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Sophie Taeuber Arp and the Avant Garde A Biography
Roswitha Mair
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Historic Avant-Garde Work on Paper 1st Edition Sascha
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Title: Sophie Taeuber-Arp and the avant-garde : a biography / Roswitha Mair; translated by Damion Searls.
Other titles: Handwerk und Avantgarde. English
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: lccn 2017038266 | isbn 9780226311210 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226311357 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Taeuber-Arp, Sophie, 1889-1943. | Women artists— Switzerland— Biography.
Classification: lcc n7153.t33 m313 2018 | ddc 700.92 [b]— dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038266
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
CONTENTS
Preface vii
One: 1889– 1908 · 1
Davos · Trogen · The Taeuber Pension · Schooling and Education
Two: 1908– 1914 · 17
St. Gallen · Munich
Three: 1914– 1919 · 31
Zurich · Hans Arp · Coffeehouse Revolution · Cabaret Voltaire and Dada · Beginning of a Partnership · Monte Verità · Hans Arp’s Capers · Galerie Dada · Dada Heads and Marionettes
Four: 1919– 1929 · 71
After the War · Away from Zurich · Arp-Taeuber, Taeuber-Arp · Summer with Schwitters · The Isms of Art · The Aubette
Five: 1929– 1933 · 121
Meudon · Surrealists and Others
Six: 1933– 1940 · 137
The Third Reich · Collectors and Collaborations · Schwitters, Mondrian, Laban, and Others · Dualities · The War Approaches
Seven: 1940– 1943 · 167
Grasse · Zurich Once More · Final Constructions
Epilogue · 189
Acknowledgments · 195
Notes · 197
PREFACE
“Sophie Is a Star in the Sky”1 — this is how Hans Arp described his lifelong companion, the artist Sophie Taeuber, after her untimely death in 1943. His grief-stricken image evokes someone both brilliant and remote, extinguished at the height of her powers, rendered forever sublime. Naturally, this is both a fair assessment and one driven by Hans Arp’s own needs.
Others who knew her held different opinions, though in general they characterized Sophie Taeuber as single-minded yet modest, a reticent figure operating quietly in the background of the clamorous, attention-seeking Dada movement that she and her husband helped found in Zurich during World War I. For decades art historians have tended to present her as a talented craftsperson, good with her hands, and as an artistic collaborator with her more famous husband. In recent years, though, interest has grown in Sophie Taeuber in her own right.
Like many of today’s leading artists, Taeuber covered considerable ground in her practice, producing new forms and challenging conventional boundaries across a wide range of disciplines, from painting, textiles, and sculpture, to design and architecture, to dance and performance. There has been a flowering of scholarly projects and important exhibitions, with more on the horizon. With these new perspectives on her work, our understanding of her as a person is growing as well. But there is much we may never know. She herself was a doer rather than a communicator. She wrote few letters, for like her mother she
viii ]
was too busy making things. Fortunately, there are writings by others— especially her older sister, Erika Taeuber, who may have known her as well as anyone— that shed light on Sophie as a child and young woman. Her later life can be seen against the rise of modernism, in which she played an important part, and the checkered events of the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on the available facts and impressions, this book attempts to sketch a biography of Sophie Taeuber as a singular figure, not a secondary player in the European avant-garde.
1: 1889– 1908
Davos
When Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber was born in Davos Platz, Switzerland, at four o’clock in the cold winter morning of January 19, 1889, joy at her arrival was overshadowed by her father’s condition. Carl Emil Taeuber (1855– 1891) had suffered from tuberculosis since his years in the military. Born and raised in Prussia, he had moved with his young wife to Davos for the clear, crisp air and sunlight that, in 1902, would be officially recognized as a medical treatment. For the first few years the couple thrived: he bought a pharmacy and carried out meteorological observations in his spare time. But before long, in 1887, his health worsened, and he had to sell the pharmacy. By the time Sophie was born, he was kept quarantined from his children in a separate room. Sophie probably barely realized he was there. She had three older siblings for company: Erika Wilhemina Katherina, four and a half years old when Sophie was born; Paul Emil, five and a half; and Hans Werner, one year old. Another brother, Ernst Friedrich, had died of meningitis in 1887 at the age of six months.1
And there was her mother, Sophie Taeuber-Krüsi (1854– 1908), the center of the family. She was a pharmacist’s daughter from the village of Heiden in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden and was related to the patrician Swiss Zellweger family. She managed the large building where the family lived along with an attached section and a constantly changing array of renters: architects, florists, dressmakers, paper merchants. For two years she also had a linen- goods business and placed English-language ads in the weekly Davos Pages on behalf
of an Appenzeller local who held knitting classes in the shop. But she too struggled and eventually had to sell her business, just as her husband had been forced to sell the pharmacy.
Two of Carl Taeuber’s brothers lived nearby. Alfons Paul Taeuber, a dentist, moved into the Taeubers’ building in 1896, but he later returned to Germany. The older brother, Louis Heinrich Taeuber, was
Figure 1. Sophie Taeuber’s parents, ca. 1882.
Figure 2. Sophie, Hans, and Erika Taeuber, 1890.
a banker, who offered services brokering stocks, bonds, and the like, and occasionally moonlighted as a cognac merchant. He was standoffish, but his assistance was crucial in giving the children a sense of security, and he made his sister-in-law’s life easier in many ways.
Sophie was just two years old when her father died on Easter Sunday, March 29, 1891. Her older siblings sometimes talked about him, but Sophie had not one memory of him. He moved through their stories like a shadow.
Sophie’s mother was thirty-six when she became a widow and her family’s sole support She accepted her fate and never complained. The household’s many visitors were struck by the good cheer and merriment that reigned in the house. One aunt of the Taeuber children, Ida Baumgartner, remembers happy days spent with the family: playing outdoors in the summer and going ice skating in the winter on the giant rink in Davos, the famous winter-sports destination in the Rhaetian Alps in the canton of Graubünden.2
Sophie Taeuber had her own place in this close-knit circle and evidently knew how to assert herself, even as a small child. One day her brother Hans started making fun of her for being a “heathen,” because she hadn’t been baptized, as he had. He teased her mercilessly until finally she insisted on being baptized too; and she wouldn’t relent. So, at the age of four and a half, the sacrament was performed by one Pastor Hauri in the Alexanderhaus Church in Davos. Her uncle Louis Taeuber and aunt Ida Baumgartner stood as her godparents.3
Trogen
Shortly thereafter came a turning point in Sophie’s life. In 1895 or 1896 the family moved to Trogen, in Appenzeller Mittelland near the city of St. Gallen.4 The region was known for its satin-stitch weaving and fine embroidery, both handcrafted and machine-made. The initial plan was to spend only six months there, over the summer season, to be close to Paul Taeuber, Sophie’s eleven-year- old brother, who was enrolled in the Wiget Institute in Trogen. But then Sophie Taeuber-Krüsi decided to stay for good, probably to be close to the family of her birth.
