Women of History Part 18

While skulking about in this state of peril and desolation, they had glimpses and occasional rencounters with some of their former companions, whom similar misfortunes had driven upon similar schemes of concealment. In this wretched condition, the time of Madame de la Rochejaquelein's confinement drew on; and after a thousand frights and disasters, she was delivered of two daughters, one of whom died within a fortnight. The result at length was, that Madame de la Rochejaquelein, after several struggles with pride and principle, was prevailed to repair to Nantes, to avail herself of an amnesty.

MADAME RECAMIER.

[BORN 1777. DIED 1849.]

DAVENPORT ADAMS.

The daughter of Monsieur Bernard, a notary of Lyons, born in 1777, and married at fifteen to Monsieur Recamier, a wealthy banker of forty-three. She was a beauty, and she knew it; the idol of that gay, irresistible French society which knows so well how to repay the devotion of its votaries; the theme of song, the G.o.ddess of _la beau monde_; very capable of love, but denied its natural exercise as wife and mother. If her path then ran among the flowers, not the less did she skirt the brink of the precipice; and her friends' advice and counsel were often needed and always welcome. She did not disdain the flatteries of her admirers; often she encouraged them to an extent that in England would have been considered criminal; but from the testimony of impartial witnesses, it seems clear that she never overstepped the bounds of virtue. She was the only woman, said Charles James Fox, "who united the attractions of pleasure to those of modesty;" but a woman who is always travelling on the verge of danger needs such a friend as Matthieu de Montmorency to counsel her in time.

Fox was in Paris in 1802 when Madame Recamier was at the zenith of her reputation. He almost divided with her the allegiance of the gay world.

The Parisian beaux imitated his costume, and the Parisian shop-windows were crowded with his portraits. Between the statesman and the beauty so close an intimacy was established that scandal made busy with it. She called upon him one day to accompany her in a drive along the Boulevards. "Before you came," said she, "I was the fas.h.i.+on; it is a point of honour, therefore, that I should not seem jealous of you." When sitting with her in her box at the opera, a copy of an ode was placed in the hands of each, in which Fox was panegyrised as Jupiter, and Madame Recamier as Venus.

The failure of Monsieur Recamier in 1806 affected her health, and she went to spend the summer months of 1807 with Madame de Stael at Coppet.

Among the ill.u.s.trious residents at Geneva at the time was Prince Augustus of Prussia, a nephew of Frederick the Great, and a handsome young man of twenty-four. He fell violently in love with the Parisian beauty, who was by no means indifferent to the pa.s.sion he openly displayed. He offered her his hand if she could obtain a divorce from her husband, whom half Paris [according to an old scandal] declared to be her father. Madame was not unwilling to be a princess, and she wrote to her husband proposing a divorce. Monsieur Recamier, in reply, expressed his willingness, but at the same time appealed to her better feelings. Years afterwards the love-suit dropped, and the prince, instead of a wife, received her portrait. Other lovers followed, and her career came near its close. In 1849 the cholera broke out in Paris.

Madame Recamier was not afraid of dying, but she shrunk from death in so terrible a form. To avoid its ravages she removed to the Bibliotheque Nationale, but she could not escape from fate. On the 10th of May she was seized with the premonitory symptoms; on the 11th she was a corpse.

She had completed nearly two-and-seventy years when she was removed from life by a death which of all others she most dreaded.

In her time she played a conspicuous part; was constantly upon the gay and glittering stage; the audience applauded her loudly, and ill.u.s.trious hands flung at her garlands and bouquets. Now that the applause has died out, now that the lamps burn dimly, now that the silent stage is given up to shadows, we wonder what there was in her acting to secure her so wide a fame. We look in vain for a flash of genius, for a burst of n.o.ble emotion. Vain, greedy of admiration, an errant coquette, a somewhat frivolous intruder on the threshold of criminal pa.s.sion,--what was she more? A beauty? Yes, but could beauty alone have secured her so wide a repute among her contemporaries? She did not even converse brilliantly, like a Du Deffand or a De Stael. She did not write charming epistles, like a De Sevigne, and yet she was a.s.siduously courted by famous wits and accomplished men of letters. Partly we may suppose her celebrity to have arisen from her profession of liberal principles under the stern _regime_ of a Bonaparte; partly it was owing to the tact with which she drew out the best qualities, and flattered the _amour propre_ of her visitors.

