Superwomen Part 23

To the Blessington salons came an American, a man whose clothes were the hopeless envy of Broadway, and whose forehead curl was imitated by every Yankee dandy who could afford to buy enough pomatum to stick a similar curl to his own brow. He was N. P. Willis. You don't even start at the name. Yet that name used to thrill your grandmother.

Willis was a writer; and gained more temporary fame for less good work than any other author our country has produced.

During a tour of England, he was fortunate enough to receive an invitation to call on Lady Blessington. And thereafter he called almost every day. He fairly raved over her.

"She is one of the most lovely and fascinating women I have ever known!" he wrote.

Then he wrote more; he wrote a story of something that happened at one of her soirees. He sent it to an American paper, never dreaming it would ever be seen in England. But the story was reprinted in an English magazine. And D'Orsay showed Willis the door.

Another visitor to Gore House was a pallid, puffy princeling, out of a job and out of a home. He was Louis Napoleon, reputed nephew of Napoleon the Great; and he was one day to reign as Napoleon III., Emperor of the French. In the meantime, exiled from France, he knocked around the world, morbidly wondering where his next suit of ready-made clothes was to come from. He even visited the United States, for a while, teaching school at Bordentown, New Jersey, and sponging for loans and dinners from the Jumels and other people kindly disposed to the Bonaparte cause.

Just now he was in England, living, when he could, on borrowed money, and sometimes earning a few shillings by serving as special policeman outside of big houses where dances or receptions were in progress. Out of the few English homes open to the prince was Marguerite Blessington's.

Marguerite and D'Orsay took him in, fed him, lent him money, and did a thousand kindnesses to the poor, outlawed fellow. You shall learn in a few minutes how he repaid their generosity.

While Marguerite had a talent for writing, she had a positive genius for spending money. And where talent and genius clash, there can be only one final result. Her talent, as I have said, brought her about five thousand dollars a year. Her income from her husband's estate was a yearly seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars more. But how could people like Marguerite and D'Orsay keep abreast of the social current on a beggarly twelve-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year?

The foregoing is a question, not a flight of rhetoric. It has an answer. And the answer is: they went into debt.

They threw away money; as apt pupils of the lamented Earl of Blessington might readily have been expected to. When they had no more money to pay with, they got credit. At first, this was easy enough.

Tradesmen, high and low, deemed it an honor to be creditors of the all-popular Dowager Countess of Blessington, and of the ill.u.s.trious Count D'Orsay. And even after the tradesmen's first zest died down, the couple were clever enough to arrange matters in such a way as to keep right on securing goods for which they knew they never could hope to pay.

Stripped of his glamour, his pretty tricks, and his social position, D'Orsay shows up as an unadulterated dead beat, a sublimated panhandler; while Marguerite's early experience in helping Shiver-the-Frills ward off bailiffs and suchlike gold-seekers now stood her in fine stead.

They were a grand pair. Their team-work was perfect. Between them, they succeeded in rolling up debts amounting to more than five-hundred-and-thirty-five-thousand dollars to tradesfolk alone.

D'Orsay, in addition to this, managed to borrow about sixty-five thousand from overtrustful personal friends.

Thackeray is said to have drawn from them the inspiration of his "Vanity Fair" essay on "How to Live on Nothing a Year." D'Orsay, before consenting to let his wife divorce him, had stipulated that the earl's daughter pay him a huge lump sum out of the Blessington estate.

He was also lucky at so-called games of chance, and his painting brought in a good revenue. But all this money was swallowed up in the bottomless gulf of extravagance.

Little by little, the tradesmen began to realize that they were never going to be paid, and they banded together to force matters to a crisis. In that era, debt was still punishable by imprisonment, and prison gates were almost ready to unbar in hospitable welcome to Marguerite and D'Orsay.

Like d.i.c.k Swiveller, who shut for himself, one by one, every avenue of egress, from his home, by means of unpaid-for purchases in neighboring streets, D'Orsay discovered that it was no longer safe to leave the house. Officers with warrants lurked at the area railings of Gore House. Tipstaves loitered on the front steps. All sorts of shabby people seemed eager to come into personal contact with Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count D'Orsay.

On Sunday alone--when the civil arm of the law rests--did the much-sought-after couple dare emerge from the once-joyous house which had grown to be their beleaguered castle. No longer could they entertain, as of yore, least a rascally warrant-server slip into the drawing-room in the guise of a guest.

Finally, the net tightened to such an extent that D'Orsay had great ado to slip through its one gap; but slip through he did, and escaped by night to France. Marguerite's wit arranged for his escape. And the man who lately had disdained to take a week-end journey without a half-dozen servants and a half score trunks was forced to run away in the clothes he wore, and with single portmanteau. Marguerite joined him at Boulogne, little better equipped than he.

Oh, but there were heartbreaking sights, in those days, in Boulogne, in Calais, and in Havre! Englishmen who had fled their own country for debt used to haunt the French seaboard, as being nearer their own dear land than was Paris. They used to pace the esplanades or cower like sick dogs on the quays, straining their eyes across the tumbled gray water, to glimpse the far-off white cliffs of their homeland. They would flock to the pier, when the Channel packets came in, longing for the sight of a home face, dreading to be seen by some one who had known them in sunnier days. Sneered at by the thrifty French, denied a penny's worth of credit at the shops, they dragged out desolate lives, fifty times more bitter than death.

It was no part of Marguerite's scheme to enroll D'Orsay and herself among these hangdog exiles. She had ever built air-castles, and she was still building them. She had wonderful plans for a career in France.

