decoy her back to Russia. For the next fifteen years she resisted
Liszt's ardent wooing to marriage. Even when, on the 10th of March,
1864, her former husband died and gave her that divorce which even Rome
considers sufficient, she would not wed. Her stay of one year in the
Holy City had brought her into the whirlpool of Church society and
Church politics. She turned her voracious intellect toward theology;
and the interests of the Church, as La Mara says, grew in her eyes far
more important than the petty ambitions of art.

The woman with a mission had changed her mission. Knowing how powerful
was her influence over Liszt, she thought to begin her new work at
home, and it was on Liszt that she practised her first churchly
seductions.

In his youth it had taken all the power of his father and mother to
keep him out of the Church; small wonder, then, that when, in the
evening fatigue of his life, the woman of his heart beckoned him to the
candle-lighted peace of vespers, he should yield.

Religion had always been as much an art to him, as art had been a
religion. By papal dispensation Liszt was admitted into Holy Orders on
the 25th of April, 1865, and the Cardinal Hohenlohe, who had not been
granted the privilege of marrying Liszt, was given the privilege of
shaving his head and turning him into a tonsured abbé.

There was a great sensation in 1868, when Liszt, who had thirty years
before run away from Paris with a comtesse, returned as a saint, and in
full regalia conducted a mass of his own, at Saint Eustache. The critic
and dictionary-maker, Fétis, declared that the whole affair was simply
an advertising scheme of Liszt's. But Liszt was taking himself