It was a welcoming landscape. Davos had been ringed with high mountains; Trogen was a land of gentle hills. Mountains give a feeling of containment, limits, a certain sense of shelter; but they also hinder a view of the surroundings. From the hilltops at Trogen the Taeuber family had a clear view in all directions. When the fall and winter fog covered the Rhine Valley far beneath them, they lived aloft in the bright sun. Houses were scattered across the green hillsides; there were few cultivated fields. Streams and gullies cut deep into the earth, separating the farms from each other and giving the families who lived there a sense of privacy.
In the town center, by contrast, the houses stood close together. Every autumn a market was held in the square bounded by a few shops and businesses, where the so- called Landsgemeinde — municipal meetings— were also held. A Protestant church soared up in the middle, with high, narrow windows glazed with clear panes; these allowed unfiltered light to fill the modestly appointed sanctuary, making it shine clear and bright. Next to the church was the Krone inn, small and insignificant-looking next to the palatial stone structures that the Zellweger dynasty had built during the height of their prosperity, in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Five Corner Palace, the Honnerlag Double Palace, and other buildings looked plain from the outside but were spacious and richly decorated within. They spoke of an age, two centuries long, when the many branches of the Zellweger family shaped the state’s politics and trade. Since then some of these magnificent buildings had been sold; one had been repurposed as a vicarage housing the cantonal library, founded in 1895– 96.
Little Sophie’s small, manageable world slowly broadened. Nine cousins became her new playmates in Trogen, for Aunt Hermine lived nearby in Uster with her husband, an electrical engineer named Alfred Zellweger. Aunt Mathilde lived right in Trogen and was married to a doctor, Hans Zellweger (Alfred’s cousin), who made an old weaver’s house available to his widowed sister-in-law, Sophie Taeuber-Krüsi. The Solitude, as it was known, was located on the edge of town along the road down to the Rhine Valley. It was not far from Hans and Mathilde’s house, the Sonnenhof. Since 1881 Hans had run the Zellweger
Children’s Sanatorium (which had earlier been a private psychiatric hospital). Private schooling was offered as well.
Sophie Taeuber started school in Trogen in 1897. An image survives of her on a poster and postcard put out by the sanatorium, advertising a “summer camp, for children of the upper class only.” The happy eight-year- old wears an inviting smile, a puff-sleeved white dress, and, atop her long hair, the indispensable hat.
Since 1597, when Appenzell had been divided into the predominantly Protestant half- canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden and the Catholic one of Appenzell Innerrhoden, Trogen had been the capital of the former. Until as recently as 1997, male residents met at the Municipal Meeting every other year to elect their officials and ratify their laws. In accordance with the local saying “Ehrbar ist, wer wehrbar ist”— he who bears arms earns respect— every man with a vote also carried a sidearm, usually a saber or bayonet.5
As a woman, Sophie Taeuber-Krüsi was not eligible to vote in
Figure 3. Left: Poster advertising the Trogen Children’s Sanatorium, with a picture of Sophie Taeuber, ca. 1900. Right: Photograph used for the poster, 1897.
Switzerland. Still, she could observe the activities at the municipal meetings. She was interested in politics, especially women’s issues. Her husband’s long illness and her early widowhood had forced her to face the challenges of life alone. She whitewashed and refurnished the Solitude to make a home for her children. Then she decided to design a house of her own.
On July 2, 1900, her brother-in-law gave her a plot of land near the Solitude, on a hillside along the same road into Trogen. She designed the house herself, down to the smallest detail— the plans still survive— before commissioning the village architect to build it.
The children never saw their mother idle: she took care of the house and the garden, only occasionally with a maid’s help.6 Whenever she needed something, she tried to make it herself, or at least to add a personal decorative touch. In a way she was emulating one of her ancestors, the painter Johann Balthasar Bullinger, the most famous member of a creative clan that also included goldsmiths and medal designers.7
Figure 4. The Taeuber family house in Trogen, ca. 1902.
Sophie Taeuber-Krüsi had cultivated her talents during her long betrothal in Freiburg, the German city on the edge of the Black Forest. She painted canvases and decorated teacups and plates, thoughtfully choosing the designs: for her sister Ida Baumgartner, for example, she painted a picture of the little church where her brother-in-law had preached. Sometimes she inscribed sayings and proverbs on the things she made. A favorite was “Allen Menschen recht getan / ist eine Kunst, die neimand kann” (“Being fair to everyone / Is an art attained by none”; or, in other words, you can’t please everybody).8 She applied such maxims to herself as well.
Söpheli, as little Sophie was called, took considerable pleasure in her mother’s projects. She watched her mother at the easel, painting flowers with meticulous precision in delicate, light, curved brushstrokes. Perhaps she found similar pictures in her mother’s favorite magazine, Die Kunst (Art), and even tried her hand at copying some. She was able to paint realistic crocuses on a turtle shell for her godmother, Aunt Ida.
But wool, thread, and yarn meant more to Sophie than paint. Under her mother’s guidance, she eagerly began to knit, embroider, crochet, and make lace. Her hands were busy making tangible things: quilts, pillows, tablecloths. Before long she was as busy as her mother, and soon she was able help her older sister, Erika, back home in 1901 from a French course in Neuchâtel.
Being active with her hands fit Sophie’s nature, whereas Erika, while she did emulate her mother in many ways, lacked the inclination. At times, in the early years, the two sisters’ opposing views of life strained their otherwise warm relationship. Erika liked to sit in on the pastor’s wife’s charity circle because, while the women’s hands were working on gifts for the poor, someone read to them from books. Erika’s mind was on what she was hearing, not on what she was doing. It was Sophie who fixed and improved what her sister had carelessly done in her hours at the pastor’s, and even finished some pieces for her. Erika was all too happy to occupy a different world— she enjoyed reading, playing music, sledding, dancing at parties at the Krone, and flirting.
