person--Kismet!

Even if the princess had not been beautiful, La Mara thinks she would
have overwhelmed Liszt with "her wonderful eloquence and her
unbelievable intellectuality." It was a case of congeniality at
first sight. There were many meetings. The concert affected the
princess deeply (when she died she bequeathed that programme to her
daughter). The day after the concert, she heard a Pater Noster of his
sung in the church. Liszt talked of his plans for compositions. He said
he wished to express in music his impressions of Dante's "Divina
Commedia," with a diorama of scenic effects. To fit out the diorama, it
needed about $15,000.

The princess, carried away with the idea, offered him the money from
her own purse. The diorama was never built, but it required a great
many conferences, and it seemed appropriate that Liszt should visit her
at her estate, Woronince. He arrived on the tenth birthday of her
little daughter, Marie. This was in February, the same month of their
first meeting. But he could not stay many days, as his concert tour
took him to Constantinople and elsewhere. But in the summer and again
in the autumn they met, and they celebrated together his birthday and
her saint's day.

She there and then resolved to give up her life to him, and to marry
him as soon as might be. She believed in the autocracy of genius, and
felt that she recognised her mission in the world--to follow and aid
this maker of music. Separation from her husband was tame, but this was
a horrifying breach of conventionality, such another as the Comtesse
d'Agoult had smitten Paris with thirteen years before. But none the
less, in April, 1848, she took her daughter and left Russia, after she