Madame Mohl, Her Salon and Her Friends: Fifth Paper

IN 1870 M. and Madame Mohl went to England for their annual visit, which was prolonged, as in the case of so many others, by the outbreak of the FrancoGerman war. Madame Mohl’s anxiety all through this terrible time was intense. Her friends left nothing undone to make her sojourn among them agreeable in itself, but she remained bitterly sad at heart. M. Mohl was still more so. It would have been unnatural, and indeed impossible, that he, a German by blood, birth, and early associations, should not rejoice with his fatherland, should not vibrate to the triumph of German armies, however sincerely he might, on the other hand, mourn for the misfortunes of France, and feel for the defeat of her brave soldiers. Blood is thicker than water, and no adoption, no grafted affections, no sense of gratitude for obligations generously conferred, could stifle the voice of nature, and make Julius Mold, the son of German parents, with unadulterated German blood in his veins, curse the triumph of German arms and bewail like a Frenchman the glory of German warriors and statesmen.

That he ever uttered a word which could be construed into satisfaction at the disasters of France no one who knew him ought to have credited ; yet there were some persons who reported that both he and his wife, who owed so much to France and French society, had turned against their adopted country in her hour of sorrow, and had nothing but hard words for her. These stories found credence in certain quarters. It is probable that those who repeated them were glad to shift upon M. and Madame Mohl the unpatriotic things they were ashamed to say themselves. That Madame Mohl gave small quarter to the criminal blunders and the ignorance of some of the French leaders we can well imagine; that she poured out vitriol in gallons on the head of Celui-ci, and denounced him in the strongest language to be found in the dictionary, we can also readily believe ; but that she rejoiced in the downfall of France, and turned against her in her humiliation, no one who had any knowledge of her character ought for a moment to have believed.

When Madame Cheuvreux met M. Mohl, on his return to Paris after the siege, she accosted him with, “ Well, my dear friend, you must he sorry that you ever made yourself a Frenchman ! " He replied unhesitatingly, “ No, I am not sorry. If it were to be done over again, I would do it.”

In speaking to Madame d’Abbadie, on returning from a visit to Germany some time after the war, Madame Mohl said, “Nations squint in looking at one another ; we must discount what Germany and France say of each other.” She herself called for a liberal discount in construing her exaggerated language into its real meaning. For instance, when M. Forgues was translating Dickens for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and making large cuttings out of the original by order of the editor, Madame Mohl was furious, and, meeting Madame Cheuvreux, she burst out, “Your friend Forgues is a canaille! He is destroying Dickens. I don’t ever want to set eyes on him again ! ” A person who distributed epithets with such odd perception of their value was not to be taken au sérieux in moments of abnormal excitement. Both in praise and blame she used words with very various degrees of precision. “ Come and dine to meet General Fox,” she wrote one day to Ampère. “ He can’t bear Cousin, but you are his passion ! ”

We cannot wonder if, in her excitement during the lamentable progress of the war, she sometimes talked in a way that led the uninitiated to suppose that she was denouncing the whole nation, when she only meant to denounce the men who were bringing all this misery upon her.

The moment peace was signed M. Mold went back to Paris. His wife was to have followed him in a few days ; but the commune broke out, and made this impossible. The interval of separation was a time of cruel anxiety to her. The accounts from Paris were more horrible than those which had been coming throughout the siege. The city, already battered by German artillery, was now a prey to the more, savage horrors of civil war; and many of those dear to Madame Mohl were, she believed, exposed with her husband to violent death at the hands of a populace exasperated to madness by the strain of hunger and nervous excitement. For the first time in her life, it occurred to Madame Mohl that her husband might die, and leave her behind him; and from the moment this possibility presented itself to her she was half crazed with apprehension. Nevertheless, she went about her life as usual, never parading this distress of mind, but doing what she could to escape from it; so that those who met her in society, at dinners and garden-parties, the centre of attention, and always racy and amusing, thought she must be heartlessly indifferent to her husband’s danger.

Mrs. Ritchie was one of the few English friends who saw M. Mohl when he was alone in the Rue du Bac, while it was being threatened on all sides by the rebel mob. “ During the commune,” she says, “ I went to see M. Mohl with my cousin, Miss Ritchie, to beg him to come away with us : but he described his quiet life, his daily visits, unmolested, to the Bibliothèque ; he pointed to the gardens from his window, to his books, and shook his head at the idea of coming away. He then began to praise his two maids. (They were the same who were so faithful to Madame Mohl after his death.) ‘ Think of those two impossible women,’ he said, ‘here all through the siege, half starved, and saying to me when I returned, “ You will find the preserves quite safe, sir, in the cupboard. We only used two pots.” I felt inclined to break every pot on the shelf, I was so angry with them! ’ ”

When the insurrection was crushed, and the gates were opened, Madame Mohl started off to Paris with Dean Stanley and Lady Augusta. Her joy at being at home again was exuberant as a child’s. She skipped along the streets, and was in raptures at the sight of everything. But her dear, beautiful Paris was never the same place to her after 1870. Perhaps it has never been the same place to any of us. Society was broken up. Streets and palaces that were burnt down have been rebuilt, most of them ; but the social edifice, once destroyed, is not so easily reconstructed. Even so wide and heterogeneously composed a circle as that of the Rue du Bac was snapped asunder at too many points for the chain to relink itself again ; not, at least, for a long time to come. Many old friends had left Paris, and gone to live in the provinces; some remained in their country places ; foreigners who had taken root in France folded their tents, and went away for good and all. Everything was changed. The pleasant place was no more the same, because so many of the pleasant people were gone.

