The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1894-01-21

punishment, its effect must have been To
impose upon its wretched victim a thou
| sand deaths.
The room in which she lived was bare
and cherries. No daylight had pene-
| trated TO il since she entered IL in 1882.
It's furniture was poor and meagre. But
| piles of manuscript, written in French,
were scattered about, and the table near
which she sat and upon which she gazed
long and passionately, were two minia-
lures, beautifully painted upon ivory and
| richly framed. The one revealed the deli
cate features Of Napoleon Bonaparte, as
he was at the height of his glory the
other was that of his young child. the ill
| fated king of Rome and lock of bis fair
bright hair was carefully braided into its
| back. She was won't, so IL Is said, TO gaze
on these pictures and to repeat over again
to herself the word: 'Etolie de ma vie. -
And whatever the secret Of the Grain
KeilmansegRe may be, IL is inextricably
interviewer with the life of the man of
Wagram, of Austerlitz and of Waterloo.
There is much that is unknown, about her
but this is surely known, that Napoleon
| had been not only the "star of her life, ~
put its bave. A woman, like him, of rest
less energy, vaulting ambition, resistless
passions, strong in intellect and unscrup-
ulous, she l. ad conceived for him an over
mastering passion, and lived only in him
and for MIN.
She was born in 1777 Of landed family,
and. as has been said, was gifted in youth
with extraordinary beauty and equally re-
markable intellectual attributes. AT 10
she was married to a young man OF her
own rank, and it is believed that TO him
she bore a son. Within two years she was
a widow There was story current, at
least in her later years, that the young
Graf ate of cherry cake which she her
self had prepared for him, and i'm
mediately after died. At any rate, his
death occurred in the summer of 1900.
and few years later she was the wife Of
the Count Kielmansegge A silent woman,
of elegant bearing and almost conven-
tional severity in dress, who suddenly ap-
peared in the Plauen Palais during the
aged Grafin's last illness and quietly
watched by her bedside, was popularity
supposed TO have been the offspring of
this second marriage.
OF the next few years we know little,
save that she plunged headlong into a
life of extravagant pleasure. Her am
bition was limitless, and to crafty it she
even sold the estates bequeathed her by
her father. She appears, then, conspicu-
Gus even amid the brilliance of the court
of st. Cloud, dazzling alike in beauty in
talents, in jewels and in attire. The min
iatures which she worshipped In the un-
were given her then. There was a pecu-
liar kinship between her nature and the
intellectual moral unscrupulousness and
magnificent audacity Of Napoleon Bona
parte. How far he was really fascinated
with her can never be told, but she seems
TO have yielded to an infatuation for him
which never lessened till her hfe's close.
1t drove from her heart all other thoughts,
stifed even the mother love for her own
children, If she had ever felt il, and her
whole subsequent life was lament and a
tear for him. Even In her dying hours
her only talk with the neglected daughter
who came to her help is said TO have been
of the man who had been in his grave for
nearly forty years.
The inevitable soon came, and not long
before the time of the fatal Russian inva-
sion, divorce separated her from the
Count Kielmansegge.
AT this same time baby boy made mis-
appearance upon her ancestral estate in
Dresden; he remained upon it when 1t