tist. After a long struggle he yielded to her, but for a
time he was a recluse, and his melancholy gradually wore out his
health; until at length he was given up for a dying man, and obituary
eulogies actually were published. But as Mark Twain wrote of himself:
"The reports of his death were greatly exaggerated."

When Liszt gave up all hope of entering the Church, he began a restless
orgy of effort for mental diversion; all manner of theories and foibles
allured him.

As Heine said of him, his mind was "impelled to concern itself with all
the needs of mankind, impelled to poke its nose into every pot where
the good God cooks the future." The theatre offered for a time another
form of dissipation than his religious hysteria. He hated concerts, and
compared himself to a conjurer or a clever trick poodle; he took up
with the Revolution of 1830; Saint-Simonianism enmeshed him; later he
fell under the spell of the Abbe Lamennais. Then Paganini came to Paris
and fascinated and frightened Liszt, as he frightened the world with
his unheard-of fiddling. It was his privilege to drive Liszt back to
the piano with an ambition to rival Paganini; as rival him he did. Next
Berlioz and romanticism fevered his brain, and then in 1831, the
twenty-year-old Liszt and the twenty-one-year-old Chopin struck up
their historic friendship, and the two men glittered and flashed in the
most artistic salons of Paris. It was about this time that the Polish
Countess Plater said, speaking of the genial Ferdinand Hiller and the
two cronies:

"I would choose Hiller for my friend, Chopin for my husband, Liszt for
my lover."

There seems to have been a snow-storm of love affairs at this period.
It is impossible even to name the flakes. Gossip of course gathered
into the catalogue every woman whom Liszt saw more than once; but we
need not pay this tribute to malice by mentioning the names of all of
Liszt's hostesses. Among those who may be more definitely suspected of
being made victims by, or victimising, him is the Comtesse Adele
Laprunarede, afterward Duchess de Fleury. She, of course, was, as De
Beaufort says, "sparkling, witty, young, beautiful." Her home was
lonely and rural; her husband was very old; Liszt, to repeat, was a
musician and Hungarian. The old comte was blind enough to invite him to
spend the winter months at his chateau. For a whole winter Liszt was
kept there in her castle a prisoner, with fetters of silk. The old
comte seems nev