SAD END OF A ROMANTIC CAREER.

Patea Mail, Volume IX, Issue 1061, 18 July 1883, Page 2

SAD END OF A ROMANTIC CAREER.

One of the saddest romances of the nineteenth century came to an end recently with the death of the beautiful Duchess de Chaulnes, born Princess Galitzin of Russia. Now that this flower of womanhood has passed away, some one of the many romancers of Paris will probably build a story out of her life history, which terminated so pitifully. Twenty-five, a widoy, an ostracised woman,, deprived of the care of her own children, ruined in fortune and health, and dying in a miserable lodging in an obscure quarter—thte is, indeed, a fate sufficient to provoke pity, when one remembers what Marie Sophie Bernardine Blanche, Princess Galitzin, had been. Those who knew her when she first began to move in Parisian society rave about ' the “ prodigious harmony of her beauty,” her “profile like that of a goddess,” her dazzling eyes, her purple lips. She was, says Etincille, a well - known writer on fashions and fashionable people, “the incarnation of the beauties of another age; she appeared to have come down

from .the Olympus of Louis XlV.’s time. . Her misfortune was that she came into the world just two centuries too late. She would have lived when she could have dreamed away the days on marble terraces to the sound of the music of Lulli, or could have listened to the jests of Lauzun or decani, or have strolled through the marble galleries, under the richly laden ceilings, in the midst of perfumes, precious stones and laces.” Amid the splendours of Versailles she would have been betwitching as a fairy. She was bewitching enough in these prosaic days of ours to win the heart ol the Due do Chaulnes, and by her marriage with him she came into possession of*a fortune which enabled her to gratify all her fancies. But the tempter came—so say the gossips—and after two'or three years of married life, the young Duke demanded a “ separation,” which is the nearest approach to a divorce yet possible in France. At the same time the youthful Duchesse had made the same demand of the courts. Meantime the Duke died, and then his . relatives—notably his mother—perseented the poor little Russian in a systematic and vindictive manner. The courts evidently decided that the Duchesse de Chaulnes bad been in the wrong, for they would not deliver her children into her care. This almost broke her heart. She made a romantic attempt to get possesion of her babes by carrying them off from the Chateau where their grandmother had sequestrated them, but this was vain, and and the persons connected with her in the matter were prosecuted and punished. Then the yonng Duchesse sued her mother-in-law, the Duchess de Cbevreul, to gain possession of her children once more ; and over the lawsuit 'of .the two Duchesses all France became divided into two great factions. The mother-in-law won, and the Duchesse de Chaulnes, retired into obscurity. Her who had stood valiantly by her for a time, appeared finally to have left her to shift for herself; and one day the woman who had been reverenced like a Queen in French society was compelled to knock at the door of some very ; humble people, whose acquaintance she had made almost by chance, and to say:— “ If yon do not take me in, there is nothing left for me but to throw myself into the Seine.” .She died in the dingy apartment of these honest folk, in a small bedroom, where the hnsband and wife and their daughters also slept. Her heart was broken, and she faded away during the winter so rapidly that the charitable people who had received her were shocked. All her glorious tresses were shorn away, while she was suffering from brain fever, but they were buried with her. The church came with its pardon,- and her own parents were on hand to attend the funeral, which was privately held in the church of St Thomas d’Aquin this morning at 8 o’clock. Just before she died the Duchesse begged that she might be buried in Fere la Chaise, and not in the cemetery of the family into which she had married. She is another added to the many who fall by the way in this terribly tempting life of the nineteenth century, in the midst of this old and corrupt society. Madame Henri Greville could make a touching and tender picture of the young Russian girl’s life and death.—-Foreign Correspondent Journal.