About twelve months afterward, business called the happy husband back to France. It was not deemed advisable for his charming wife to accompany him. Neither, as a matter of fact, did she wish to undertake the voyage. But she accompanied him on board the steamer and bade him a touching, emotional and affectionate adieu. Mark what followed! Hardly had he got twenty-four hours beyond Sandy Hook than she proceeded to the same specialist, who had severed her former bonds, and employed him to procure her another divorce. It was applied for, and duly granted by the presiding judge of the Fourth District Court of Iowa. When this decree came to hand, with its flash heading and big red seal, the lady was married to a handsome young dry-goods man.
Meantime the absent husband in Paris kept up a fervent correspondence with his wife, anathematizing his ill-luck in being so long kept from her side. She replied regularly and kindly to these letters until her wedding with the young dry-goods Adonis was consummated, when she abruptly ceased to write. The Frenchman remonstrated, adjured, cursed and cabled, but receiving no response finally hurried across the ocean to find that he was a divorced man, and to be reminded, in the choice phraseology of his supplanter, that "what was sauce for the goose, was sauce for the gander."
With true Gallic impetuosity he sought for VENGEANCE! He employed lawyers and spent considerable money in the expectation not only of setting the divorce aside, but in bringing the lady and her paramour to condign punishment. His efforts, however, proved perfectly impotent. The lawyer, resident at the court, remembered nothing of the evidence, and the court remembered the case only so far as that it was perfectly regular and satisfactory.
Thus it will be seen that
"Domestic happiness,
That only bliss of Paradise which has survived the fall,"
when once perverted by cunning treachery like this, leaves the betrayed with little chance to cover its poor grave with the ostentatious monument of legal justice.
There are some aspects of this divorce specialist business which would be amusing did they not furnish such a cloak and encouragement to depravity and licentiousness. The following narrative of actual facts illustrates a phase of the kept-mistress ethics, and shows how the Western bogus divorce operates in lowering the tone of society and in sapping the foundations of morality:
A few years since a young stock broker of this city, spent his summer vacation in the sylvan glades of the country surrounding Lake Champlain. He possessed an appreciative eye for feminine beauty, and a soul burning for adventure. Like most men of this type, he was not apt to be disturbed by qualms of conscience where the gratification of his passions was concerned. In an evil hour, he made the acquaintance of a handsome Vermont girl, just merging upon the full meridian of exceptionally voluptuous charms. Without any special claim to mental endowments, Sadie F—— was a superb animal. Her, our frisky broker saw, and wooed. The girl fell madly in love with him, and, before long, ceased to be a virgin of the vale. Lothario was much attached to her, and by his persuasions and ornate representations of city life, backed by aureate promises, she was induced to fly from her once happy rural home and to live with her seducer in this city. He began by treating her well, placing her in handsome apartments in a boarding house on the west side, and for nearly a year the ardor of his attachment knew no abatement. Gradually, however, the affection on his side began to wane. She awoke from her delusive dream to the consciousness that she was alone in a great city without friends, money, or virtue. Whither could she flee? She could not return to her country home to look into the sorrowful depths of her mother's tender eye, or face the stings and sneers of the people of her native village. "A life of pleasure"—as it is sarcastically termed—seemed her only resource. In her terrible extremity, she made a last appeal to her deceiver, and succeeded in touching a tender spot in his heart. Perplexed as to what disposition he could possibly make of the girl who had loved him "not wisely but too well," he consulted an acquaintance notorious for the number and variety of his amours. "Oh, my dear boy, that's easily settled,"' said the friend, "get a Western divorce through one of those advertising fellows." The broker didn't "catch on"—he couldn't see why he should obtain a divorce, and said as much. "But she wants the divorce!" replied the adviser. "Let her be divorced from Frederick Brown, or Augustus Smith, or Maximilian Johnson, and then, you see, her character will be restored, her virtue whitewashed, and she will be corroborated and sustained as a respectable member of society; an object of envy and emulation on the part of her sex, and of interest, admiration and honest courtship by ours." So a decree was duly applied for through one of those "divorce lawyers" wherein the petitioner, Mrs. Sadie Johnson, sought to be severed from the hated yoke of her husband, George Frederick Johnson, who, as the petition set forth, not only treated her with habitual brutality but continually violated the purity of the hymeneal couch, to wit, etc., etc. The papers were duly served upon the defendant, who assumed the name of George Frederick Johnson for the purpose of the suit. At the expiration of the time allowed in such cases for an answer to the petition, no defense had been set up. The lady's lawyer thereupon moved for the appointment of a referee, as well as for counsel fee and alimony. All went smoothly, of course, for the petitioner, and in due course the decree of absolute divorce was granted to this unmarried lady, with permission for her to marry again, while the disreputable George Frederick Johnson was absolutely debarred from any such privilege.
When the decree was recorded, Sadie returned to her family by the peaceful waters of the lake, and was received with open arms. She was an object of envy to the unsophisticated young ladies of the neighborhood, and of open and unbounded admiration to the young men. She had learned to dress and to put on flash airs, and her experience in vice, gilded over by this divorce sham, rendered her much more attractive metal to matrimonially-disposed Strephons than any quiet, retiring Daphne of the rural district. She soon became the wife of a well-to-do country store-keeper, and made his home a pandemonium, which ended by him employing a regular lawyer to procure a divorce, when the foregoing facts were elicited.