She and D'Orsay had done much for Louis Napoleon in his days of poverty. And now Louis Napoleon was President of France, and already there were rumors that he would soon make himself emperor. He was the Man of the Hour. And in his heyday of prosperity he a.s.suredly could do no less than find a high government office for D'Orsay and pour a flood of golden coin into the lap of "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington."

Let me save you from suspense by telling you that Louis Napoleon did nothing of the sort. Indeed, he seemed much embarra.s.sed and not at all over-joyed by the arrival of his old benefactors in Paris. He made them many glittering promises. But the Bank of Fools itself would have had too much sense to discount such promises as Louis Napoleon was wont to make.

Soon after their arrival in Paris, Marguerite learned that creditors had swooped down upon Gore House, seizing it and all the countless art treasures that filled it. House and contents went under the hammer, and brought a bare sixty thousand dollars; not enough to pay one of the D'Orsay-Blessington debts.

Marguerite was at the end of her career. She was sixty years old; her beauty was going; her money was gone. She had ruled hearts; she had squandered fortunes; she had gone through the "dark spot,"

(ninety-nine per cent of whose victims sink thence to the street, while the hundredth has the amazing luck to emerge as a Super-Woman.) She had listened to the love vows of men whose names are immortal. And now she was old and fat and banished. Hope was dead.

A younger and stronger woman might readily have succ.u.mbed under such a crisis. Certainly, Marguerite Blessington was in no condition to face it. Soon after she arrived in Paris, she sickened and died.

D'Orsay had loved her with fairly good constancy, and he designed in her honor a double-grave mausoleum of quaint design. And under that mausoleum, at Chambourey, she was buried. Three years later, D'Orsay was laid there at her side.

Super-woman and super-man, they had loved as had Cleopatra and Antony.

Only, in the latters' day, it was Rome's vengeance and not a creditor-warrant that cut short such golden romances.

CHAPTER XI

MADAME RECAMIER

THE FROZEN-HEARTED ANGEL

Paris--the hopelessly mixed, ~sans-culotte~-philosopher new Paris society of 1793--took a holiday from red slaughter and reflection on the Rights of Man, and went to an odd wedding.

The wedding of a fifteen-year-old girl to a man of nearly fifty.

Probably, even in that less bromidic day, there were not lacking a few hundred guests to commit the ancient wheeze anent May and December.

The girl was a beauty of the type that it tightens one's throat to look at. And the man was an egregiously rich banker. So Paris deigned to be interested; interested even into momentary forgetfulness of the day's "List of the Condemned" and of Robespierre's newest patriotic murder dreams.

The girl bride was Jeanne Francoise Julie Adelaide Bernard, daughter of no less a dignitary than the Paris' receiver of taxes--a mild-mannered and handsome man, weak and stupid, with a handsome and steel-eyed wife, who was neither dull, weak, nor good.

The groom was Jacques Recamier--by profession a powerful banker, by choice a middle-cla.s.s Lothario. His father had sold hats at Lyons.

Recamier had been an intimate friend of the Bernards, forever at their house, since a year or so before Jeanne had been born.

As the wedding party stood on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, after the "civil ceremony"--so runs the story--a pa.s.sing man halted and gazed long and closely at Jeanne, in dumb admiration, studying every line of her face and form. The gazer was a painter, Greuze by name.

And from Jeanne Recamier, as he saw her that day, he drew the inspiration for the wonderful "~Jeune fille~" picture that made him immortal.

The wedding party filed into a line of waiting carriages. But scarce had the joyous cavalcade set out on its short journey when it was halted by the pa.s.sage of a truly horrible procession that just then emerged from a cross street; a procession made up of scarecrow men and women, hideous of visage, clad in rags, blood from the guillotine--around which they had lately gathered, gloating--spattered on their clothes and unwashed faces.

In the midst of the howling and huzzaing throng was a chair, carried by supports on the shoulders of eight half-naked ~sans-culottes~.

And in this lofty chair crouched the most hideous figure in all that vile gathering--a dwarfish, weirdly dressed man, his face disgustingly marred by disease, his eyes glaring with the light of madness.

Around him gamboled the mob, screaming blessings and adulations, strewing his bearers' way with ma.s.ses of wilted flowers, filched from the ~halls~.

Thus did Doctor Jean Paul Marat make his triumphal return home that April day from the Convention, escorted by his worshipers--and fellow beasts. Thus did his obscene retinue block the wedding procession of dainty little Jeanne Recamier. Jean Paul Marat--for whose shrunken chest, at that very moment, poor, politics-crazed Charlotte Corday was sharpening the twenty-eight-cent case knife she had just bought.

An odd omen for the outset of married life; and vitally so to the little new-wed Recamier girl, who had been brought up amid superst.i.tions.

Shall we glance at a short word picture of Jeanne, limned by a contemporary?

"She has orange-tinted eyes, but they are without fire; pretty and transparent teeth, but incapable of snapping; an ungainly waist; coa.r.s.e hands and feet; and complexion that is a bowl of milk wherein float rose leaves."

Let me add to the sketch the established fact that, during the seventy-one years of her life, no man so such as boasted that he had received a caress or a love word from her. But don't lose interest in her, please, on that account. Dozens of men would blithely have tossed away their souls for the privilege of making that boast truthfully.

Failing, they nicknamed her "the angel of the frozen heart." Against her, alone, perhaps of all super-women, no word of scandal was ever breathed. (Chiefly, it has been claimed, for physical reasons.)