put it as we may, it is the devotedness which occupies us wholly in thinking of that first of wives.
So it is in the case of wives who have risked their lives to save their husbands, like Madame Lavalette and many others. The one incident absorbs us, and we inquire no further than the capacity to do the deed. M. Lavalette lay under sentence of death for high treason at Paris, in 1815. His wife was in such miserable health, through her anxieties and terrors, and her efforts on his behalf, that she could hardly stand. She made this weakness available for M. Lavalette’s escape. She went to the prison in a sedan chair, and was carried without stopping to a passage within the turnkey’s department; and when she went home, she entered the chair at the same place. On the December day in 1815 which was to have been the last of her husband’s life, she went to the prison at four in the afternoon, her daughter, eleven years old, walking beside the chair. The fashion of the time, in regard to head-dress, was favourable to disguise. We do not forget the remark made when the Duchesse d’Angoulême entered the Tuileries, on the return of the Bourbons, and appeared there as the heroine of the most mournful story in all royal experience: the remark of the by-standers was,—“She wears the small bonnet!”—the small bonnet being the English mode, and the French a particularly large one. In such a large bonnet, and moreover with an ample veil, Madame Lavalette stepped out of the chair; and the turnkey supported her on one side, and her child on the other, upstairs and to the door of her husband’s apartment. She dined with her husband; and in an hour and a half from her arrival, the turnkey was summoned to assist her to her chair. The veil was down; and no doubt the man was silent from compassion. It was an hour before any one entered the prisoner’s room; and then the prisoner, wrapped in the well-known cloak, appeared to be reading by the light of a candle on the table behind him. The gaoler spoke twice, and, receiving no answer, advanced into the room, and went to the front of the prisoner. Further concealment was impossible. Madame Lavalette looked up with a smile, saying, “He is gone,” and immediately fell into convulsions. She had been full of dread of the treatment she should receive when discovered; and the solitary hour of watching and terror she had passed had been too much for an exhausted invalid. She rejoined her husband, however, beyond the frontiers of France, whence he had escaped by the agency of Sir Robert Wilson and Mr. Bruce, whose trials for the act (only half-voluntary on their part, and an act of simple benevolence), all elderly Englishmen remember.
There is no end to the true stories of the devotedness of wives of political prisoners, whether they could effect deliverance, like Madame Lavalette and Madame Kinkel, or could only mitigate, more or less, the sufferings of captivity. The sympathies of a whole generation were with the Countess Confalonieri, in her incessant struggles for her husband’s release from the atrocious inflictions of the late Emperor of Austria; and when her reason gave way, and then her life, so that she had no enjoyment of his freedom at last, her fate was felt almost as a personal sorrow by more than one nation.
Madame Kinkel’s health also gave way under the stress of terror and grief, inflicted by the late King of Prussia himself and by his too faithful servants, in their passion of alarm and wrath at the events of 1848; but she lived a few happy years with her husband in his exile before the heart-disease which she had incurred in the struggle caused her death by a fall from a window, to which she had rushed for air in a spasm. Again and again she had been told that he had only one day to live, or that he had been shot that morning; and her persistence in moving heaven and earth on his behalf was met with intolerable insolence, indifference, or cruelty. The indignity to which M. Kinkel was subjected, of being made to spend his days in spinning wool, was at length converted into a retribution on his oppressors. The yarn he had spun during the day hung from his window at night, to fetch up the implements by which he effected his escape. I believe the method of escape has never been made known. All the gaolers knew was that the bird had flown, and then that he had joined his patient and constant mate; and again, that they had made a nest for themselves in a region where the liming and snaring of the best birds of the wood is an unknown practice.
When we speak or hear of wives attending on their imprisoned husbands, all minds revert to the two wives whose interests were engaged on opposite sides during the great rebellion,—Mrs. Hutchinson and Lady Fanshawe. Lucy Hutchinson’s life is so well known by her Memoirs of her husband, that her mere name and her husband’s mention of her with his dying breath are enough. “Let her,” said he, “as she is above other women, show herself, on this occasion, a good Christian, and above the pitch of ordinary women.” She was his friend and partner in all transactions in which she could share; his deputy when two offices had to be fulfilled at once; and her superiority in judgment, knowledge, and ability was a subject of gentle and dignified exultation to him,—in striking contrast to the sense and experience of a great man at the very moment.
Milton has left us his testimony of the need that such men have of intellectual capacity and cultivation in a wife. Without it, he says, “there must come that unspeakable weariness and despair of all sociable delight which turn the blessed ordinance of God into ‘a sore evil under the sun,’ or at least to a familiar mischief, a drooping and disconsolate household,—captivity without refuge or redemption.”
Lady Fanshawe candidly tells us how she went to work to be her husband’s, Sir Richard Fanshawe’s, political comrade; or rather how she—a mere girl—was wrought upon by designing persons, to try to get at his secrets, when the fate of the Stuarts was trembling in the balance, and an indiscreet word from man or woman might possibly determine the fate of an empire. She tells us ingenuously and merrily how she pouted and sulked, and how her husband gaily and lovingly bore with her, and gave her time to