M. Mohl never recovered from the shock and strain of that dreadful year. He was a man to suffer deeply from an impersonal grief. He took the downfall of France greatly to heart; and it was a sharp pain to him, too, to find that his German birth was now remembered where it had formerly been forgotten. He loved his adopted country better and more wisely than many born Frenchmen, and it was bitter to him to find that many doubted this, and that his German origin made a barrier now between him and some of them. Family afflictions followed soon upon this national sorrow. His brother’s death was a heavy blow. His health began to fail. Every one saw this but his wife. He was ten years younger than she, and the possibility of his dying first had never occurred to her, except during that anxious time when he was alone in Paris. She saw him suffering and growing more and more feeble, and she was very unhappy, but not the least alarmed. She had entire confidence in Dr. Richet’s skill to restore him in due course to health. “ I owe an everlasting gratitude to Dr. Richet, whose science and incomparable skill have made the poor cripple walk,” she writes to Madame Cheuvreux, and announces triumphantly that M. Mohl had been out to pay a visit, “ in spite of his legs.”

Later on, when every one but herself felt that there was not a shadow of hope, she writes, in answer to the repeated invitation to Stors:¹ “I am looking forward to a fête in being amongst you all, and hope to get back a little of my entrain near you, whom Heaven has endowed with the power of putting every one about you in good spirits.”

But her blindness did not alter the fact that M. Mohl was going from her. One morning Mrs. Wynne Finch met the doctor coming out of the house, and learned from him that the end was close at hand ; it might be in a few days, perhaps sooner. She found Madame Mohl just as usual, quite unaware of the truth. There was something dreadful and pathetic in this unconsciousness. It seemed cruel to undeceive her, and still more cruel not to do so. Mrs. Wynne Finch, with the courage of a true friend, resolved to tell her the truth. She broke it to her as tenderly as she could. “ Indeed, indeed, there is danger, my dear friend. The time is very short, and it would be cruel and selfish, I feel, not to tell you.” At first the poor soul did not, then would not, understand. She shrank away angrily from the merciful cruelty of the revelation.

“ It is not true ! I don’t believe it ! There is no danger; they never said there was any danger!” she cried, and, turning away, like a vexed child, she ran out of the room, back to M. Mohl,

“ reeling with the shock,” as she afterwards confessed. But her eyes were opened. The moment they fell upon him she saw that he was dying. She never left his side again for a moment. She watched by him all that night, holding his hand, while he struggled for breath. Sometimes he stroked her face. “ That stroking has been an ineffable comfort to me,” she wrote, a year later, to Mrs. Wynne Finch; “ it was an endearment when he could not speak,— the only sign he could give me of his affection, and that he knew it was I who was beside him.” He died in the night of the 3d of January, 1876.

During that last day, when she watched him passing away, conscious now that he was going from her, Madame Mohl found courage to ask her husband about his last wishes concerning certain things he had at heart: amongst others, what he should like her to do with his dear books, his most precious possession. “ Shall I give them in your name to the library at Stuttgart ? she said. But he replied, “ No; sell them here. That is the way to make books useful; they go to those who want them.” She had often heard him say the same thing. He had spent forty years in collecting his Oriental library, and used to declare, “ It is impossible to write on those subjects without having in possession certain books.” Three days after his death, two booksellers from Leipsic wrote to Madame Mold, offering to purchase the library ; but she would not hear of letting it leave Paris. She had the books sold at the house as soon as it was possible. The sale and its inevitably painful details excited and distressed her to frenzy.

“ I suffered so intensely,” she wrote to Madame Scherer, some days later, “ at seeing the brutal manner in which those creatures kicked my dear husband’s books about when taking them away, I was so miserable at having had that beast of a bookseller to manage it, that, after the dreadful day in which they finished the sack of my house, I begged none of my friends would speak to me of the transaction. I was in a state of irritability nothing can describe, and obliged to repeat to myself that I had done it because he had told me, and I could not disobey him. Since then, two or three friends have come to tell me about it; but I begged them to give me no details. My feeling was as if my dear husband was being dissected. I can’t write to you without tears.

“ But I know I am like a creature without a skin. I ought to have known the public by this time. What is so disgusting, too, is that, after spending his life in setting up this odious Asiatic Society, spreading knowledge and spending his mind, they won’t give to it a lodging big enough to place the books ! There was one in the Palais Mazarin; it has been divided, and M. Regnier, who does his best, tells me half the books are packed in cases, for want of room. My diningroom is crammed with the pamphlets of the Société, which my dear husband lodged here. I have asked Regnier where I should send them. He says,

'Pray, keep them ; we have not room.’ The English friends of my dear husband are astounded. They had heard so much of the liberality of the French government for science and learning and giving room,” etc.

Her one interest in life henceforth was her husband’s memory and work. Her grief for him was inconsolable. It had in it something of the child’s inability to comprehend death. She could not realize that he had gone away, never to come back to her. She had for a long time the forlorn look that made some one who saw her passing in the street say, “ Poor old soul, she looks like a lost dog, going about searching for his master.”

Some time after M. Mohl’s death, she came upon a pocket-book of his, carefully tied up and put away in a drawer in his room. She was in the act of opening it, when a sudden terror stayed her hand. “ Suppose,” she thought, “ it should contain a remembrance of some other woman,—something that would show me he had not loved, always loved, me as I believed ? ” For more than a fortnight she went daily and looked at this little book, and put it back without opening it. At last, she said to Madame d’Abbadie, “ I feel as if my fate were in that pocket-book. If it should contain what I dread, it would kill me. I could not bear it ! ” Madame d’Abbadie insisted on her at once convincing herself of the folly and injustice of these fears. They went together into the deserted room, and the loving, youthful-hearted old woman, in fear and trembling, opened the pocketbook. It held some early and very tender letters of her own to M. Mohl. She was completely overcome by this touching proof of his faithful affection.

In the following summer, she went to see her niece, Mrs. Vickers ; “ my kindest friend,” she calls her. Later, she went to her old friend, Mrs. Simpson (née Nassau Senior), at Bournemouth. “ It was easy to see,” says Mrs. Simpson,² “ that she had received a shock from which she would never recover. She was incapable of dismal despondency, and her elastic spirit rebounded at intervals. She loved the sea and the woods, and all the sights and sounds of the country. The house contained an excellent library of many interesting old books, and into these she plunged eagerly. We had a houseful of children and young people (with whom she was a great favorite), and a basket pony-carriage, which carried her about and saved her much trouble.”

Soon after her return to Paris from these visits, Madame Mohl had an accident which agitated her a good deal. She tells the story herself to Madame Scherer : —

“ Dear friend, I have been out these last two days, though I have an arnica poultice on my shin just below the knee. If M. Haureau had not been tall and strong, I should have been killed, and my dear husband’s papers would have been dispersed or lost; for who has time to look after the remains of those who are gone! I cannot express how glad I am my life was spared, on that account.

“ It was coming down a dirty, dingy old staircase in the Imprimerie, which, like a goose, I had consented to go over and see : not that I cared one button about it, but my pet niece, Margy, had so caught at the proposal of M. Haureau to show it to us that I had not the heart to refuse. He was preceding us downstairs, three or four steps lower. Shall I ever forget the terror when I felt myself fall ! I fainted away with sheer fright, for nothing was knocked but my legs, and luckily I was light enough not to knock down M. Haureau, and hurl him and myself down to the bottom ; but how my legs were so much hurt I can’t imagine. I have been just a fortnight a prisoner.

“ Indeed, I wish you were nearer. It would be the greatest comfort to me. My dear Madame d’Abbadie will not be here till April. It was only my terrible loss last year that made her and her husband spend a winter here ; for, like queer people, which they are, they spend the spring and part of the summer in Paris, and the autumn and winter in the Pyrenees, where they pretend it is warmer. I have other worthy neighbors, — not delightful, like Madame d’Abbadie, but kind, — and they too are obliged to leave Paris in the winter. Is it not ridiculous ? ”

It was no pretense to say she rejoiced that her life had been spared for the sake of M. Mohl’s papers. To the publication of certain of these papers and of her husband’s works she henceforth devoted all her energies. She was ready, for this, to toil up and down dark stairs in the Imprimerie and the Institut and all over the busy city. “ My dear husband’s Shah-Naneh, the small edition, is going on printing rapidly,” she writes to Madame Scherer. “It is only a translation into French, not a word of Persian, which he luckily had said to many friends that he would publish. I have fulfilled his wish. Do you think M. Scherer would give an account of it in the Temps ? I don’t think it is necessary to be an Orientalist to do so, but of course I can’t judge. Just ask him what he thinks. I am sure he will judge rightly.” ³ Her great consolation was reading over M. Mohl’s letters. “I am going to Stors to-morrow,” she writes to Madame Scherer, “ and I shall remain there three weeks, if they don’t get tired of me. I have refused going there ever since my husband is gone. I had been so happy there with him, and they were so fond of him ! Madame Cheuvreux made me promise to go this year. ... It is a pleasant house, with a variety of visitors. I may stay in my room as long as I please, and I take with me my dear husband’s letters, that are a perfect chronicle. All those who have read them say, ‘ You ought to publish them.’ I take them with me to rc-read them. Perhaps, on studying them under that point of view, I may think about it; but I should not decide without advice.”

Whether owing to her own judgment or the advice of other friends, these letters were never printed.

In the following year Madame Mohl went to visit her husband’s family in Germany. His two nieces, whose presence, as young ladies, had periodically brightened the Rue du Bac, were both married in Germany : one to the celebrated Professor Helmholtz ;⁴ the other to Baron von Schmidt Zabiérow, governor of Carinthia. Madame Mohl loved both these nieces of her husband’s as if they had been her own. “ I am very ill,” she wrote to Madame Cheuvreux, " but, all the same, I mean to go to the marriage of my dear niece at Heidelberg. It is a love match, quite according to my principles, but not at all according to my interest, for she is going to live in Hungary.”

