blessed with a daughter who has proved a source of concord and affection in her distant northern home. And herewith I close a brief chapter of my chequered existence which, when I lived through it, was brimful to me of the best emotions known to the human heart.

How often-when, climbing the hill of life, and pausing awhile to recover breath and look back at its verdant slopes-the "pastures green we so recently trod seem turned by some dire magic into desolate moorland, or perhaps a wild moraine, and where we left freshness and the song of birds, the prospect is blotted out by murky vapours through which our ear can just discern the voices of the mountain speaking in rushing wind and water. Alas! the sad and disenchanting change is in ourselves, not in that which we leave behind us—

"And yet this time remov'd was summer's time! "

Onward we go, passing still further from light and warmth and the stir of life; above us seem to beckon the solemn snow-clad peaks, and higher yet, thank God! there is sunshine in the clear and infinite sky.

CHAPTER X

BADEN AND CARLSRUHE, 1854-1856

IN July I went to Baden, where my relations had as usual taken up their summer quarters. Not the least of the advantages of the Legation to which I now belonged was its being accredited to the Court of Baden as well as to that of Würtemberg. Thus, when the Minister went away on leave, as Jerningham now did for a full year, the Secretary of Legation (Frederick Hamilton, who habitually resided at Baden) assumed charge of the Mission at Stuttgart; the Paid Attaché, in my person, taking his place in the Grand Duchy.

During this summer season it was that I first became acquainted with Madame Kalergis, a person so remarkable in many ways, and who, in the society of her generation, played so conspicuous a part, as almost to belong to contemporary history. In any "Dream of fair women" of her time she might well have been accounted the fairest, so tall was she and well favoured, and of a complexion so dazzling. Hers was the perfection of northern beauty. Such we can picture to ourselves Edith Schwanenhals, Thusnelde,

or that "pearl of beauty" Guinevere :

"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,

And most divinely fair."

216

A POLISH CHARMER

217

Of her it was that Gautier sang in sensuous rhyme :

"Ces débauches de chair nacrée,

Ces miracles de blancheur !" 1

and Heine wrote, with his wonted persiflage :

"Die Dichter jagen vergebens nach Bildern
Um ihre weisse Haut zu schildern ;

Selbst Gautier ist dessen nicht capabel,
O diese Weisse ist implacable!

Des Himalaya Gipfelschnee

Erscheint aschgrau in ihrer Näh';

Die Lilie, die ihre Hand erfasst,

Vergilbt durch Eifersucht oder Contrast." 2

By birth a Nesselrode-niece of the Russian Chancellor-she had been brought up chiefly in Poland, and had imbibed from her Polish mother

thoroughly Polish ideas. When barely seventeen, a marriage had been arranged by her family at St. Petersburg between her and Kalergis-a Greek who had nothing but wealth to recommend him. So ill-suited were they that, after a few brief months, and before, even the birth of their only child, they parted, never to meet again. Thus early was she left to herself in a world where fortune, beauty resplendent as hers, the keenest wit, and the most luxuriant imagination were so many sources of well-nigh irresistible temptation. Whether this wonderfully brilliant creature was as 1 Théophile Gautier : Emaux et Camées. 2 Heine, Romanzero Der weisse Elephant. 3 A daughter, now married to Count Coudenhove.

cold and passionless as the marble from which she seemed hewn, or whether she was guarded by that sense of dignity and purity which is innate in the best of womankind, it is my firm belief that she passed unscathed through the many eccentricities of a singular existence. There was probably less of sentiment about her than of fancy. Even her daily acts of charity and kindness were perhaps due less to an impulse of the heart than to a dislike to see suffering around her. If the Poles are an enslaved nation, their women, on the other hand, are enslavers par excellence, and she had all their indescribable charm and fascination. Probably no woman of her time was the object of more sincere and devoted admiration. Her own dream was that impossible woman's dream of affection purely "platonic," and this phantom she pursued through life-to her own great unhappiness and the misery of others-with that curious penchant for the unreal and the overstrained which is so marked a characteristic of the Slavonic race. She professed in turns a culte, as she herself would have termed it, for the pianist Thalberg, her countryman Adam Potocki, and the austere Cavaignac. Her influence with the latter during his Dictatorship was the more remarkable for being in such strange contrast with the stern rule of life of that French Puritan. When first I met her she was under the influence of a far less intelligible penchant for a Prussian cavalry colonel, whom she idealised into the flower of

A PUPIL OF CHOPIN

219

chivalry, but who was a beau sabreur and little more. She firmly believed at this time that he would make her his wife as soon as ever she was released by Providence from her unhappy marriage bond. She was quite in error, and when Kalergis at last did die she married de guerre lasse a Russian of the name of Moukhanoff, several years her junior, whose patient constancy had in the end touched her heart.

Music was the great link between Marie Kalergis and myself. I do not think it possible to hear anything more perfectly enthralling than her rendering of the compositions of Schumann or Chopin. She had been one of the latter's favourite pupils, and, with the exception of one other person, she alone, to my mind, gave to his works their true expression. At the piano she was simply irresistible, but there fortunately ceased her charm as far as I was concerned, however sincere was my admiration of her beauty and her brilliant gifts. At Baden, where she spent several summers in succession, her house was the rendezvous of most of the distinguished French littérateurs and artists who frequented the place at that time. Herself a most accomplished artist, and gifted with the peculiar adaptability so characteristic of the Slavs, she managed all these various heterogeneous elements with consummate skill and tact. I shall never forget the evenings I spent there under the spell of her wondrous music, or listening to the brilliant talk of Méry or Arsène Houssaye, or the inimitable