Then Liszt fled to the Abbe Lamennais, and in tears sought, at the confessional and in dim retirement, a surcease from the passion that was devouring him. Here was a pivotal point in the life of Liszt, and the Church came near then, claiming him for her own. And such would have been the case, were it not for the fact that one of the children of the Countess d'Agoult was sick unto death. He knew of the sleepless vigils—the weary watching of the fond mother.
The child died, and Franz Liszt went to the parent in her bereavement, to offer the solace of religion and bid her a decent, respectful farewell, ere he left Paris forever. He thought grief was a cure for passion, and that in the presence of death, love itself was dumb. How could he understand that, in most strong natures, tears and pain, and hope and love are kin, and that each is in turn the manifestation of a great and welling heart!
Liszt stood by the side of the Countess as the grave closed over the body of her firstborn child. And as they stood there, under the darkening sky, her hand went groping blindly for his. She wrote of this, years and years after, when seventy winters had silvered her hair and her steps were feeble—she wrote of this, in her book called, "Souvenirs," and tells how, in that moment of supreme grief, when her life was whitened and purified by the fires of pain, her hand sought his. The deep current of her love swept the ashes of grief away, and she reached blindly for the hands—those wonderful music-making hands of Liszt—that they might support her. And standing there, side by side, as the priest intoned the burial service, he whispered to her, "Death shall not divide us, nor is eternity long enough to separate thee from me!"
t was only a few days after that Liszt left Paris—but not for a monastery. He journeyed to Switzerland, and stopping at Basle he was soon joined by the Countess, her two children, and her mother.
All Paris was set in an uproar by the "abduction." The George Sand school approved and loudly applauded the "eclat"; but it was condemned and execrated by the majority. As for the injured husband, it is said he gave a banquet in honor of the event; his feelings, no doubt, being eased by the fact that the goodly dot his wife had brought him at her marriage was now his exclusive possession. He had never gauged her character, anyway, and he inwardly acknowledged that her mind was of a sort with which he could not parry.
And now she had wronged him; yet in his grief he took much satisfaction, and in his martyrdom there was sweet solace.
The chief blame fell on Liszt, and the accusation that he had "broken up a happy home" came to his ears from many sources. "They blame you and you alone," a friend said to him.
"Good! good!" said Liszt, "I gladly bear it all."