Around the turn of the century Erika began to write down her thoughts and experiences, as was customary for “superior daughters”
then. Many of her entries were self- critical: she described the perennial “painful discrepancy between wanting to do something and being able to do it.” Or even: “I’m not really living, I’m only dreaming.”9 Sophie tended to make only mocking comments about her sister’s writing, as did their brother Hans. But it is thanks to her notebooks that we know about many events in Sophie’s life that would otherwise have been forgotten.
In general, Sophie and Hans were close in temperament, not only in age, and got along wonderfully. Hans Taeuber’s passion was collecting butterflies.10 He often set out from Trogen on mountain expeditions to hunt them, and later explored the Schatzalp mountain above Davos. He would neatly organize his specimens in glass cases— blues, scarce coppers, skipper butterflies, burnet moths, tuft moths— with the large butterflies in the middle, rhythmically offset against the smaller ones. Sometimes he followed the form of the curved wings and arranged the butterflies of similar size as though in a compositional study. He showed his imagination while always working meticulously— uncompromising and straightforward, the same way his younger sister painted her pictures and worked her fabrics. It was a bond between them, over and above their fondness for each other as brother and sister, and one that required few words.
Erika, for her part, may have felt excluded. As the oldest, she no doubt would have liked to be the one to lead her younger siblings. But Söpheli didn’t need her. She could generally do what she wanted to on her own, since her dreams never got so far ahead that her hands couldn’t keep up. She focused her attention on just a couple of things: painting and handicrafts. Erika, in contrast, had many different interests, including music. She played the piano with enthusiasm, if not especially well. Later she would put together a small house orchestra with her own children. Sophie could never muster much interest in music. She already knew what she wanted— and what she didn’t. She was twelve years old when she told her sister firmly, brooking no argument, that now she was a teenager and she no longer had to do anything for anyone.11
Their tolerant mother accepted the children for who they were.
Only once did she admonish Erika to learn to think of others, “and to that end, a friendly face and a cheerful word are generally more important than anything else.”12
The new Taeuber house was finished in the spring of 1901— a wooden building in the chalet style, with narrow roofs, bay windows, and a veranda. Here Sophie enjoyed practicing her handicrafts and Erika occasionally slogged her way through a sewing project. Both daughters were part of a young ladies’ tea and sewing circle. Though the chalet was generally dark, when the sun shone in through the little windows the rooms were bathed in a warm, glowing light. There was more space in the new house than in the Solitude, enough to bring the old family furniture out of storage, including the comfortable chairs that were soon distributed throughout the house. They were there where you needed them— like Sophie Taeuber-Krüsi for all who sought her help, as reported by Elisabeth Pletscher, a granddaughter of Salomon Zellweger and the daughter of one of Erika’s friends. At home, though, the family kept to itself.13
Between 1900 and 1906 Taeuber-Krüsi recorded her family and their relatively cultivated lives in photographs, filling two albums in the process.14 She developed the pictures herself and lovingly framed them in albums, adding ornaments and floral motifs, presenting them as carefully as she had staged the actual photos. The ones of her daughter Sophie always showed her looking quite chic, posed with her bicycle or with book or mandolin in hand.15 Sometimes Sophie’s mother took pictures on family excursions to the town of Rorschach or Lindau by Lake Constance: the albums contain photos of Sophie with her cousin from the Sonnenhof, Martha Zellweger, wearing hats and carrying parasols on board a steamship in July 1902. A little later, on August 23, she produced a portrait of her younger daughter that conveyed her quick smile but also suggested a girl with a lively, reflective mind.
In 1902 Sophie finished elementary school and started at the Realschule (the high school in the German system, less academically elite than the six-year pre-university Gymnasium). Here again she was living in a manageable world, clearly defined and delimited. She found
herself among her own kind, so to speak, not the children of weavers and embroiderers, who, then as now, lived in Trogen along with more prosperous families like the Taeubers and Zellwegers but did not attend the Realschule.
Someone was sewing, weaving, or embroidering in practically every house. In 1900, eight hundred of the 2,600 inhabitants were embroiderers, weavers, needleworkers, tailors, designers, pattern enlargers, or mechanics. Despite the long-standing prohibition against child labor, almost three- quarters of the children under fourteen were put to work rather than sent to the schools, which had been free and open to all since 1870. They plied needles and cut lace, sitting in damp basements an average of six hours a day and up to ninety hours per week.16
The Zellweger and Taeuber children, meanwhile, sat on the windowsills outside these weaving cellars and embroidery workshops and watched the other children work. They were the Mehrbesseren , the “more-and-betters,” who didn’t have to struggle to get by. They played different games.
Later, in the 1920s, the Surrealists would claim to have invented some of those games themselves. In one, every player wrote a line of poetry without looking at the others on the same sheet of paper; the meaning, or meaninglessness, came from the juxtaposition of the different lines when read together. But Sophie had played that game as a child. The children likewise enjoyed the picture riddles, where they would draw an image that stood for something else: Vögelinsegg, a train station near Trogen, for instance, might be a bird in a bag (the nearhomonym Vogel in Sack). The other players had to solve the riddle— a game of a moment, forgotten as soon as the next one began.17
Growing up in Trogen, the Taeuber children had a carefree life. They went hiking in the mountains, around the Säntis, from which you could see Lake Constance and far down into the Rhine valley. They roamed around the little woods known as the Wäldli and swam in the lakes below Trogen. In the winter they played charades, put on plays, and, when they were older, went to balls and other gatherings at the Krone. They liked to dress up, as attested by photographs and Erika Taeuber’s reminiscences.
The Taeuber Pension
As the years went by, Sophie Taeuber’s horizons widened. The cantonal school, founded by Johann Caspar Zellweger in 1821 as an “Institute for the Instruction and Upbringing of Sons of the Educated Classes,” was still an internationally respected Gymnasium with an elite faculty. Many of the students came from abroad, and the need to house them provided a good source of income for the Taeubers and many others in Trogen. There were typically two or three cantonalschool students living with the family in the new house.
The Zellwegers, whose linen business had branched out to Lyon, Genoa, Marseilles, and Barcelona, had once known some of the leading intelligentsia of the late eighteenth century, such as the artist Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), a major influence on William Blake, and the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Now it was students living with the family who helped create lines of communication with the outside world; some of these friendships would last a lifetime.