But when friends and kindred had done their best, life had to be taken up where she had left it. On returning home, the loneliness seemed greater than ever. She had closed her door to every one tor a year after her husband’s death, and when, at the end of that time, she opened it it was a surprise to her to find how many of her former assiduous visitors had forgotten the way there. She would ask, like a petulant child, “Why don’t people come and see me ? I used to have visitors all day long; now, nobody comes ! ” The complaint sounded very sad in the empty salon that she had done so much to make attractive, and where she had been so happy to see the crowd coming “ all day long.”

She had worked hard to make her salon perfect in its way, and she had succeeded ; and now, at the end of the day, nothing remained but the pained surprise of being forsaken by the clever, agreeable people who for a long half century had continually climbed her stairs, and never found them too steep. It was a sad return for the labor of a lifetime, for all the trouble she had taken to amuse her fellow creatures. Few persons did more in their time than Madame Mohl to make life pleasant and cheerful to those around them ; and when we consider how dull most people find life, how impatiently they chafe against the dullness, making it worse by clumsy and foolish efforts to improve it, one must confess that anybody who provides a centre of cheerful, refined, and healthy recreation for a large circle of human beings deserves well of mankind. It was ungrateful in the children of this world to forsake in her loneliness the kindly, spirituelle old lady who had taken such pains to amuse them.

One day, during her widowhood, Madame Mold said to Madame Cheuvreux, “ I have all my life striven to please ; but I cannot forgive myself for having lost many opportunities, for not devoting more care to it.” After a moment’s reflection, she added, “ Car au fond il n’y a que cela.” She had come to the end of it now, and found out what the fond was worth.

She was extraordinarily faithful in her own friendships, and few things gave her more pleasure than getting back a friend of old times, from whom circumstances of one kind or another had parted her. M. de Maupas, when a very young man, had been an habitué of Mrs. Clarke’s salon, but had drifted away from Mary years before her marriage. He had then taken office under Celui-ci, and consequently become “ unfit for decent company.” But the Empire had fallen ; the late Minister of Police was now an old man, broken in health, paralyzed, and a great sufferer. The Comtesse de Thury, an old friend of his and of Madame Mohl’s, mentioned her name to him one day. He brightened up, and said, “ She was the most spirituelle woman I ever knew,” and added some kindly remarks about her. Madame de Thury repeated this to Madame Mohl, who was greatly pleased, and, fetching a portrait in crayons that she had taken of M. de Maupas in the days of his youth, she begged Madame de Thury to take it to him. But Madame de Thury said, “ No, you must take it to him yourself; that will make it much more welcome. And you know it is one of the works of mercy to visit the sick.”

Madame Mold consented to perform this work of mercy. Her visit was announced, and all the family were assembled to greet her. M. de Maupas, unable to rise from his chair, gave her a welcome that touched her deeply, The two old friends sat a long while together, working bright incantations on each other with that magic little sesame, “ Vous souvenez-vous ? ” that opens the enchanted palace of the past, and enters its echoing chambers, and conjures up its visions so delightfully. He invited her to dine, and several distinguished persons were asked to meet her. This pleasant gathering was one of her last gleams of social glory. No pretty young débutante at her first ball, Madame de Thury says, ever had a greater ovation than this nonogenarian lady at that dinner-party. There was no question of politics, or of anything but the pleasure of meeting after long estrangement.

Madame Mohl had never in her younger days loved solitude, but it was now unendurable to her. From the time of her husband’s death she dreaded being left alone for a day. In 1880, she went, as usual, to England, and from Wormshill (Berkshire) she writes to Madame Scherer in August: —

“ I am the better already for being here. I left Paris because I fell into the most indescribable state. I did nut see a soul from Monday to Saturday ! I never saw Paris so utterly abandoned. I came to my niece, who is my kindest friend, and I am much better; but I find I must not be entirely alone, which I did not know before. Everybody had left town at the beginning of July, and the last twenty days were new to me, and made me acquainted with myself.

“I go from this in three weeks to my friend Mrs. Simpson, at Bournemouth. If I like it, I stay ; if not, I go. But there are some nice people there, — a certain Lady Shelley, whom I would go some miles to see any day. ... I have learned to be very humble, for I find I cannot be alone. I must have some one. I don’t mean that I want people to love me, but I must have some society.”

From another hospitable country home she writes a few weeks later: —

“ I am staying at one of my oldest and best friends, Mrs. Bonham Carter, the mother of my dear Hilary Carter.

. . . If I make mistakes, pray forgive me, for there is a woman chattering at my ears such nonsense ! I never heard such an impudent ass, since I have not had the pleasure of seeing and hearing creatures of my own sex oftener than I liked !

“ I am ashamed, my dear, good friend, of my silence. The fact is, I am grown so stupid that I often sit a long time doing nothing, hardly thinking, from extreme low spirits. Instead of growing better from the habit of loneliness, I am perhaps worse, and the loss of my dear husband seems more and more a ruin of everything. ... I stayed with my niece, Mrs. Vickers, in Berkshire till the 14th of August, when she went to Wilbad. Then I came on here to a most charming place, eight or ten miles from London. Mrs. Bonham Carter is the mother of my dear friend, who died years ago. She lived with me several years in Paris, studying painting. She was the dearest and best friend I ever had, and my dear husband loved her as much as I did. We were sadly cut up at her death ; it must be more than sixteen years ago. How time passes! Her mother and sister, whom I am staying with now, are as kind to me as she would have been herself. These friends are so kind that I feel more sorry to leave them than I can tell, which I must do soon : first, from mere discretion ; secondly, because I want to see some nephews in Leicestershire in September. I think of returning to Paris in October, but I am uncertain at what date. The fact is, I dread being in Paris empty. I stayed there last year till the 25th of July, and I was nearly two months without seeing any one. I thought myself capable of bearing such solitude, but I was not, and I dare not run the risk again.”

