At Paris our heroine fell in the way of a plain downright man of business from America, with no particular recommendation either of fortune, person, or talent; but strange to tell, she almost instantaneously conceived for him a passion yet more violent and uncontroulable than that which she had formerly experienced for Mr. F. To him she sacrificed every thing, even her modesty; for though she without scruple lived with him as his wife, she refused to be married to him even according to the slight and unsatisfactory ceremonial then observed in France. Her reasons for this conduct were somewhat whimsical. She did not choose that he should be made liable to debts formerly incurred by her, and she also entertained the idea, that an avowed marriage with her, would expose him to certain family inconveniencies and embarrassments.
But alas! for such hasty attachments! neither did our American return her passion with a suitable enthusiasm. He left her at Paris in a state of pregnancy, under pretext of business, which required his presence at one of the sea-ports, and with a promise of speedy return. He did not perform this promise. She followed him to the sea-side. Here she was delivered of a daughter. The cold-blooded American pleaded business in London; but promised her, that if she would go quietly back to Paris, he would soon return from England, and rejoin her. But though they did meet again, passion was quite exhausted on his part, never more, by any arts or exertions of her’s, to be revived. To be brief—he chose another companion, and recommended to her to do the same. This was rather too much to be endured. The lady did not indeed, in imitation of Sappho, precipitate herself from another Leucadian rock; she chose a more vulgar mode of death; she put some lead into her pockets, and threw herself into the water. She did not, however, use lead enough, as there was still gas sufficient left in her head to counterpoise it. She was rescued from the watery bier, and lived again to experience the feverish varieties of the tender passion.
The anguish of her grief did not endure any very considerable time, for within a few months she united herself to a man, whose peculiarities of opinion were as strange and as preposterous as her own. Mark, reader, she did not marry him. No! that would have been pitiful, wondrous pitiful, on both sides. She had already demonstrated her amorous creed, the great maxim of which was, that
Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.
Her new lover had, on the subject of marriage, already and solemnly declared, that “so long as he should seek to engross one woman to himself, and to prohibit his neighbour from proving his superior desert, and reaping the fruits of it, he would be guilty of the most odious of all monopolies.”
The mind sickens at the continuation of a narrative, so replete with folly, and so offensive to every thing which piety, delicacy, and human obligations render sacred. The lady, on her return to this country, was considered as the wife of her American lover, and in this character, on account of her talents, which nobody will presume to call in question, was visited by several very respectable females. But when in open defiance, and in contempt of all decency and good order, she cohabited with the author of P⸺ J⸺, our precise sturdy countrywomen thought that this was carrying the jest somewhat too far, and accordingly withdrew themselves from her acquaintance.
Such a proceeding at first excited the astonishment of the lady, and the scorn of the philosopher; indeed the latter pretended to make it a matter of ridicule, but all would not do; and it is understood that the lady condescended to use her influence with her lover, and, in spite of his public avowed hostility to marriage, he became her legal husband.
The union did not long continue; it was dissolved by that which dissolves all things—the unrelenting hand of death. Mrs. G. died in child-bed, at no great distance from the time of the marriage ceremony having been performed.