I do not think Madam Knight had a Narragansett pacer, for as soon as they were raised in any numbers they were sent at once to the West Indies for the use of the wives and daughters of the wealthy sugar-planters, and few New England people could afford to own them. The “horse furniture” of which she speaks included, of course, her side-saddle and saddle-bag, which held her travelling-wardrobe and her precious journal.
Madam Sarah Knight did not end her days in Boston. She removed to Norwich, Conn., and in 1717 it is recorded that she gave a silver cup for the communion-service of the church there. The town in gratitude, by vote, gave her liberty to “sitt in the pue where she was used to sitt in ye meeting house.” She also kept an inn on the Livingston Farm near New London, and I doubt not a woman of her large experience kept a good ordinary. No rustling beds, no sad-colored pillow-bears, no saucy maids, no noisy midnight topers, no doubtful fricassees, no pumpkin-bread, and, above all, no bare-legged punch in her house.
It is painful to record, however, that in 1718 the teacher of Benjamin Franklin and friend of Cotton Mather was indicted and fined for “selling strong liquor to Indians.”
Altogether, Madam Knight was far ahead of the time in which she lived. She was a woman of great energy and talent. She kept a school when a woman-teacher was almost unheard of. She ran a tavern, a shop. She wrote poetry and a diary. She cultivated a farm, and owned mills, and speculated largely in Indian lands, and was altogether a sharp business-woman; and she must have been counted an extraordinary character in those early days.
CHAPTER VI.
TWO COLONIAL ADVENTURESSES.
A “strange true story of Louisiana” so furnished with every attractive element of romance, so calculated to satisfy every exaction of literary art, that it seems marvellous it has not been eagerly seized upon and frequently utilized by dramatists and novelists, is that of a Louisiana princess—or pretender—whose death in a Parisian convent in 1771 furnished a fruitful topic of speculation and conversation in the courts of France, Austria, Russia, and Prussia. This Louisiana princess (were she no pretender) was the daughter-in-law of Peter the Great of Russia, wife of the Grand Duke Alexis, and mother of Peter II. of Russia. The story, as gathered from a few European authorities and some old French chronicles and histories of Louisiana, is this.
The Princess Christine, daughter of a German princeling and wife of the Grand Duke Alexis, is said by Russian official and historical records to have died in 1716 after a short and most unhappy married life with a brutal royal profligate, and to have been buried with proper court honors and attendance. But there is another statement, half-history, half-romance, which denies that she died at that time, and asserts that her death and burial were but a carefully planned deception, to permit her to escape her intolerable life in Russia, and only concealed her successful flight from St. Petersburg and the power of the Russian throne. Aided by the famous Countess Königsmark, the princess, after some delay and frightened hiding in France, sailed from the port of L’Orient, accompanied by an old devoted court retainer named Walter. Of course there must always be a lover to form a true romance, and a young officer named D’Aubant successfully fills that rôle. He had often seen Christine in the Russian court, and had rescued her from danger when she was hunting in the Hartz Mountains, and had cherished for her a deep though hopeless love. When the news of her death came to the knowledge of Chevalier D’Aubant, he sadly left the Czar’s service and went to France. Soon after he chanced to see at the cathedral in Poitiers a woman who raised her veil, glanced at him with a look of recognition, and apparently a face like that of his loved Christine. After long search for the unknown, he found her temporary home, only to learn that she, with her father Mons. De L’Ecluse (who was of course Walter), had just sailed for the New World. But the woman of the house gave him a slip of paper which the fair one had left for him in case he called and asked concerning her. On it was written this enigmatical lure:—
I have drunk of the waters of Lethe,
Hope yet remains to me.
Now, he would not have been an ideal court-lover, nor indeed but a sorry hero, if, after such a message, he had not promply sailed after the possible Christine. He learned that the vessel which bore her was to land at Biloxi, Louisiana. He sailed for the same port with his fortune in his pockets. But on arriving in Louisiana, Walter (or Mons. De L’Ecluse) had taken the disguising name of Walter Holden, and Christine posed as his daughter, Augustine Holden; so her knight-errant thus lost trace of her. Christine-Augustine and her father settled in the Colonie Roland on the Red River. D’Aubant, with sixty colonists, founded a settlement but fifty miles away, which he named the Valley of Christine. Of course in due time the lovers met, and disguise was impossible and futile, and Augustine confessed her identity with the Crown Princess. As her husband Alexis had by this time conveniently died in prison, in Moscow, where he had been tried and condemned to death (and probably been privately executed), there was no reason, save the memory of her past exalted position, why she should not become the wife of an honest planter. They were married by a Spanish priest, and lived for twenty happy years in the Valley of Christine.