One such student was Gaston Bonnal,18 a classmate of Hans Taeuber. A French national, he was from Smyrna, Turkey; he was sent to school in Trogen by a Persian uncle, who had also studied there. The Taeubers nicknamed him “Lulu” and took him in as a member of the family. It was his first real home, and it provided him with a mother to replace the one who had died abroad.
One evening, in December 1901, they were sitting together in conversation. Perhaps Erika described the scene in such detail in her diary because her mother was talking about Ernstli, the little brother who had died young, and about Father, who never complained of his lot and who arranged everything before his death to help make his wife’s life a little easier. He was rarely mentioned in the house; Erika was probably the only one of the children who genuinely missed him, though she almost never dared ask about him because Mother would say nothing. Now, in the presence of someone else so sad at heart, in mourning for a member of his own family, Mother told stories about these things so rarely spoken of.
They had also learned just six months before that the eldest son,
Paul, who had gone off to the Hamburg Naval Academy to train as an officer, had died of yellow fever in Pará, Brazil.19 Louis Taeuber, Sophie Taeuber-Krüsi’s brother-in-law, had come from Davos bearing the sad news and helped her through this difficult time. Later Paul’s diary was sent home, and at the very end it said that he wanted to return to Switzerland and pursue another career. Now it was too late, and that made his mother’s pain practically unbearable. But she stayed strong, for the children. The more pain she felt, it seemed, the more love she gave to the people around her. Her motto, taken from Genesis, accompanied her throughout her life: “I will bless you . . . and you will be a blessing.”20
She tried to be there for anyone who turned to her, even the student lodgers having trouble in school or other personal problems. Relatives came to stay who were barely tolerated by the rest of the clan— an Aunt Marie, for example, was welcome in Trogen, allowed to play the piano long and often, and delighted to be her niece’s respected guest.
Taeuber-Krüsi likewise expected respect from others. Once she sat down in church in the pew reserved for village dignitaries and was told she would have to move; she never returned to that church except for her children’s confirmations. Sophie’s came in 1905. What had started with a baptism had to be brought to its proper conclusion— like every piece of embroidery, like everything in life. But it was merely a formal act. Religion played no great role in the Taeuber family, although Taeuber-Krüsi was related to a family prominent in religious history, that of Heinrich Bullinger, a follower of the Swiss Protestant reformer Huldrych Zwingli.21In 1904 a childhood friend of Carl Taeuber remembered the Taeuber children and invited Erika to come visit the Koerner family estate in West Prussia, where Carl had grown up. Erika visited Hofleben (now Mlewiec), near Copernicus’s birthplace of Thorn (now Torun), the next year, and both sisters went in 1909.22 Their father’s homeland, far from the green hills of Appenzell, was a distant country of the mighty Vistula River, extensive pine forests, brown tilled earth, and enormous fields of sugar beets.
There is no way to know whether the Taeuber sisters’ ancestors from northeastern Germany were Polish or German, for it was only with the second division of Poland, under Friedrich Wilhelm II, that
Posen, Thorn, and Danzig were added to Prussia. Nonetheless, the residents of German descent thought themselves better than their Polish neighbors. They settled around the villages, squeezing their way in between the farmsteads of the Poles, whom they contemptuously called “Polacks.” The tension between the two groups could be felt everywhere, even on the Koerner family’s estate where they were staying; Erika, during her 1905 visit, found it disconcerting. She had grown up in another world, in Switzerland. Still, like her mother and siblings, she had Prussian citizenship through her father.
Carl Emil’s father, Louis Taeuber (1823– 1892), who came from Silesia, had opened a pharmacy in Mogilno and started a family with a landholder’s daughter, Wilhelmine Graul. 23 Their son, Sophie’s father, had come to Heiden in Appenzell in 1875, via Berlin. He trained at the pharmacy owned by Johann Jakob Krüsi (1824– 1882) and his wife, Ida Sophie Bullinger (1831– 1891), and there he met their daughter, Sophie Krüsi. At age twenty- one, in April 1876, he asked for her hand in marriage. Then he returned to Germany, took his state exams, and fulfilled his year of military service in Berlin. By October 1881 Carl Emil Taeuber had returned to Switzerland, where he married in the spring of 1882. Carl only rarely visited his parents in Berlin; the last time was presumably in the summer of 1889, by which point he was already very ill.
On August 29, 1905, Erika’s mother applied to reclaim her earlier municipal citizenship in Gais, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, thereby making her and her children Swiss citizens.24 The application for repatriation was granted in 1906. Hans and Sophie, as minors, became Swiss citizens along with their mother, while Erika remained a Prussian citizen until her marriage. As a result— and this was no doubt the main reason for the change of nationality— Hans, as a Swiss citizen, was no longer eligible to be called up for military service in the land of the German Kaiser.
Schooling and Education
The Prussian/Swiss Taeuber family spoke a Swiss German with High German expressions mixed in, which sounded strange to Swiss ears.
It was a kind of family dialect, which Erika, Hans, and Sophie would use with one another throughout their lives. Thanks to the occasional efforts of a young Englishwoman, the children learned English.25 But they spoke among themselves mostly in French, which every educated Swiss- German was expected to master. Sophie Taeuber-Krüsi had studied French in Neuchâtel in 1870– 71, where Erika also went from 1899 to 1901 and Sophie in the 1905– 6 winter semester after graduating from school in Trogen. Both daughters stayed in the same pension as their mother had, Madame Matil’s.
When Sophie returned from Neuchâtel, her brother, Hans, moved to Davos. Having passed his final exams at the University of Basel, he began an apprenticeship at the Richter Bookstore, which his uncle Louis Taeuber had been running since 1904 as a bookstore and gallery. Hans lived with his uncle in the addition to Taeuber House and only rarely visited Trogen.26 His younger sister missed him but nonetheless kept busy.
Erika, meanwhile, continued to struggle to find herself. On April 30, 1899, her mother wrote in the family poetry album that Erika should “take heed” not to have lived in vain— “so seek out early a worthy goal for your striving.”27 While the older daughter admired independent women who went to university, she had a tendency to put off decisions of her own, preferring to keep every option open. Sophie, on the other hand, had reached a firm decision by the time she was twelve: she did not want to sit at home like other young women, “knitting and crocheting” and waiting for a husband.28 She was determined to study drawing and design, and in 1907 she became a guest student at the Drawing School of the Industrial and Weaving Museum, in St. Gallen. The museum was only a few miles from Trogen and could be easily reached by the new electric streetcar (opened in 1903), the Trogenerbahn.