She returned to Paris at the end of September, and on the 1st of October she writes to Madame Scherer : —

“ Dear friend, I this instant found your letter. I came back on Wednesday night, the 29th, from London, which I had quitted at seven in the morning.

“ I seem as if I had lost my dear husband last week, and I never, never, shall get over it. I went to Père La Chaise to-day with my niece, Ida.”

The old cemetery, with its silent chapels and flowering tombs, has witnessed few more touching scenes than that of the aged widow, sitting, one cold morning, on a high spot, and looking on from a distance while her husband’s coffin was carried from its temporary resting-place to the grave she had made ready for it; and then stealing quietly away, weeping under her black veil, and returning unseen to the desolate home.

But her health was giving way. She suffered at times very much, and, like most people living alone, she was apt to neglect herself. Finally, however, she was induced to have advice.

“ I am already the better for the treatment of Dr. Guèneau de Mussy,” she writes to Madame Cheuvreux. “ We talked about you, — he and I. He says he used to know you well, once upon a time, and regrets very much that he never sees you now. So, if you like, he will be charmed to renew the acquaintance. No need to say I sha’n’t busy myself telling him I told you so, in case you do not respond. But he is a delightful man, full of esprit, and so

amusing. He is convinced that—

was insupportable, and he has lots of other sympathetic convictions.”

Madame Mohl was not the only patient of this most sympathetic of physicians who considered it “ a pleasure to be ill, because it brought one a visit from Dr. de Mussy.” She had a great regard for him, and left him a charming token of her gratitude for his care and kindness. The Queen of Holland had had a copy made for M. Mohl of Rembrandt’s Leçon d’Anatomie, and after Madame Mohl’s death this picture was sent by his niece, Madame von Schmidt Zabiérow, to Dr. de Mussy. His name had been written by Madame Mohl on the back of it, and he then remembered that, many years before, she had said to him one day, “This will be for you.”

If Madame Mohl enjoyed Dr. de Mussy’s visits, even at the cost of some suffering, the pleasure seems to have been mutual. Although he saw her chiefly when she was ill, and consequently not in the best mood for conversation, she was always original and amusing. One of the last times that she sent for him, he found her greatly exhausted, and with hardly strength left to say, “ J’ai fait des bétises ! ” Her voice was scarcely audible. He contrived to rouse her a little, and then she explained to him what the bétise was: “ I had a frantic desire to hear some Italian music ; so I went down into the street, and waited for the omnibus that would take me to the theatre. I got in, and arrived there, but there was not a single place to be had except up amongst the gods. This did not, however, prevent me enjoying the music deliciously. On leaving the theatre, I had great difficulty in getting the omnibus to take me home. I did get it at last, but I am done up ! ”

What energy of mind and body in a woman of ninety! Dr. de Mussy says that up to the last she had the most incredible agility, and would run up her high stairs quatre à quatre; but as the sum of her strength was not equal to this agility, when she had indulged in some “ petite extravagance,” as she used to say, she was knocked up.

After one of these little bouts of extravagance that rendered Dr. de Mussy’s care again necessary, Madame Mohl went to Stors to recruit, and spent a month there with great enjoyment. She had met her old friend, M. Thiers, at Stors during the previous summer. It was their last meeting on this side of the grave. Perhaps both had some vague presentiment of this ; at any rate, they talked very confidentially together about old times, and M. Thiers made some sentimental declaration about having loved her in his youth, when, as a “ petit étudiant,” the concierge complained of his long visits. He told Madame Mohl that he had never dared tell her of his love, because he had nothing else to offer her. Whether the story were true or not, Madame Mohl believed it, and was greatly touched by it. M. Thiers’s oldest and most intimate friend declares that the statesman was hoaxing the old lady, an accusation that does not sound incredible, and which may without much remorse be thrown in with others that lie on the memory of the Liberator of the Territory. Anyhow, the avowal revived Madame Mohl’s old friendship for him, and she felt his death as a personal sorrow. The following letter was written to Madame Cheuvreux on the day of his funeral, which occurred almost immediately after her long visit to Stors : —

“ Dear friend, you are very grudging of your ink and paper, I must say, never to tell me a word about your own little concerns; as if, after being a month at home in your house, and being treated, not only with all possible distinction, but with all possible tenderness, I had no interest in them. Are you so utterly devoid of principle as to clean forget me ? Don’t the affairs of Stors concern me ? It is downright mean to have let me feel that I was one of the family (which I adopted with all my heart), and then to leave me in total ignorance of everything; above all, after my telling you all about my marriage, to amuse you !

