They parted.
Liszt made princely provision for her welfare, and the support of their children, as well as those that had come to her before they met.
She went south to Italy, and he began that most wonderful concert tour, where, in Saint Petersburg, sums equal to ten thousand dollars were taken at the door for single entertainments.
Countess d'Agoult was the respected friend of King Emmanuel, and her salon at Turin was the meeting-place of such men as Renan, Meyerbeer, Chopin, Berlioz and Rossini. She carried on a correspondence with Heinrich Heine, was the trusted friend of Prince Jerome Bonaparte, Lamartine and Lamennais, and was on a footing of equality with the greatest and best minds of her age. She wrote several plays, one of which, "Jeanne d'Arc," was presented at the Court Theater of Turin, with the Royal Family present, and was a marked success. Her criticism on the work of Ingres made that artist's reputation, just as surely as Ruskin made the fame of Turner. But one special reason why Americans should remember this woman is because she first translated Emerson's "Essays" and caused them to be published in Italian and French.
I am not sure that Liszt ever quite forgave her for not dying of broken heart, when they parted there at Lake Maggiore. He thought she would take to opium or strong drink, or both. She did neither, but proved, by her after-life, that she was sufficient unto herself. She was worthy of the love of Liszt, because she was able to do without it. She was no parasitic, clinging vine that strangles the sturdy oak.
The Abbe Lamennais, the close friend of Liszt, once said, "Liszt is a great musician, the greatest the world has ever seen, but his wife can easily take a mental octave which he can not quite span."
The Countess d'Agoult died March Fifth, in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, at the age of seventy years. When tidings of her passing reached the Abbe Liszt, he caused all of his immediate engagements to be canceled and went into monastic retirement, wearing the robe of horsehair and a rope girdle at his waist. He filled the hours for the space of a month with silent reverie and prayer.
And even in that cloister-cell, with its stone floor and cold, bare walls, the leaden hours brought the soundless presence of a tall and stately woman. Through the desolate bastions of his brain she glided in sweet disarray, looked into his tear-dimmed eyes, smoothing softly the coarse pillow where rested that head with its lion's mane which we know so well—a head now whitened by the frost of years. No sound came to him there, save a soft voice which Fate refused to silence, and this voice whispered and whispered yet again to him: "Death shall not divide us, nor is eternity long enough to separate thee from me!"