Despite organizing her life to be as orderly and straightforward as possible, some things in Sophie’s life were beyond her control. In November 1906 her mother fell ill with cancer. Erika and Sophie worried about her constantly; only the patient herself never despaired, remaining busy and active for as long as she could. As the older daughter, Erika bore the greatest burden; she took over her mother’s care.
At the beginning of a diary that her sister had given her, she inscribed these words by J. G. Herder: “Write, write, write yourself free! This is our prerogative!”29
Maybe the regular writing and reflection on her situation gave her strength in this difficult time. Her mother died on May 8, 1908: inconspicuously, quietly and calmly, as she had lived. When Sophie arrived from St. Gallen and Hans from Davos, she was already gone. According to Erika, while their mother lay pale and lifeless, a remarkable, solemn silence and an infinite love and sense of security seemed to emanate from her, as though even in death she were still trying to give her children strength for the future.
The burial took place on a sunny spring day three days later. A final farewell, full of sadness and lingering fear for the future. Not a day went by, Erika Taeuber would later write in her diary, that she did not think of her mother— and think that her mother had raised her children so that they could find their way without her, almost as though she had suspected she would die young. Now it was time to make their way in life and fulfill their mother’s best hopes for them.30
2: 1908– 1914
St. Gallen
The Taeuber siblings rented out the house in Trogen. Hans went back to Göttingen to work as an assistant in a university bookstore, and the sisters moved to the larger town of St. Gallen, where Sophie was already enrolled in the Stauffacher School and the Drawing School of the Industrial and Weaving Museum. Almost nothing in their day-today lives changed. Erika studied foreign languages. Sophie embroidered, crocheted, and wove, as before, and attended classes.1
It was an age when the socially oriented Arts and Crafts movement was much discussed, especially in a milieu like that of St. Gallen, which was dominated by the textile industry. Around 1900 the magazine The Studio had made the turn- of-the- century English reform movement famous on the Continent. Its founder, the poet, painter, and socialist William Morris, sought a return to craftsmanlike production and simple forms after the industrialization of artisan crafts. His goal was to make prototypes for machine production that would yield artistic, high- quality, beautifully formed products for rich and poor alike. The products remained out of reach of the poor, however. Morris’s idea of a universal reform movement ultimately failed, but it had fallen on fertile soil in all sorts of places— even St. Gallen, although local industry continued, in its own financial interest, to promote the ornate, convoluted designs admired by the wider population.
One of Sophie’s chief instructors was Johannes Stauffacher, a famous flower painter who advocated not just “drawing after nature” but studying the full historical sweep of ornamentation, from primi-
tive beginnings to the modern day as a solid foundation for composition. Along with decorative painting, figure drawing, nature drawing, design, stylistics, and art history, he taught the cultural history of various peoples.
The school library offered students the chance to learn about the latest trends in art: Jugendstil, with its emphasis on curved forms; the Nabis in France, who had been aesthetically inspired by Paul Gauguin; and japonisme. All of these tended to flatten space in order to emphasize the decorative aspect of the image and achieve a degree of abstraction. The illusion of perspective— the suggestion of threedimensional space on a two- dimensional surface— was no longer the goal. Artists were also rediscovering folk art: in “folk pictures,” motifs and images were organized on the two- dimensional surface and given equal value, next to, above, or below one another. No single motif dominated; none shoved its way into the foreground.
What Sophie Taeuber had already seen in Trogen may have prepared her for these new developments. She surely knew the primitive relief sculptures that decorated Trogen’s buildings, and she would have encountered watercolors by the local weaver Babeli Giezendanner, a woman who painted the cycle of everyday events in the region, including the annual procession up the Alps in early summer to graze the vast herds of livestock.
Every year in Appenzell Ausserrhoden, with life organized around weaving and textiles, things happened in the same order, and Sophie, too, liked to give everything an order and a sequence. A photo from around 1903 shows the fourteen-year- old Sophie sitting at a desk in her room. Above the desk she has put up a piece of fabric with light and dark stripes, a wall hanging on which she has attached everything that seemed important to her. Every element is independent, yet seems in dialogue with everything else: a large engraving is mounted across from a smaller diagonal, with smaller pictures and a bunch of cards in between, arrayed in a semicircle like an open fan formally engaged with the rectangular pictures. Nothing is left to chance— everything is intentional.
Sophie no doubt chose how and where she would study with the same care she applied to everything else. She was impressed by the
ideology of the handmade and the return to simple forms, which helped her to set reachable goals for herself and to keep working until she had realized them. This built her confidence, though her singleminded determination in school often made her unpopular with other students. Having learned to trust herself, she relied on her own abilities: her mother had taught Sophie to make things with her hands and to cultivate an ethic of self-sufficiency. Sophie felt that her mother lived in everything she did, every piece she finished— which meant that she lived on in her daughter’s life.
Meanwhile, Erika was still searching. Perhaps that was why her sister kept pushing her to publish her short stories, novellas, and
Figure 5. Sophie Taeuber in her room in Trogen, 1903/4.
[
] chaPter two “meditation pictures.” Finally Erika worked up the courage to send a query to a newspaper. It worked: the Swiss Family Paper published one of her stories.2 For a time Erika had accompanied her uncle Hans on his rounds visiting patients. Then she had worked in a children’s home. But she could never decisively settle on a direction for herself. She dreamed of being more than a support for others, as her mother had been. She imagined many goals for herself, each different and increasingly distant— anything to keep reality at bay.
And she still mourned her father. She had been seven when he died, and she would later describe her time in Davos, after she had lost him, as a nightmare. Hans Zellweger, her Trogen uncle, was a kind of substitute father figure with whom she could talk about things— literature and people. But he died shortly after Erika’s mother.
Looking for security, she eventually found it with Eugen Schlegel, the younger brother of the Trogen pastor Eduard Schlegel.3 Their wedding took place on April 19, 1910, with a bridal procession across the Landsgemeinde Square in Trogen. Elisabeth Pletscher, one and a half years old, was dressed as a little cupid in the couple’s honor— just as Erika Taeuber, now Schlegel, wanted it.
