“Some new invention,” she laughed. “And yet it is not necessary to invent, for the romance and tragedy of my life were acute enough.” And she then told me the following story:
“I was travelling with my mother and brother on the Riviera in 1855, when we met a Russian, Count de Guerbel. He was very tall, very handsome, very fascinating, very rich, and twenty-eight. I was seventeen.
“He fell in love with me, and it was settled I should be married at the Consulate at Nice, which I was; but the Russian law required that the marriage should be repeated in the Russian Church to make the ceremony binding, otherwise I was his legal wife, but he was not my legal husband.
“It was arranged, therefore, that I should go to Paris with my mother, the Count going on in advance to arrange everything, and we would be remarried there in the Greek Church. When we arrived in Paris it was Lent, when no marriage can take place in the Greek Church; and so time passed on.
“He must have been a thoroughly bad man, because he did his best at that time to persuade me to run away with him, always reminding me that I was his legal wife. The whole thing was merely a trick of this handsome, fascinating rascal. He promised me that, if I would go to him, he would take me to Russia at once, and there we should be remarried according to the rules of the Greek Church. Being positively frightened by his persistence, I told my mother. At the same time rumours of de Guerbel’s amours and debts reached her ears, and she wrote to a cousin of ours, then American Minister in Petersburg, for confirmation of these reports.
“My cousin replied, ‘Come at once.’ We went; I, of course, under my name of Countess de Guerbel, which I had naturally assumed from the day of our wedding at Nice, and we stayed at the Embassy in St. Petersburg. The Count’s brother was charming to me. He told us my husband was a villain, and I had better leave him alone. That was impossible, however—I was married to him, but he was not married to me, and such a state of affairs could not remain. It became an international matter, and was arranged by the American Government and the Tzar that we should be officially married at Warsaw. The Count refused to come. The Tzar therefore sent sealed orders for his appearance. Wearing a black dress, and feeling apprehensive and miserably sad, I went to the church, and at the altar rails, supported by my father and mother, and the Count’s brother, I met my husband.
“It was a horrible crisis, for I knew my father was armed with a loaded revolver, and, if de Guerbel refused to give me the last legal right which was morally already mine, its contents would put an end to the adventurer’s life. There we stood, husband and wife, knowing the service was a mere form; but the marriage was lawfully effected. He had completed his part of the bargain and we had learned his villainy.
“At the door of the church we parted, and I never saw him again. We called a cab and drove direct to the railway station, and thence travelled to Milan.”
Romance, comedy, tragedy! As I sat looking at that beautiful woman, still beautiful at seventy, it was easy to see how lovely she must have been at seventeen, and to picture that perfect figure in her black frock on her bridal morning—a pathetic sight indeed!
She was continuing her story: