consolate princess gave way to a superstitious resignation to fate.

It seems that the amiable relatives of the princess, chancing to be in
Rome and hearing of the wedding, determined to prevent it at all cost.
Before the Pope they charged her with securing the divorce by perjury.
The princess had friends at court, who could have procured the
satisfactory conclusion of the matter. The Cardinal Hohenlohe offered
his own chapel for the marriage. But the princess was as immovable in
her new determination as she had been in her old.

She had resisted for thirteen years the efforts of the Russian court to
decoy her back to Russia. For the next fifteen years she resisted
Liszt's ardent wooing to marriage. Even when, on the 10th of March,
1864, her former husband died and gave her that divorce which even Rome
considers sufficient, she would not wed. Her stay of one year in the
Holy City had brought her into the whirlpool of Church society and
Church politics. She turned her voracious intellect toward theology;
and the interests of the Church, as La Mara says, grew in her eyes far
more important than the petty ambitions of art.

The woman with a mission had changed her mission. Knowing how powerful
was her influence over Liszt, she thought to begin her new work at
home, and it was on Liszt that she practised her first churchly
seductions.

In his youth it had taken all the power of his father and mother to
keep him out of the Church; small wonder, then, that when, in the
evening fatigue of his life, the woman of his heart beckoned him to the
candle-lighted peace of vespers, he should yield.

Religion had always been as much an art to him, as art had been a
religion. By papal dispensation Liszt was admitted into Holy Orders on
the 25th of April, 1865, and the Cardinal Hohenlohe, who had not been
granted the privilege of marrying Liszt, was given the privilege of
shaving his head and turning him into a tonsured abbe.

There was a great sensation in 1868, when Liszt, who had thirty years
before run away from Paris with a comtesse, returned as a saint, and in
full regalia conducted a mass of his own, at Saint Eustache. The critic
and dictionary-maker, Fetis, declared that the whole affair was simply
an advertising scheme of Liszt's. But Liszt was taking himself
seriously. The Pope had called him "My dear Palestrina," and he desired
to reform church music as Palestrina had done.

The fact that this ecclesiastical passion was