For Sophie, life continued in its straight line. After finishing her studies in St. Gallen, she went to visit Erika and Eugen for a few days in Bern, where they now lived. On October 1, 1910, she moved to Munich and enrolled in the Teaching and Research Studio for Applied and Fine Arts, also known as the Debschitz School, on the Hohenzollernstrasse in the Schwabing district, the city’s bohemian quarter. This was the logical next step for Sophie. The school’s curriculum and facilities were far more advanced than those at St. Gallen, and it had a reputation for innovation.
Munich
The Teaching and Research Studio had been founded by the Swiss sculptor Hermann Obrist and the German painter and designer Wilhelm von Debschitz in January 1902— even before the art nouveau pioneer Henry van de Velde reorganized the School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, a precursor of the world-famous Bauhaus. When Obrist
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Proper pride
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Title: Proper pride A novel. Volume 1 (of 3)
Author: B. M. Croker
Release date: December 16, 2023 [eBook #72433]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Tinsley Brothers, 1882
Credits: MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROPER PRIDE ***
PROPER PRIDE.
A Novel.
Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth, Love repulsed—but it returneth.
December in Malta is very different from that month in England. There is no snow, no black frost, no fog; a bright, turquoise-blue sky, and deep indigo sea, smooth as glass, and dotted here and there with the white sails of fishing-boats, make a becoming background for this buff-coloured island. The air is soft, yet exhilarating; a perfume of oranges, cheroots, and flowers pervades the atmosphere. Little boys, with superb dark eyes, are thrusting delicious bunches of roses and heliotrope into the hands of passersby, and demanding “sixpence.” The new piano-organs are grinding away mercilessly at the corner of every street. A trooper, a Peninsular and Oriental, and a vicious-looking ironclad are all in simultaneously, and Valetta is crammed. Such, at least, was the scene one December afternoon, not many years ago. It was the fashionable hour; the Strada Reale was full of shoppers, sightseers, and loungers; half the garrison were strolling up and down. Fat monks in brown, thin nuns in black, fruitsellers, Maltese women in their picturesque faldettas, soldiers, sailors, rich men, poor men, beggar men, and no doubt thieves, thronged the hot white pavement.
Outside Marîche’s, the well-known tobacconist, two young men, bearing the unmistakable stamp of the British warrior of the period, were smoking the inevitable weed.
Cox, “the horsey,” with hands in pockets, was holding forth at intervals, to Brown, “the blasé,” and ladies’ man par excellence, of the gallant smashers.
“Never saw such a hole as this is in my life—never! No hunting, no shooting, no sport of any kind. Think of all the tiptop runs they are having at home now! If The Field is to be believed, there never was
such going; nor, for the matter of that, such grief. Here we are— stuck on an island; water wherever you look; not a horse worth twenty pounds in the place!”
“Oh come, my dear fellow,” remonstrated his friend, “what about the Colonel’s barb, and half-a-dozen others I could mention?”
“Well, not a hunter, at any rate, and that’s all the same. If we are left here another year, I believe I shall cut my throat—or get married.”
Looking at his companion with critical gravity, to see how he took this tremendous alternative, but observing no wonderful expression of alarm or anxiety depicted on his face, he continued to puff furiously at the cigar, which he held almost savagely between his set teeth. Suddenly he exclaimed:
“By Jove, there’s that Miss Saville that all the fellows are talking about! Why she’s nothing but a schoolgirl after all.”
“Nevertheless, she is the prettiest girl in Valetta,” replied Mr. Brown, taking his cheroot out of his mouth and gazing with an air of languid approval after a tall slight figure, in a well-cut blue serge costume, that, in company with an elderly lady, was crossing the Palace Square.
“By the way, Brown, who is this Miss Saville when she is at home?”
“Miss Saville,” replied Brown, propping himself against the doorway, and evidently preparing for a narrative, “is——In the first place, an heiress, four thousand a-year, my dear boy—think of that.”
Encouraged by a nod from Cox, he proceeded:
“She is also an orphan.”
“Good!” quoth Cox emphatically.
“But you need not run away with the idea that she is an unprotected female. She has a guardian,” continued his friend
impressively
“It seems that her father, General Saville, saved or made a lot of money out in India, and this girl was his only child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and she was sent home and received a firstclass education, including all the extras. Are you listening?”
“Of course I am; get on with the story.”
“Well, old Saville, who had always meant to come home and live on his fortune and repose on his laurels, trusted too long to the climate, and left his bones in the cemetery at Lahore, and his daughter to his great chum, Sir Greville Fairfax, with her fortune and her hand, both tightly tied up, not to marry without his full consent, not to come of age till she was five-and-twenty, and all that sort of thing, you know.”
“Yes, yes; go on.”
“Hurry no man’s cattle, the day is young,” said Brown, removing his cheroot after two or three puffs, and contemplating it with apparent interest.
“About six months later,” he proceeded oracularly, “Sir Greville died suddenly of heart disease, and it was found by his will that he had passed on the guardianship of the fair Alice to his son—to his son, a young fellow of four-and-twenty, a captain in the Fifth Hussars, and now with his regiment in India. What do you think of that?”
“Think!” returned his friend, with emphasis; “I think it was meant as an uncommonly strong hint for the son to marry her.”
“And so he will, be sure. A pretty girl, with four thousand pounds ayear and no relations, is not to be had every day. I only wish I had such a chance. But I am afraid that a sub in a marching regiment, with a pittance of a hundred pounds a year and his pay, would be rather out of the running.”
“You may say so,” replied Cox candidly, plunging his hands still deeper into his pockets. “That old dowager would make short work of ‘the likes of you,’ as they say in the Green Isle.”
“No doubt she would. She is a Miss Fane, an aunt of Fairfax’s, and has been all autumn at Nice; and is now here on a visit to the LeeDormers. Of course she will keep the fair Alice for her nephew.”
“How do you know all this? How do you know her name is Alice?” inquired Captain Cox.
“Oh, I know a good many things,” returned his friend, with careless complacency, resuming his cheroot and a critical inspection of all passers-by.
His companion gazed at him for some moments with a kind of sleepy admiration, and then suddenly burst out:
“Is this Fairfax a dark, slim, good-looking fellow? for I recollect a Fairfax, an A1 rider, winning the Grand Military at Punchestown some three years ago; he was in the cavalry, I know.”
“Yes, that’s he—Reginald Fairfax. Since then he has been improving the shining hour in the gorgeous East, tiger-shooting, pigsticking, polo-playing, and so on. His regiment is in this season’s reliefs, and, very likely, on its way home now.”
