equal rank. The comte was forty-five, she only half his age. He seems
to have been a by no means ideal character, and she found her diversion
in the brilliant society she gathered into her salon. For some time she
seems to have been fascinated by Liszt before she could reach him with
her own fascinations.


Indeed she was always the pursuer, and he the pursued. This is the more
strange, since, at least at first, she was extremely handsome. Ramann
has thus pictured her:

"The Countess d'Agoult was beautiful, very beautiful, a Lorelei:
slender, of lofty bearing, enchantingly graceful and yet dignified in
her movements, her head proudly raised, with an abundance of fair
tresses, which waved over her shoulders like molten gold, a regular,
classic profile, which stood in strange and interesting contrast with
the modern breath of dreaminess and melancholy that was spread over her
countenance; these were the general features which rendered it
impossible to overlook the countess in the salon, the concert-room, or
the opera-house, and these were enhanced by the choicest toilets, the
elegance of which was surpassed by few, even in the salons of the
Faubourg St. Germain. That fantastic dreams were hidden behind the
purity of her profile, and passion, burning passion, under the soft
melancholy of her expression, was known to but a few, at the time that
her connection with the young artist began."

Her "Souvenirs" justify the accusation of unusual vanity as the
mainspring in her motives, but if it were only her passion for conquest
that made her seek Liszt, she was punished bitterly. In 1834 she
captured him, and the preliminary formalities of flirtation were