Francis. These traits
or predispositions made her a willing listener to all the uncertain
science of mesmerism and its goblin brood, which have been rife in
recent years.
She had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of
herself, 'A man's ambition with a woman's heart, is an evil lot.' In
some verses which she wrote 'To the Moon,' occur these lines:--
'But if I steadfast gaze upon thy face,
A human secret, like my own, I trace;
For, through the woman's smile looks the male eye.'
And she found something of true portraiture in a disagreeable novel of
Balzac's, "_Le Livre Mystique_," in which an equivocal figure exerts
alternately a masculine and a feminine influence on the characters of
the plot.
Of all this nocturnal element in her nature she was very conscious,
and was disposed, of course, to give it as fine names as it would
carry, and to draw advantage from it. 'Attica,' she said to a friend,
'is your province, Thessaly is mine: Attica produced the marble
wonders, of the great geniuses; but Thessaly is the land of magic.'
'I have a great share of Typhon to the Osiris, wild rush and
leap, blind force for the sake of force.'
* * * * *
'Dante, thou didst not describe, in all thy apartments of
Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence half
unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to be born.
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