“ But I have been so full of poor Thiers (and you, too, no doubt) that I have not thought as much of your bad behavior as I should have done, if this and the newspapers had not filled my mind. Luckily, I have in the house here a nice old gentleman, who never contradicts me, — M. Trélat, formerly Director of the Salpêtrière for more than forty years, I think. He is so old that he can hardly see me, and can only get up to my apartment with a great effort ; but the eyes of his mind are still full of life and intelligence. He is very deaf, and, like the Commandant, he won’t use a trumpet, which I am sorry for, because even my clear, high voice does not always reach him, and this prevents my talking to him as much as I should like. If it were not for this, we should suit each other like a pair of gloves. He has been rather extreme in politics, they say, but he is a man of such entire loyalty ! . . .

“This is the day of the funeral, and it pours torrents, without a moment’s respite. I am vexed to the last degree by this rain, which will greatly interfere with the programme. The government and the newspapers are disgusting. Good-by, dear méchante. If you don’t write, I ’ll not love you any the less ; but I shall be very angry with you.”

“ Dear, very dear friend,” she writes to Madame Cheuvreux, in a moment of great depression, “it is difficult for a letter to do any one more good than yours has done me ; above all, as a proof of your old and large and tender and loyal friendship. Oh, how good it is to have such a friendship when one is in sorrow like mine ! ”

She rebounded now and then, and never nursed her grief morbidly ; but her sorrow remained inconsolable to the last.

Her faculties had continued unimpaired up to this period, but the decay of memory, which set in soon after M. Mohl’s death, went on rapidly to almost total loss. She forgot events from one day to another completely. She would go down of a morning to Madame d’Abbadie, who lived on the floor below her, and exclaim in sudden agitation, “ My dear, I want you to give me the address of your man of business. I want him to invest my money for me. I don’t know what to do with it, and I am afraid it will all be lost.” She would take down the name and address, and go away relieved in mind, and return next day, again asking for it in the same agitation. She had never adopted the English custom of keeping her money at a banker’s, and drawing checks, but used to stow it away in boxes and drawers, sometimes to the great annoyance of friends at whose houses she visited. Towards the end of her life this habit became a mania, and she used to hide away large sums of money behind pictures, under the sofa-cushions, and in other unlikely places : sometimes twenty, thirty, forty thousand francs were spread about the drawing-room in this fashion. Then she would forget where she had hid the money, and would fancy it had been stolen, and spend the day in a state of despair, looking for it; afraid to say anything to her servants, but confiding her trouble to any friend who came in, and who would help in the search. When the money was all found she was like a child that had got back its lost penny.

Yet even in this sad mental decay, which invaded the morale, increasing to mania a natural tendency to stinginess, Madame Mohl’s heart retained its native warmth. She never grew to love her money better than her friends. Her affection for Mrs. Wynne Finch had grown much deeper and tenderer since that courageous friend had warned her that M. Mohl was dying. She was always entreating Mrs. Wynne Finch to come and dine with her. “ My dear,” she would say, “ I never have any dinner to speak of for myself, but don’t you be afraid on that account. There is a capital pastry-cook’s opposite, and I will send across for any dishes you like, and they will be here piping hot in five minutes. So come whenever you can, and be sure you can never come amiss.” And fabulously economical as she had grown towards herself, she would gladly have paid many times a week for these piping hot dishes for her friend.

Sometimes she forgot that M. Mohl was dead, and would speak as if he were coming home to dinner. It was very curious to observe how the chief characteristic of her mind, that keen intellectual curiosity, which Dr. Johnson considered the surest sign of a vigorous intellect, survived this wreck of memory. One day she received a visit from a lady who had been away in Australia for many years. Madame Mohl had not the faintest recollection of who she was, or anything about her. “My dear,” she said, “ I dare say I liked you very much, but I have quite forgotten you. Never mind. Tell me who you are.” The visitor quite failed to identify herself ; but when she spoke of Australia the old lady was full of curiosity to hear all about it, and opened a fire of leading questions : “ And they speak English ? How extraordinary ! And what sort of clothes do they wear ? Do they go naked, like savages ? ”— and so on ; inquiring about the resources of the colony, and the people and their prospects, as she might have done formerly on hearing of the discovery of a new island. Once she grasped the subject presented to her, she could talk about it as clearly and sensibly as ever.

In the summer of 1881, two years before her death, Mr. and Mrs. Wheelwright, of Boston, came to see her. Mrs. Wheelwright’s notes made at the time show us Madame Mohl as she was in her ninety-first year: “ A curious little figure came forward to greet us, — a very slight woman, about the middle height. Her gray hair was in a most disheveled condition ; a mass of tangled curls projected over her forehead, and was constantly getting into her eyes, and she was constantly poking it outHer black silk gown, much the worse for the wear, was made open in the neck. A lace ruffle adorned the edge of her bodice, which had a trick of getting unhooked every minute, and at which she was perpetually fumbling with her very active fingers. Her eyes were fine and still bright, and her manner very agreeable, in spite of some eccentricities, such as curling and uncurling herself in a corner of the sofa.”