MARY BRUNTON.

[BORN 1778. DIED 1818.]

DR BRUNTON.

Mary Brunton, [auth.o.r.ess of the novels "Self-Control" and "Discipline,"

was the only daughter of Colonel Thomas Balfour of Elwick, and of Frances Ligonier, only daughter of Colonel Francis Ligonier, the brother of Field-Marshal the Earl of Ligonier. From her sixteenth year (although her mother is spoken of as still alive at a much later date), it is stated that the entire charge of her father's household devolved upon her, and left her very little time for anything else. Thus matters continued till she was nearly twenty. Meanwhile her future husband, Dr Brunton, and she had met, when or where we are not informed.] Dr Brunton merely says: "About this time, Viscountess Wentworth, who had formerly been the wife of Mrs Balfour's brother, the second Earl Ligonier, proposed that Mary, her G.o.d-daughter, should reside with her in London.

What influence this alteration might have had on her after-life is left to be matter of conjecture. She preferred the quiet and privacy of a Scotch parsonage. We were married in her twentieth year, and went to reside at Bolton, near Haddington."

[A love of reading had been an early pa.s.sion with her, but in her childhood it had spent itself mostly in poetry and fiction; and her want of leisure afterwards had withdrawn her to a great extent even from literature of that description.] "Her time," Dr Brunton continues, "was now much more at her own command. Her taste for reading returned in all its strength, and received rather a more methodical direction. Some hours of every forenoon were devoted by her to this employment; and in the evenings I was in the habit of reading aloud to her books chiefly of criticism and _belles lettres_. Among other subjects of her attention, the philosophy of the human mind became a favourite study with her, and she read Dr Reid's works with uncommon pleasure." After their removal to Edinburgh, their circle increased. "She mingled more with those whose talents and acquirements she had respected at a distance.... She had often urged me to undertake some literary work, and once she appealed to an intimate friend who was present whether he would not be my publisher.

He consented readily, but added that he would at least as willingly publish a book of her own writing. This seemed at the time to strike her as something the possibility of which had never occurred to her before, and she asked more than once whether he was in earnest. A considerable part of the first volume of 'Self Control' was written before I knew anything of its existence. When she brought it to me, my pleasure was mingled with surprise. The beauty and correctness of the style, the acuteness of observation, and the loftiness of sentiment, were, each of them in its way, beyond what even I was prepared to expect from her."

[The work was published in two large volumes, which were afterwards distributed into three post octavos in January or early in February 1811 anonymously, and after considerable precautions had been taken to preserve the secret of the authors.h.i.+p, which actually was, we are told, for a little time so well kept that she had frequent opportunities of hearing her work commented on.

Mrs Brunton commenced a new novel, "Discipline;" but before it was completed "Waverley" appeared. It came into her hands, her husband says, while she was in the country, and when she had heard nothing of its reputation; but she at once discerned its high merit, and was so fascinated by it, that she could not go to bed till she had read it through. It happened that a scene of a part of her own work too was laid in the Highlands, about which a universal interest had been for some years before this awakened by Scott's "Lady of the Lake," and other poems; and her first impulse was to cancel the Highland portion of her story altogether; but to this sacrifice her husband strongly objected.

Writing to one of her female friends in December, a few days before her new work was to appear, she says: "It is very unfortunate in coming after 'Waverley,' by far the most splendid exhibition of talent in novel-writing which has appeared since the days of Fielding and Smollett. There seems little doubt that it comes from the pen of Scott.

What a compet.i.tor for poor little me!" When "Discipline" at length came out, however, its success was far greater than she antic.i.p.ated. "But she was by no means gratified by it," we are told, "to the same extent she had been by the reception of 'Self-Control.' She was now well known to be the author, and therefore she was not so sure that the applause which reached her was all sincere." The silence of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_, too, annoyed and discouraged her.

All this indisposed her to attempt a third novel. Yet she commenced some other works, in which she proceeded slowly. But the end of all was at hand. After being married for twenty years, she had at last the prospect of becoming a mother. Her husband's interesting narrative proceeds:] "She was strongly impressed, indeed, with the belief that her confinement was to prove fatal, not in vague presentiment, but on grounds of which I could not entirely remove the force, though I obstinately refused to join in the inference which she drew from them.

