fortune, but Liszt continued to support the children.

The comtesse died of pleurisy in 1876, at the age of seventy-one. How
long these sweethearts of musicians last!

Thus closes the chapter of Liszt's affairs with the Comtesse d'Agoult.
It had lasted, all things considered, surprisingly long--five years.

A pleasant note of character was sounded by Liszt, which rings him to
the difficult love affair of Robert Schumann. In one of his letters,
Liszt tells how fond he had been of Schumann and Wieck and his daughter
Clara. Then came the famous struggle between father and suitor for the
possession of the girl. Liszt took Schumann's side, because he thought
he was in the right; he even went so far as to break off all
intercourse with Wieck--who took his revenge by publishing ferocious
criticisms on Liszt's playing.

In 1845 Liszt wrote a letter of calm, cool friendship to George Sand,
his "Dear George." For years he roved Europe, flitting from ovation to
ovation, from flirtation to flirtation. But he was drifting unwittingly
toward the grand affair of his life. A woman--the woman--was waiting
for him in Russia. Mr. Huneker says of Liszt and the Comtesse d'Agoult:
"Every one knows that he was as so much dough in her hands." So, in a
more than different way, we shall find him--who had slain his hecatomb
of hearts--helpless in the power of his one great love. Again he is
first compelling, then compelled.

February 8, 1819, in Monasterzyka in Kiev, Carolyne von Ivanovska was
born. She was the only daughter of a rich Polish nobleman. The parents
soon separated, and the child's life was divided between them. The
father brought her up, as La Mara tells, as if she were a boy. He made
her the companion of his conversations late into the night; and, in
order to make her the more congenial a comrade, he taught her to ride
wild horses and smoke strong cigars. Then the other half of the year,
she was the ward of her "beautiful, lovely, elegant" mother, who doted
on society, and introduced her daughter to the capitals and the salons
of Europe.

So, says La Mara, "under constantly changing surroundings, now in the
midst of the world, now in the deep solitude, Carolyne von Ivanovska
lived her first years."

When she was seventeen, her father bought her a husband, the son of the
Field Marshal Fuerst Wittgenstein, and on May 7, 1836, she gave her hand
to the Prince Nicolaus von Sayn-Wittgenstein, seven years her senior.
He was at the