She talked to her visitors pleasantly of long ago, and was as accurate as possible concerning things that had happened fifty, sixty, seventy years past; but events of a nearer date were all confused. When Mrs. Wheelwright spoke of her memoir of Madame Récamier, she could remember nothing about it. “ Did I write a book about her, my dear? I don’t remember.” Of Madame Récamier herself she had the most vivid recollection, and of Châteaubriand, too ; she said he was “ the most agreeable of men.” To Mrs. Wheelwright’s remark, “ But he was so vain and selfish ? ” she replied, “ But selfish people are not necessarily disagreeable, my dear, and their vanity makes them anxious to ingratiate themselves.” Madame Récamier, she said, “ did not seem old, she carried herself so well; and she had a great deal of sense, — much more than people gave her credit for. She was well read, and kept up in the literature of the day. I have never known anybody so delightful in a tête-à-tête. I loved to get her alone, but it was not easy, she was always so surrounded.”

Mr. and Mrs. Wheelwright went again to see Madame Mohl in the evening and found her alone, looking very desolate over her solitary cup of tea. “ The large windows of her salon were open, looking over green gardens full of tall trees ; in the distance the gilt dome of the Invalides. The setting sun threw a golden glow into the room. Madame Mohl was very low-spirited, and told us over and over again the sad stories of her sister’s and her husband’s death. She took us to the window, and pointed out the various gardens. ‘ That large one,’ she said, ‘ belongs to a convent. Its occupants are an order of missionaries to North Africa, and are supported by all the peasants of France.' She told us she had had a quarrel with her cook. ‘ I have had her for ten years, and I fancied she was attached to me ; but, my dear, it was all a delusion. She was not a bit attached to me ; and she has been putting up the other maid to ask for higher wages, so I shall have to part with them both. When I went to England, in former years, I wanted no maid. Now, I don’t know what to do, or where to go. I have never been in Paris before so late ’ (July). Her books were her only resource now, she said. When we came in she had been reading the Nineteenth Century, dipping into it as she sipped her tea. The publishers always sent it to her, she told us. Justin M’Carthy’s History of our own Times was on the table beside it. ‘A most delightful book, my dear. I read it all the evening, and I never go to bed before midnight.’ We asked her about old times, and how the society of her youth compared with that of the present day. She said there was no society now. ‘ Louis - Philippe was the best king France ever had. The French did not know when they were well off. In those days society was delightful. Six to a dozen people used to go to the house of one among them every night, or several times a week. They took pains to be agreeable; to have some story to tell, some interesting news, etc. Each one did his part; it was delightful. But all that is over now. The late dinners and love of display have killed society.’ We mentioned to her that we had just met an old acquaintance of hers, Mr. F. B., of Boston, and that he spoke of knowing her years ago. ‘ Mr. F. B. ? ‘ she said. ‘ I don’t remember him ; but I knew so many pleasant Americans. Why does he not come and see me ? I can’t think why people forget me as they do.’ She seemed to take Mr. B.’s forgetfulness so much to heart that we hastened to assure her that he was only passing through Paris.”

This falling off of visitors was her constant complaint. She kept bewailing it to everybody. “ I used to have such crowds of pleasant people coming to see me ! Nobody comes now. Why, I wonder ? ”

But if the “ crowds of pleasant people " who had been assiduous at the Rue du Bac when it was a centre of amusement ceased to frequent the now lonely salon, this way of the world was not imitated by the few real friends who were sincerely attached to Madame Mohl. Their faithful devotion made a fine contrast to the desertion by the pleasure-seeking crowd. Amongst these faithful ones were Madame and Mademoiselle Tourguenieff,⁵ whose longproved affection drew closer to her in her hour of need; M. and Madame d’Abbadie, who were her near neighbors; and Mignet. But no one was more devotedly kind than M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, the friend of a lifetime. After M. Mohl’s death, M. St. Hilaire gave up his beloved studies, his whole time for six months, to perform the onerous duties of executor to his friend. Madame Mohl grew so used to having him continually at her beck and call, always at hand to advise, to cheer her, and to manage her business, that when his duties as Minister for Foreign Affairs forcibly put an end to this pleasant state of things the poor old soul was indignant, and resented it as a cruel wrong and a faithless desertion. When M. St. Hilaire’s name was mentioned, she would say petulantly, “I never see him. He never cared for me ; it was only for M. Mohl that he cared. I know that now.”

But the moment the deserter was set free from the bondage of state affairs he went at once to the Rue du Bac. Madame Mohl gave a scream of delight when she beheld him, and fell upon his neck, in her impulsive, childlike way. “ So you have come back! Why did you give me up ? What did I do to vex you?” M. St. Hilaire was equally touched by her reproaches and by her joyful welcome. He tried to make her understand that he had not been in fault, and that he had now come to resume the old and pleasant intercourse which had been inevitably interrupted by public duties. She was pacified, but nailed him at once by a promise to dine with her every Friday, so long as he did not take to being state minister again. M. St. Hilaire kept this weekly engagement to the last. He declares that in doing so he had no merit of self-sacrifice; that Madame Mohl’s conversation was as interesting, as clever, as it had been in her younger days. The loss of her memory and her delusion about her money affairs were very distressing ; but with this exception, she was the same bright, amusing hostess as ever. Within the last year of her life she became possessed by the idea that she had lost everything ; that she would not be able to meet the next quarter’s rent, and would be obliged to leave her present abode. M. St. Hilaire, who knew how utterly devoid of foundation this fear was, would advise her to go to her man of business, assuring her that he would find the necessary money. When her mind was set at rest on this score, she would chat away as pleasantly as possible on every subject that was started.