Under this belief, she completed every, the most minute, preparation for her great change, with the same tranquillity as if she had been making arrangements for one of those short absences which only endeared her home the more to her. The clothes with which she was laid in her grave had been selected by herself; she herself had chosen and labelled some tokens of remembrance for her more intimate friends; and the intimations of her death were sent round from a list in her own handwriting. But these antic.i.p.ations, though so deeply fixed, neither shook her fort.i.tude nor diminished her cheerfulness. They neither altered her wish to live, nor the ardour with which she prepared to meet the duties of returning health, if returning health were to be her portion. After giving birth to a still-born son on the 7th December, and recovering for a few days with a rapidity beyond the hopes of her medical friends, she was attacked with fever. It advanced with fatal violence, till it closed her earthly life on the morning of Sat.u.r.day, December 19, 1818."

FELICIA HEMANS.

[BORN 1794. DIED 1835.]

JEFFREY.

The business of women being with actual or social life, and the colours it receives from the conduct and dispositions of individuals, they unconsciously acquire, at a very early age, the finest perception of characters and manners, and are almost as soon instinctively schooled in the deep and dangerous learning of feeling and emotion; while the very minuteness with which they make and meditate on these interesting observations, and the finer shades and variations of sentiment which are thus treasured and recorded, trains their whole faculties to a nicety and precision of operation which often discloses itself to advantage in their application to studies of a different character. When women accordingly have turned their minds, as they have done but too seldom, to the exposition or arrangement of any branch of knowledge, they have commonly exhibited, we think, a more beautiful accuracy, and a more uniform and complete justness of thinking, than their less discriminating brethren. There is a finish and completeness, in short, about everything they put out of their hands, which indicates not only an inherent taste for elegance and neatness, but a habit of nice observation, and singular exactness of judgment.

We have not as yet much female poetry. That of Mrs Hemans is a fine exemplification. It may not be the best imaginable poetry, and may not indicate the very highest or most commanding genius; but it embraces a great deal of that which gives the very best poetry its chief power of pleasing, and would strike us perhaps as more impa.s.sioned and exalted, if it were not regulated and harmonised by the most beautiful taste. It is singularly sweet, elegant, and tender; touching, perhaps, and contemplative, rather than vehement and overpowering; and not only finished throughout with an exquisite delicacy and even severity of execution, but informed with a purity and loftiness of feeling, and a certain sober and humble tone of indulgence and piety, which must satisfy all judgments, and allay the apprehensions of those who are most afraid of the pa.s.sionate exaggerations of poetry. Almost all her poems are rich with fine descriptions, and studded over with images of visible beauty. But these are never idle ornaments; all her pomps have a meaning, and her flowers and her gems are arranged, as they are said to be among Eastern lovers, so as to speak the language of truth or of pa.s.sion. This is peculiarly remarkable in some little pieces, which seem at first sight to be purely descriptive, but are soon found to tell upon the heart with a deep, moral, and pathetic impression. But it is in truth nearly as conspicuous in the greater part of her productions, where we scarcely meet with any striking sentiment that is not ushered in by some such symphony of external nature, and scarcely a lovely picture that does not serve as an appropriate foreground to some deep or lofty emotion.

AUGUSTINA ZARAGOZA.

[BORN 1786. DIED 1826.]

ALISON.

They were happy who [in the siege of Saragossa] expired amidst that scene of unutterable woe. Yet even they bequeathed with their last breath to the survivors the most solemn injunctions to continue to the last the unparalleled struggle; and from the dens of the living and the dead issued daily crowds of warriors, attenuated indeed and livid, but who maintained with unconquerable resolution a desperate resistance. But human nature, even in its most exalted mood, cannot go beyond a certain point. Saragossa was about to fall; but, like Numantia and Saguntum, she was to leave a name immortal in the annals of mankind.

Such was the heroic spirit which animated the inhabitants, that it inspired even the softer s.e.x to deeds of valour. Amongst these, Augustina Zaragoza was peculiarly distinguished. She had served with unshaken courage a cannon near the gate of Portillo, at the former siege, and she again took her station there when the enemy returned.

