One of Robert Emmet’s college mates was Richard, youngest son of the John Philpot Curran, “ugly, copious, full of wit and ardour and fire,” the Curran of “fifty faces and twice as many voices,” of Byron’s lasting admiration. Richard had a sister Sarah, aged not quite eighteen when Robert Emmet, three years her senior, fell in love with her. Sentimental invention has placed their first meeting at a ball in a Wicklow country-house; but it would rather seem as if, in the compact society of a gay little city like Dublin before the Union, they must have known each other fairly well from childhood, especially as the two families were then acquainted. That fatal mutual affection was to endure long vicissitudes and to prove invincible.
We must infer from a passage in Mr. W. H. Curran’s _Life_ of his father that Emmet’s reserve, for once, but imperfectly concealed evidences of some strong passion, political or extra-political, or both, from the oracular host of the Priory at Rathfarnham. Parenthetically, and without emphasis, Mr. Curran saw fit to warn his household against too implicit a cherishing of their engaging visitor. That Sarah’s interest in him was particular, that it was already awakened and deepening, seems never to have been surmised. According to such evidence as we have, it looks as though he had declared to her the state of his feelings before he went to Paris. It was not an hour, however, when Sarah dared to be happy. Her family had but just gathered together after a most harrowing break-up; she herself had been away for several years under the roof of a beloved clergyman in Lismore, and her homecoming was recent. Her mother, how driven to that point of revolt we know not, had eloped in 1794 with a too sympathetic neighbouring vicar. Sarah was fourteen then, and of a peculiarly sensitive temperament; and she had worshipped her mother. Her sensitiveness was not allayed by her father’s increased mental aloofness from his family, after his misfortune. Incomparably genial, when he chose, to strangers, he visited his resentments in private upon his children, her children, especially upon his son Henry, who stood in lifelong dread of him. The one little daughter of his inordinate love, Gertrude, had died by accident at twelve years old.