Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 397, November 1848Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 397, November 1848
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
years ago, to commence the exceptional existence she since has led.
We may venture to take a page from her _Lettres d'un Voyageur_--a
page replete with that peculiar fascination which renders her pen so
powerful for good or evil.
"It grieves me not to grow old, it would grieve me much to grow
old alone; but I have not yet met the being with whom I would fain
have lived and died; or, if I have met him, I have not known how
to keep him. Hearken to a tale, and weep. There was a good artist,
called Watelet, who engraved in aquafortis better than any man of
his time. He loved Margaret Lecomte, and taught her to engrave as
well as himself. She left her husband, her wealth, and her country,
to live with Watelet. The world cursed them; then, as they were
poor and humble, it forgot them. Forty years afterwards there were
discovered, in the neighbourhood of Paris, in a little house called
_Moulin-Joli_, an old man who engraved in aquafortis, with an old
woman whom he called his _Meunière_, who also engraved at the same
table. The last plate they executed represented _Moulin-Joli_,
Margaret's house, with this device,--_Cur valle permutem Sabinâ
divitias operosiores!_ It hangs in my room, above a portrait whose
original no one here has seen. During one year, he who gave me that
portrait seated himself every night with me at a little table, and
lived on the same labour as myself. At daybreak we consulted each
other on our work, and we supped at the same table, talking of art,
of sentiment, and of the future. The future has broken its word to
us. Pray for me, O Margaret Lecomte!"
It is no secret that Madame Dudevant's Watelet was Jules Sandeau,
a French novelist of some ability, whose name still makes frequent
apparitions in the windows of circulating libraries, and at the foot
of newspaper feuilletons. Let us see what M. de Lomenie says of this
period of her life, and of her first appearance in the lists of
literature, in his brief but amusing memoir of this remarkable woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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