former meeting when the one was but a boy, and the other only Duke of Orleans. "Much has changed since then," said the Citizen-King. "Yes, sire, but not for the better!" bluntly replied the artist. In 1844 Europe was more liberal in some respects than America is to-day. Honours and applause were not denied to Liszt because he openly transgressed the sex conventions. Since 1835 his life had been shared by the beautiful Comtesse d'Agoult, the would-be rival, under the name "Daniel Stern," of the more celebrated Georges Sand. Of this union were born three children, one of whom became the wife of Richard Wagner. Madame d'Agoult was a Romanticist, and a very typical figure of her time and circle. She was an interesting woman, and tried hard to be more interesting still. But it was no affectation of passion that led her to abandon home, husband, and position, to throw herself into the pianist's arms at Basle. She was deeply in love with him; but she wished to be more than a wife, more than a lover: she aspired to be his muse. Liszt, however, needed no inspiration from without. In an oft-quoted phrase, he said that the Dantes created the Beatrices; "the genuine die when they are eighteen years old." The man chafed more and more under the ties that bound him. He had no wish to abandon the mother of his children, but his genius demanded to be unfettered. He wandered over Europe, sad and bitter at heart, but heaping up his laurels. The Comtesse and the children stayed in Paris, or at the villa Liszt had rented on the beautiful islet of Nonnenwerth, in the shadow of "the castled crag of Drachenfels." There he joined them from time to time, while unable to resist the conclusion that he and she must part. The evolution of their temperaments and intellects was in rapidly diverging directions. He was no longer willing to throw himself out of the window at her bidding as he had publicly declared himself to be four years before. The cord that bound them was frayed and fretted to a thread. [Illustration: FRANZ LISZT.]