“But the Fairfax I knew had lots of coin, never went near a lady, and would be the last man in the world to settle down and get married. He cared for nothing but sport of all kinds—hunting, racing, shooting, and so on; and if he is the identical guardian, Miss Saville is likely to remain Miss Saville as far as he is concerned. Money would be no temptation to him,” he concluded triumphantly.
“Well,” rejoined Mr. Brown, “if he won’t marry her, someone else will; it will be all the same to you and me. Here, my cheroot is out; come along and take a turn in the Strada, and give the natives a treat.” Exeunt, arm-in-arm.
CHAPTER II. ALICE SAVILLE.
Among the passengers who landed at Southampton from the Peninsular and Oriental Rosetta, one warm August afternoon in the year 1858, was a stout well-to-do Bengali ayah. Her stoutness spoke for itself, her gold nose-jewel, heavy seed-pearl earrings, massive necklet, bangles, and toe-rings amply vouched for her monetary ease. She carried on one arm a thick black-and-red plaid shawl (her own property), and on the other a pale, fragile, wistful-looking infant, dressed in a short white embroidered pelisse, white bonnet, and enormous black sash.
This miserable puny little orphan had lived and thriven, and developed into the beauty and heiress alluded to by Captains Brown and Cox.
All through her early childhood she had been the care, no less than the idol, of her grand aunt and uncle Saville, an old maid and an old bachelor, who resided in an imposing but slightly dilapidated mansion in the centre of a large wild-looking demesne, near some unpronounceable village in the south of Ireland.
Here, for nearly ten years, little Alice—thanks to a supposed delicate constitution—was allowed unlimited freedom from lessons, lectures, punishments, and all the restraints that young people of her years specially detest. It was true that her fond aunt made a valiant attempt to “do lessons” with her for one hour daily; but how often was that hour curtailed in deference to the pleading of a jovial, indulgent old grand-uncle?
Allowed her own way almost entirely, she brooked no constraint; for she had a fine spirit, as her relations complacently remarked. Her violent bursts of passion were passed by unchecked. It was merely the Saville temper, as much hereditary, and seemingly as much to be proud of, as her violet eyes and the far-famed Saville nose. Mounted on her chestnut pony she would accompany her uncle in his rides or scour solus round the fields, with her long golden hair streaming in the wind, looking far more like a spirit than an ordinary Christian child.
“Ay, but isn’t she the beautiful fair creature to be born in that black country?” the servants and retainers would observe to each other, with mingled admiration and amazement.
At ten years of age Alice Saville could barely read; wrote large intoxicated-looking round-hand; knew nought of arithmetic, sewing, or spelling; and was, without doubt, as pretty and complete a little dunce as could be found in the whole province of Munster.
Nevertheless, she had some accomplishments. She was a wonderful rider for her years, and could and would ride any colt on the premises; gaily careering round and round the lawn, and sticking on as if she were part and parcel of the animal, to the pride and delight of all beholders. Moreover, she could jabber Irish, and was well versed in all the old lore, legends, fairy-tales, and superstitions current within the four adjoining counties.
Alice had ten years of boundless liberty, and at the end of that time her uncle died, his estate passed to the next heir, and his sister, finding herself no longer the mistress of a large liberally-kept establishment, but, on the contrary, an old maid in straitened circumstances, removed to a small house in the suburbs of Dublin, and talked of sending her niece to school.
Alarming rumours now began to reach Sir Greville Fairfax. His ward was an unkempt, uneducated, bare-legged little wretch, running wild among the bogs of Ireland. What a terrible picture was
conjured up before his mental vision. He became at once alive to a sense of his responsibilities, and sought the advice of his most immediate matronly neighbours without a day’s delay.
“She must be sent abroad!” this was the universal opinion, that rather disappointed her guardian; for, to tell the truth, he had had hopes of keeping her under his own roof, with a governess to look after her manners and education. Since his son had gone to Sandhurst the house seemed remarkably lonely and silent, and he would have liked the child of his old friend Maurice Saville to have made her home with him. He had been her guardian now for more than a year, and he had actually never seen her. But when he had taken the suffrages of his most intimate lady-friends this hope was quenched.
“She must be sent abroad” was their verdict; nothing else could possibly counteract that odious Irish accent. Lady Bertram knew of such a charming establishment where two of her nieces had been for years.
Three miles from the city of Tours, and within sight of the village of Roche-Corbon, stood an old gray château, almost buried in woods. The Revolution of ’92 had most effectually dispersed its former owners, who surely in their wildest flight of imagination never dreamt that their venerable roof-tree would become one day a boardingschool for the English “Mees”—“Not a school,” Madame Daverne affirmed, merely a few young friends, whose education she undertook to superintend for the consideration of three hundred pounds per annum; and a very good investment Madame found that old château, and its rickety obsolete furniture. It is true that she kept char à banc and a pair of fat white horses for the use of her young friends. How otherwise could they go to Tours thrice a-week to receive lessons in music, singing, painting, riding, fencing, and dancing? How otherwise attend the English church once a-day on Sunday? But Jules and his horses were not an expensive item—rent and living were cheap; Madame was a manager, a strict disciplinarian, and a most excellent teacher.
The château at Rougemont was a delightful place to its young English inmates, entirely different to a great, formal, stiff house at home, with so many rooms on each floor, all the same size, and nothing interesting or unusual from garret to cellar. Here in the château, with its little pepper-castor towers and corkscrew staircases, they were constantly making some novel discovery, whether of a secret panel, or a secret stair, a well, a picture, or a grave. It had even been hinted that an oubliette was somewhere on the premises. Rougemont far more resembled the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty, with its large kitchen and hall, long stone passages and spacious courtyard, than the orthodox establishment for young ladies. It was surrounded by a garden laid out in terraces, connected by flights of shallow steps, and ornamented with clipped yew-trees, closely resembling in shape the toy-trees of the sheepfolds of our youth, and a wonderful and varied collection of stone, plaster, and even coloured wooden statues, which burst upon the eye in the most unlooked-for and surprising manner.
