Albert Payson Terhune

“ He was Jean, Vicomte du Barry.
Jean met and fell victim to Marie. Realizing what a cash attraction her beauty and charm could be made, he installed her as presiding genius of his gambling house, as a lure to draw youthful nobles to the place. Marie—or Madame Lange, as, for no known reason, she had begun to call herself—was the bright star at the Chance Goddess' shine. And the money poured fast into the crooked games whereby the house made Jean rich.
For a time there was wholesale prosperity all around, with plenty more of it to come. ”

“ Meantime, Greece was humming like a kicked hornet's nest. Menelaus learned of his wife's flight, and with whom she had fled. He went, heart-broken, to his brother Agamemnon for help in avenging his wrongs. Agamemnon not only reminded him of the other suitors' promise to defend the honor of the man whom Helen should marry, but volunteered, as overlord of Greece, to force them to keep their vows.
Now, this offer was none too easy to carry out. It is one thing to make the maddest pledge, under the drunkenness of love. It is quite another thing to fulfill that pledge when love is dead. ”

“ In his place lived Mark Antony, prince of lovers; a man whose sole thought and aim in life consisted in worshipping at the bare feet of a red-haired, snub-nosed Egyptian woman.
Cæsar had loved Cleopatra—and won. Mark Antony loved her—and lost; lost everything—except perfect happiness. But for her, Antony might have striven night and day, with brain, will, and body, using his friends as sacrifices, employing a statesmanship that was black treachery, drenching all Europe in blood. But for Cleopatra, he might have done all this. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it was a wonder-breeding novelty to France. Adrienne revolutionized acting, diction, and costuming. Paris acclaimed her as a genius; which abused term was for once well applied.
Men of rank clamored for introductions to her. They plotted, and sighed, and bribed, and killed one another for her favor. But for them all she had one stereotyped answer; an answer that waxed historic through many firm repetitions:
"Love is a folly which I detest!"
Which, in conjunction with her motto, "What is living without loving?" throws a sidelight on Adrienne's ideas of life at the moment. ”

“ Grandees of the old and the new regime as well—aristocrats of the noblesse—who would not deign to visit the Tuileries while the Corsican adventurer held sway in that house of kings—all flocked to the Recamier home and vied with one another to do Jeanne honor.
Her beauty, her siren charm, her snowy—or frosty—virtue were the talk of France. What more natural than that Napoleon should seek out this new paragon; that sheer conceit as well as genuine love should make him burn to succeed where all the world had failed? ”

“ There is a world of stark adoration in Faustus' greeting cry, as, for the first time, he beholds the enchantress:
"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!"
She granted him the kiss, but no immortality; instead, his meed was damnation, like that of her million other swains.
Goethe, in the second part of his "Faust," makes her Marguerite's successor in Faust's love. And one poet after another has amplified the theory that she lives on through the ages, drawing men's souls from them. ”

“ This miracle of homeliness was Madame de Stael, author and futile conspirator. For exercising the latter accomplishment, she had been banished, like Jeanne, from Paris. So ugly was Madame de Stael that when she once said to an ill-favored man:
"You abuse the masculine prerogative of homeliness," her hearers laughed—at her, not at her victim.
In Italy, too, Jeanne met Prince Augustus of Prussia, prince-royal and man of distinction and wealth. They met at a reception. Madame Recamier and Madame de Stael were seated side by side on a sofa. ”

“ Lola was the talk of the hour. An army of babbling Ranelaghs could not now have dimmed her fame.
Dujarrier, all-powerful editor of "La Presse," laid his somewhat shopworn heart at her feet. Dumas, Balzac, and many another celebrity sued for her favor. Her reign over the hearts of men had recommenced.
But Lola Montez never rode long on prosperity's wave-crest. A French adorer, jealous of Dujarrier's prestige with the lovely dancer, challenged the great editor to a duel. Dujarrier, for love of Lola, accepted the challenge—and was borne off the field of honor with a bullet through his brain. ”

“ Each of the lovers was a genius; each had been pedestaled by the world; each was supposed to live on a rarified plane far above the heads or the ken of mere earth folk. The love affair of two such immortals might reasonably be expected—was expected—to be akin to the noble romances of poetry.
As a matter of fact, its three-year course was one long series of babyish spats, of ridiculous scenes, and of behavior worthier the inmates of a mad-house or a kindergarten than of the decade's two master intellects.
George Sand expected De Musset to live on the heights of bloodless idealism. ”

“ The rat that wishes to continue his career wastes no time in joining the exodus. And Emma Lyon did not disdain to take example from the humble rodent.
There seemed no good reason for remaining longer at the side of the bankrupt baronet, to add to his cares and expenses. So, with womanly consideration, she left him.
She was alone in the world once more, without a shilling or a friend; equipped with education, accomplishments, wondrous beauty, and charm, but with no immediate market for those commodities. It was the black hour that comes least once into the life of every adventuress. ”

