The world was bound by no such scruples. The rumour ran from capital to capital that Liszt was enthralled by the Andalusian. It reached the Comtesse d'Agoult in her retreat at Nonnenwerth. She penned a fierce, reproachful letter. Liszt, in Calypso's grotto at Dresden, answered proudly and coldly. The Comtesse wrote, announcing the end of their relations. Most men are frightened at the abrupt termination of a love affair of which they have long been heartily weary. Liszt gave the Comtesse time to think it over. She made no further overtures, expecting that he would come to kneel at her feet. He did not. The lady went to Paris, and they never met again.
The artist at least owed Lola a service, since she had been the unwitting instrument of a rupture so long desired by him. But he valued his newly-recovered freedom too highly to jeopardise it by linking his life again with a woman's. His love affair with Lola may have been simply an infatuation. Lucio would soon have tired of Gioconda had he lived with her. We hardly know how this brief love story began; we are quite in the dark as to how it ended. A report was current that the two travelled together from Dresden to Paris, where both appeared in the spring of '44. We do not hear that they were seen together in the French capital, so the adieux may already have been exchanged. Liszt stayed there but a few weeks, and then started on a tour through the French departments. Then he crossed the Pyrenees, and pushed as far south as Gibraltar. Less than three years later he was in the toils of a third woman--the Princess Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, with whom his relations endured twelve years. It is noteworthy that he and Lola turned their thoughts from love to religion almost at the same time, though half a world lay between them.
Of the third actor in this little drama it is hardly within my province to speak. The Comtesse d'Agoult found consolation in the care of her children and in those wider interests of which she never tired. She ardently espoused the cause of the Revolution in 1848. More fortunate than her old lover, she never lost the sane and generous sympathies of her youth. You may read her _Souvenirs_, published at Paris the year after her death (1877). Liszt long survived the women who had loved him--not a fate that either of them would have envied him.