Physically she remained as active as a young girl, and would run up and down stairs, with her burden of ninety years, as if she had been nineteen. A few months before her death, Mrs. Milner Gibson called to inquire for her. Being herself ailing at the time, she could not climb the steep stairs, but sent up her card. Madame Mohl, hearing that her old friend was waiting in the carriage for an answer, ran down as she was, and jumped in beside her, and began to talk about M. Mohl and to weep over him, as if she had lost him only a month before.

The friends who surrounded her to the last relate how bitterly she continued to mourn for her husband. They used to find her of an evening sitting by the fire, with the tongs in her hand, fidgeting with the logs, building and unbuilding them, and looking the picture of loneliness and desolation. She would at once begin to talk of “Mr. Mohl,” and pour out her recollections of all that he had been to her; telling over and over the same tale of his entire devotion to her, his cleverness in managing their property, his fidelity to old friends, his goodness, his wonderful learning, etc. As she rambled on, the big tears would trickle down her wrinkled face, and the little gray curls would quiver with the emotion that shook her.

Up to within a short time of her death, she was often heard to say that she had never known an hour’s ennui in her life; poignant grief she had experienced more than once, but ennui never. Such an assertion sounds almost incredible from any human being, no matter how exceptionally bright his circumstances and opportunities may have been; hut, discounting it, as one must do all Madame Mold’s sweeping statements, it was perhaps as true of her as it could he of any one. She had a very happy temperament: she was content to take the world as she found it, and she found it a very pleasant place, full of gens d ‘esprit ; she was content with herself, her position, her fortune, all the share in life that was allotted to her. There was a spirit of unworldliness, — though it may sound paradoxical, — negative imworldliness, that preserved her from the irritation and restlessness that positive worldliness breeds. She did not care a dry straw for a multitude of things, the want of or the longing for which keeps worldly minded persons in a state of chronic disquiet and discontent.

Her standard was low enough to be reached without strain or discomfort. It makes all the difference, having a convenient standard. Pleasing one’s self and other people, without reference to a high ideal that involves sacrifice, makes the way very easy and smooth. Madame Mohl said that she had always striven to please, feeling that “ au fond. il n’y a que cela.” She had succeeded, and had reaped a rich crop from the seed carefully sown through, say, three quarters of a century. She had been widely, extraordinarily popular, and had “ pleased ” more people than most of her generation ; but when the power of pleasing no longer existed, there was nothing to replace it, nothing to fall back on, and the life that had been so brilliant and full of interesting, pleasant excitement was setting in solitude, weariness, and gloom. Ennui, that she had kept at bay throughout, overtook her at the close, when she had lost the power of coping with it.

She knew that the end was not far off, and she saw the night closing in upon her apparently without fear. She said more than once to a friend whose courage had stood her in good stead at another crisis only less momentous, “I feel greatly humbled before God when I look back on ray life, and see how much better I might have been and how much more I might have done.” Her friend’s assurance that this sense of being an unprofitable servant and her sorrow for having done so little were the best atonement she could make used to console her, and she would renew the selfaccusation to hear the words of encouragement repeated.

M. St. Hilaire continued faithful to his weekly engagement. On Friday, the 11th of May, he dined with Madame Mohl en tête-à-tête for the last time. “Never,” he said to me, “did I see her more agreeable ; her talk was as original, as piquante, as entertaining, as I ever remembered it.” She had begun, as usual, by telling him of her utter destitution, and her terror of being short of money for the quarter’s rent; but when he had set her mind at rest on this point, she was quite content, like a child, and entered into conversation on a variety of subjects, talking of old times and memories in common, and on all of these things she was as clear as a bell. After dinner she seemed tired, and lay down on the sofa. When the tray was brought in, she asked M. St. Hilaire to make the tea. “ I thought this a bad sign,” her old friend says, reverting with pathetic humor to this incident of their last evening together. It was the first time, in all their long years of intimacy, that he had ever known her to allow any one to interfere in the tea-making. He said that it was too great a responsibility; that he would pour in the water, but that he could not undertake to put in the tea. She laughed, and repeated a remark that he had often heard before ; that is, that his not drinking tea was the only flaw she had ever discovered in his character. He went away before midnight, leaving her in very good spirits.

The next day she had a kind of fit. The servant ran down for Madame d’Abbadie, who came at once. Mademoiselle Tourguenieff was sent for later. These two faithful friends watched by her to the last.

It was wonderful to see how, with the shades of death closing round her, her esprit retained its quickness. The doctor had ordered her to be rubbed with some calming lotion, and Madame d’Abbadie was doing this with the utmost gentleness ; but the old lady cried out, and told the doctor she had been shaken to pieces. On her friend’s affectionately protesting that she had made her hand so light that it could not have hurt an infant, Madame Mohl retorted, with a faint flash of the old spirit, “ Oh, yes, so you think ; but then, other people’s skin is so tough ! ” (la peau d’autrui est si dure !) Her favorite, the big Persian cat, jumped up on the bed. She stroked him, and said, “ He is so distingué. His wife is not the least distingué, but he does not see it; he is like many other husbands in that.”

Madame d’Abbadie prayed beside her, and the dying woman joined with fervor and entire consciousness in all she said. Before sundown she passed away. It was the 15th of May, 1883. They laid her to rest between Fauriel and Julius Mohl.

Kathleen O’Meara.