Madame Daverne, the English widow of a French avocat, was a little, thin, middle-aged woman, invariably dressed in gray, and never seen without her spectacles. She wore her still abundant dark hair in plain bandeaux—a long-exploded fashion—and no cap. Although her domestic arrangements were managed on a liberal English scale, and she believed in plenty of cold water, open windows, and tea, still she had lived sufficiently long in the country of her adoption to have imbibed a very strong prejudice in favour of surveillance, especially as regarded the young friends under her care. No idle chatter about the boys at the Lycée, of love, of lovers, was ever permitted; novels and romances were unknown and unread. The great outside world, with its sayings and doings, was an unexplored region to Madame Daverne’s pupils. Nevertheless, her six young friends found a good deal of happiness in each other’s society; they spent a very busy, healthy life—rambles in the forest, tennis, la grâce, and gardening were their usual amusements, and every Thursday during summer and autumn they made expeditions to Loches, Blois, Chinonceaux, Plessis les Tours, Amboise, or other places of, as Madame observed, “well-known historical interest.”
More than six years had passed since the wild little Irish imp had arrived at Rougemont; and in those years what a change had come over her! How marvellously she had improved! Her gusts of passion were among the things of the past, her goat-like impulses had been subdued, her craving to ride every horse she met had long been curbed, her ignorance—who dares to talk of ignorance in connection with Madame Daverne’s most brilliant and most accomplished pupil?
Few girls take leave of school and schoolfellows with as much regret as Alice Saville. Rougemont has been her home, and she has no desire to leave the shelter of its gray walls and venture out into the world alone among strangers. She loves every stick and stone about the old place; every feature in the landscape she looks out on is a dear familiar friend; from the “Lanterne” itself to venerable Marmoutier, from Marmoutier to the Cathedral, whence comes the Angelus, faintly audible across the waters of the swiftly-rolling, poplar-fringed Loire.
To-morrow Alice is to leave Rougemont for ever. Miss Fane, her guardian’s aunt, is at this instant in the city of Tours. To-morrow she comes to fetch her away; and no child at the zenith of her enjoyment at a children’s party ever heard the terrible words: “Your nurse has come,” with a chillier thrill of dismay than did Alice when Madame Daverne announced to her that her future protector was about to remove her from her care.
Alice and her friends are sitting on some broken stone steps; she in the middle, of course, for is not this their last evening together? and are they not all very fond of Alice, and very very sorry that she is leaving them? They may well be fond of Alice, for she is the brightest creature that ever lived, and the life and soul of the little community; a favourite with everyone, from Madame herself down to an old lame femme de ménage occasionally called in on domestic emergencies. Who could sing, and dance, and tell ghost-stories like her? Who dressed up and acted with the inimitable talent of their fair-haired schoolfellow? Who was as generous, as unselfish, as ready to help, to give, or to lend, as Alice? Bright and gay, warm-hearted and clever, all the inmates of Rougemont know that when she departs she will leave a blank behind her impossible to fill.
Think of the prettiest girl you ever saw, and it may give you some faint idea of Alice Saville, as she sat on the topmost step but one, with her hands locked round her knees (an easy if not graceful attitude), and her eyes gazing down on the valley of the Loire for the last time. Had your beauty mischievous violet eyes—eyes whose colour was a mystery to many, owing to their rapid change of expression and their sweeping black lashes; quantities of goldenbrown wavy hair rippling and curling away from her forehead, a roseleaf complexion, a purely Grecian profile, and seventeen summers?
The farewells have been said three months ago; many tears were shed—and dried; and now the curtain rises upon new scenes. Touraine and its picturesque old châteaux and dim green woods fades away, to give place to the narrow, sun-scorched, steppy streets of Valetta.
In a cool spacious apartment, overlooking a Moorish courtyard, filled with orange-trees in green tubs and various semi-tropical plants, Alice and Miss Fane are sitting reading. The post has just come in, and Miss Fane is revelling in an abundant supply of letters, which flutter and rustle in an aggravating manner as the cool seabreeze steals in and plays with them, and seems to try to snatch from their recipient the full enjoyment of their contents. The breeze plays tenderly and lovingly with Alice Saville’s stray little curls, but she reads on and takes no notice. Nothing short of a “Levanter” would rouse her from her study—“Ivanhoe.” The world of fiction has been opened to her at last! Miss Fane thinks that “there is no harm in the Waverley novels, with the exception of the ‘Heart of Midlothian;’” that is carefully put aside; any of the others Alice may read; and Alice is rapidly devouring them. Her crewel-work lies neglected on the floor; her cup of tea stands at her elbow untasted; and all her thoughts are entirely engrossed in the storming of Torquilstone Castle.
Miss Fane and Alice had spent the autumn in visiting Rome, Florence, and Nice, and were spending a few weeks in Malta before returning to London, where they were to reside together; and Alice was to make her début the ensuing season. She found Valetta altogether delightful. Fresh from her studies, with the history of the Crusades, and of the Knights of Rhodes and Malta still green in her memory, the half-mediæval half-oriental aspect of the place fascinated her beyond measure. Many an hour did she spend in the old Cathedral of St. John, endeavouring to decipher the tombs with which its numerous chapels are paved. Her knowledge of French and Italian helped her to find out the meaning of their Latin inscriptions, and many and various were the stories she mentally wove about those valiant, war-worn, monkish soldiers lying beneath her feet. “Exploring” was Alice’s favourite recreation, as she was not, strictly speaking, “out” as yet; and balls, dancelettes, and yachting picnics were unknown pleasures. The long narrow streets, the “Nix Mangiare” stairs, the odd steep ascents, were an amusing and delightful novelty to her light active feet, but a sore detested pilgrimage to Miss Fane’s gaunt old bones. The mysterious little shops that line these queer streets of stairs were another perennial source of interest, including the sleek cats that sat sentry in almost every doorway. The Maltese themselves were capital subjects for sketches or study; whether they lay flat on their backs, basking in the sun, with their caps pulled over their faces, or lounged in lazy groups about the corners of picturesque old houses, or drove their huge betasselled mules up and down the steep stradas, they were ever and always a fresh novelty to Alice. She little knew that she herself outrivalled the “fried monks” as one of the “sights of Malta;” or that she was the object of general interest and admiration, as, escorted by her austere-looking chaperon, she roamed about, satisfying the curiosity of youth and the craving of a highly imaginative mind.
Miss Fane had been working steadily through her correspondence. Long crossed letters, resembling lattice-work, occupied her for the best part of an hour. At length she came to one in a bold, black, manly hand, not crossed, not even filling two pages. She knit her brows more than once as she perused it, then slowly
