TRAGEDIES OF JEALOUSY

Evening Star, Issue 19615, 22 July 1927, Page 3

TRAGEDIES OF JEALOUSY

GREAT LIVES POI6OSED AND HAPPINESS WRECKED. How many men whom the world lias agreed to regard as great and famous have had their liappincs.s marred and their lives poisoned by the cur,so cl jealousy- either victims ol its pangs themselves or tortured by the suspi-. cions and vagaries of those they love and have earned to their grave, often in suffering secrecy, the marks oi a wound that will not heal? Not all the great duos of history were as fortunate as Julius Chesav, whoso wife has passed into the proverbs of all languages, the woman above reproach. Would Napoleon Bonaparte’s career have been trifmipliant to the last if Josephine had been as good a woman and as true a wife as Calpnrnia ? A QUEEN OF PA I! IS. It mav be doubted whether Josephine, that languid Creole beauty, ought ever to have, married Napoleon. The wives of groat men should bo made of sternei stuff. One of the queens of Parisian society, beautiful, graceful, vivacious, a plea-sure-seeking butterfly, she at once dazzled and infatuated the young Corsican officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had conic so suddenly into prominence and had just been, nominated to the command of the army in Italy.

Could any marriage have begun under less promising circumstances? Josephine had probably no love, possibly not even much affection, for tlie little, thin, impecunious young soldier whom everybody was talking about,. She married him, for he was Napoleon, and an irrepressible suitor, hut even he, in the first ardor of a honeymoon lover, failed to persuade her to go with him to Italy. She rarely answered his letters, though they were full of ardor and passion. In the tented field his thoughts were divided between' his dreams of conquest and glory and his love for the beautiful Creolo who preferred Paris and its gaieties to Napoleon and his ambition. DIVORCE—AND REMARRIAGE.

“I could not brook a rital,” ho wrote to his wife. “To see him and to tear out his heart world be, for mo, one and the sarite thing.”

When he thought her guilty, in her compromising conduct with M. Charles, n handsome young officer, he yielded, not to anger, but to gloom and despair. It was then that he took the first .resolve that ultimately led to divorce and to the second wedding, the Austrian marriage, which clogged him in so many directions, and alter which his luck deserted' him Jealous, tortured, and disappointed, he yet loved his unresponsive first wife Lo the last. At one moment in his career, his mind tottering under his misfortunes, he p 1 I to commit suicide. “You wi'l . Josephine.” he said, “ that ray thoughts were of her before life departed.”. And wjien she died Napok-on spoke well of her. He forgot his sufferings, the long nerve wrack and agony which poisoned life and shook the firmest soul since the great Julius himself, and said pathetically of her; “She had her failings. of course, but she at any rate would never have abandoned me.” STRAIN OF MADNESS.

The biographers have long quarrelled over, and will long continue to quarrel over, the character of Lord Byron and over the mystery of the separation between him and Lady Byron, and of the shocking charges she allowed' to he made against him. Certainly, with the unsound strain in hi", family history, with his unbalanced

temperament, he was the last man to withstand the tortures'her perhaps justifiable jealousy imposed upon him. The son of Mad Jack Byron, a handtome profligate, who seduced his friend’s wife,’ and who squandered his own wife’s fortune, the poet came unhappily into a world that he found hard to fit into.

it was perhaps his unhappiness as a child—his mother, a virago, taunted him with his lameness—that made him so impressionable, so eager for sympathy and Icvc, and yet so strangely cynical. At seven ho fell in love with his cousin, Mary Duff. One may smile at calf love, but one cannot overlook the vagaries of genius. His love for Mary Duff had many ’ successors. When be vent abroad for the grand tour he sent, home a lock of hair from the head of an admiral’s daughter of Spain, and he wrote the ‘ Maid of Athens' after a stormy infatuation for his landlady’s daughter in Greece, for whom hi gashed himself in the chest with a dagger of love. in Turkey he threw himself at the feet of a native maiden. Her angry fellow-countrymen tied the lady in a sack and proposed to have her drowned. It is said that Byron rode up to the troop of soldiers', and, drawing his sword, rescued the maiden, who afterwards died of fever- ■perhaps, the poet afterwards observed, she died of Jove. That was the true Byron touch. The poet lived in a dream, with himself the chief character, playing, to his own immense satisfaction, the role of the “perfect lover.” Would a wise wife have taken such a man always and entirely at his own valuation? LOVELESS MATCH. Lady Byron, when the poet first proposed to her, rciused him, and it was not till two years later that she accepted him, with, as he wrote, “not a spark of love on either side.” Wts that a marriage, with such a man, that could hold out any prospects or success P When the separation came she allowed to be hinted at charges which, if established, would make Byron a person unfit for human society. They were never but the jealous fury that led to their suggestion !eft_ an ineradicable mark on Byron’s highstrung temperament. EXILE. Byron signed the separation and left England for ever, giving his life in » forlorn struggle to'save Greece and to redeem the reproach of an idle and dissolute existence. How much happiness did he miss in life, how much of it was due to the jealous suspicions of Lady Byron, tvhic> have pursued him even beyond the honored grave.he ultimately found?