“ The superwoman charm was hers from the first. And she retained it in all its mysterious power through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth; men vying for her love when she was ninety.
A full year before her father died, she had met the youthful Prince de Marsillac, and had, at a glance, wholly captivated his semi-royal fancy. It was Ninon's first love affair—with a prince. She was dazzled by it just a little, she whom monarchs later could not dazzle. She was only fourteen. And in Touraine a princely admirer was a novelty. ”

“ The man in black, by way of answer, drew one sable-gloved hand from beneath his cloak. In his fingers he grasped a large phial, wherein sparkled and glowed a strange, pinkish liquid.
"Life is short," said the visitor, as Ninon still looked in amazed inquiry from his half-hidden face to the rose-colored phial he carried. "Life is short, but youth is far shorter. When youth is gone, love is gone. Love is the goal of life. Without youth, there is no love. Without love, life is a desert. The gifts of youth and beauty are yours. ”

“ The hatred of the people at large did not much distress her. Through the latticed windows of the palace filtered the growls of the populace, droning and futile as the roar of distant breakers. And even as breakers have no peril for landsmen, so, safe in her husband's home, Helen did not fear the grumbles of the folk he ruled.
Then, in the fullness of his age, Menelaus died, and all at once the situation changed. Helen was no longer safe ashore, listening to the breakers; she was in their power. ”

“ Agamemnon, looking at her, cried:
"Hath no man, then, avenged his wrongs by slaying thee? Is there none to shed thy blood for all that thou hast slain? To wreak on thee the wrongs that thou hast wrought? Nay, as mine own soul liveth, there is one. Before a ship takes sail, I will slay thee with mine own hand!"
But, as he advanced toward her, sword in hand, her beauty seized him in its spell. He paused, irresolute, then turned away.
For many years thereafter, Helen and Menelaus dwelt together at Sparta. ”

“ Old Philippe the Regent was misgoverning France just then; and to say that his court was morally rotten would be gross flattery. The unapproachable Lecouvreur was thus a freak, as well as a delight. Like the good, old, overworked "breath of mountain air in a slum," this loveless genius swept through the palaces of Paris and Versailles. A hundred nobles longed for her favor. Not one could boast that he had so much as kissed her lips. Here is her picture, sketched from the Mercure, of 1719:
Without being tall, she is exquisitely formed and has an air of distinction. ”

“ Her love life began at a convent school when she was little more than a child, and it endured until old age set in. Perhaps a list of its victims, as Sandeau so cruelly hinted, would have resembled a city directory. It certainly would have borne a striking likeness to a cyclopedic index of Europe's nineteenth-century celebrities; for it embraced such immortal names as De Musset, Sandeau, Balzac, Chopin, Carlyle, Prosper Merimee, Liszt, Dumas and many another. So many demigods knelt at her shrine that at last she wrote:
I am sick of great men. ”

“ D'Orsay stayed on.
There is every reason to think Marguerite was true to her young "Greek God." But if so, it was not for lack of temptation or opportunity to be otherwise. In her late forties and early fifties, she was still "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," still as lovely, as magnetic, as adorable as in her teens.
Among the men who delighted to honor her salons with their frequent presence—and more than one of them made desperate love to their hostess—were Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, Sir Robert Peel, Captain Marryat, Brougham, Landseer, Tom Moore, Disraeli, and many another genius. ”

“ The emperor was Stephen Jumel's idol. Himself a self-made man, the old merchant worshiped this self-made demigod, the model and unattainable example of every self-making man since his day.
Jumel's hero-worship took a practical form. He placed his resources at the emperor's service, and once tactlessly, but generously, offered his own wealth and his New York home as solace and refuge in the increasingly probable event of the emperor's mislaying his crown. To which Napoleon replied—speaking, as ever, to the gallery:
"Whatever reverses Fortune may inflict on me, Duty will chain me to France. ”

“ She used her power over Richelieu freely, but never for herself; always to soften the punishment of some luckless man or woman who had fallen under the rod of his eminence's displeasure.
Thereby, and through Richelieu's love for her, Ninon clashed with no less a personage than the Queen of France herself.
When Anne of Austria came from Spain to be the bride of Louis XIII of France, Richelieu fell in love with the pretty young queen. Anne had not wit enough to appreciate the cardinal's genius or to fear his possible hate. ”

“ Helen, passing near the wooden beast that night, heard within it the clank of arms. She halted, and, in a low voice, spoke the names of some of her old suitors. Ulysses answered, bidding her open a concealed trapdoor in the horse's side. She obeyed. Out climbed a score of Greeks. Guided by Helen, they unbarred the city gates to the horde outside who had returned in their vessels. One of the greatest massacres of the ages followed. Babies were butchered as they slept, women were cut down as they ran from their beds, half-wakened men were slaughtered like sheep. ”

“ Yearly she journeyed in state to Saratoga, with a retinue of fifty servants and "officers of the household."
Money went like water in the upkeep of the queenly establishment. The once-boundless Jumel wealth that she had helped to amass began to shrink under the strain. Yet so great was that fortune that more than a million dollars of it was left after she died.
New York was kind. Men who had loved Betty, women who had been envied because of her friendship for them, rallied about her now, in her dotage, and helped her keep up the pitiable farce of queenship. ”