"See, General," said she to Palafox, when he visited that quarter, "I am again with my old friend." Her husband being struck with a cannon-ball as he served the battery, she calmly stepped into his place, and pointed the gun as he lay bleeding at her side. Frequently she was to be seen at the head of an a.s.saulting party, wrapped in her cloak, sword in hand, cheering on the soldiers to the discharge of their duty. She was at length taken prisoner; but being taken dangerously ill, and carried to the French hospital, she contrived to escape. A female corps was formed to carry provisions and water to the combatants, and remove the wounded, at the head of which was Donna Benita, a lady of rank. Several hundred women and children perished during the siege, not by bombs or cannon-shot, but in actual combat.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE.

[BORN 1816. DIED 1855.]

MRS GASKELL.

The auth.o.r.ess of "Jane Eyre" and other works is, as she calls herself [August 1850], undeveloped then, and more than half a head shorter than I am. Soft brown hair, not very dark; eyes very good and expressive, looking straight and open at you, of the same colour as her hair; a large mouth; the forehead square, broad, and rather overhanging. She has a very sweet voice; rather hesitates in choosing her expressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort admirable, and just befitting the occasion; there is nothing overstrained, but perfectly simple. Her nerves were severely taxed by the effort of going among strangers. On one occasion, though the number of the party could not exceed twelve, she suffered the whole day from acute headache, brought on by apprehension of the evening.

It was now [1853] two or three years since I had witnessed a similar effect produced on her, in antic.i.p.ation of a quiet evening at a friend's home; and since then she had seen many and various people in London; but the physical sensations produced by shyness were still the same, and on the following day she laboured under severe headache. I had several opportunities of perceiving how this nervousness was ingrained in her const.i.tution, and how acutely she suffered in trying to overcome it. One evening we had, among other guests, two sisters who sung Scotch ballads exquisitely. Miss Bronte had been sitting quiet and constrained, till they began "The Bonnie House of Airlie;" but the effect of that, and "Carlyle Yetts" which followed, was as irresistible as the playing of the piper of Hamelin. The beautiful clear light came into her eyes; her lips quivered with emotion; she forgot herself, rose and crossed the room to the piano, where she asked eagerly for song after song. The sisters begged her to come and see them next morning, when they would sing as long as ever she liked, and she promised gladly and thankfully.

But on reaching the house her courage failed. We walked some time up and down the street, she upbraiding herself all the while for her folly, and trying to dwell on the sweet echoes in her memory, rather than on the thought of a third sister who would have to be faced if we went in. But it was of no use; and dreading lest this struggle with herself might bring on one of her trying headaches, I entered at last, and made the best apology I could for her non-appearance.

Much of this nervous dread of encountering strangers I ascribed to the idea of her personal ugliness, which had been strongly impressed upon her imagination early in life, and which she exaggerated to herself in a remarkable manner. "I notice," said she, "that after a stranger has once looked at my face, he is careful not to let his eyes wander to that part of the room again." A more untrue idea never entered into any one's head. Two gentlemen who saw her during this visit, without knowing at the time who she was, were singularly attracted by her appearance; and this feeling of attraction towards a pleasant countenance, sweet voice, and gentle, timid manners, was so strong in one as to conquer a dislike he had previously entertained to her works.

There was another circ.u.mstance that came to my knowledge at this period, which told secrets about the finely-strung frame. One night I was on the point of narrating some dismal ghost-story, just before bed-time. She shrank from hearing it, and confessed she was superst.i.tious, and p.r.o.ne at all times to the involuntary recurrence of any thoughts of ominous gloom which might have been suggested to her. She said that in first coming to us, she had found a letter on her dressing-table from a friend in Yorks.h.i.+re, containing a story which had impressed her vividly ever since; that it mingled with her dreams at night, and made her sleep restless and unrefres.h.i.+ng.

[There was a peculiarity about Charlotte Bronte's death.] Not long after her marriage with the Rev. Mr Nicholls, she was attacked by new sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness. "A wren would have starved on what she ate during these last six weeks." Long days and long nights went by; still the same relentless nausea and faintness, and still borne on in patient trust. About the third week in March [1856], there was a change; a low wandering delirium came on, and in it she begged constantly for food, and even for stimulants; she swallowed eagerly now, but it was too late. Wakening for an instant from this stupor of intelligence, she saw her husband's woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that G.o.d would spare her. "Oh," she whispered forth, "I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy." Early on Sat.u.r.day morning, March 31, the solemn tolling of Haworth Church bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts s.h.i.+vered within them as they thought of the two sitting together [the father and husband] in the old grey house.