When they boarded the train from Rome to London for a stay of several months, Charlotte clearly hoped the time together would help them reconcile. She’d even planned a romantic trip to Paris. But shortly after they arrived, Max changed her mind and went back to Rome and to Hattie.
“I can never suffer so much again,” Charlotte later wrote to a friend about that winter. “God knows there is no need.” She felt tortured. Forcing herself through the snow to rehearsal, then back to her bed, at times she even felt suicidal. She dealt with her pain as she always did, by making it into art.
She threw herself into the role of Queen Katharine, the tragic heroine of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. In the play, Henry abandons Katharine, his first wife, for the young, fertile Anne Boleyn. Charlotte was thirty-eight and thought she might be getting a little old to play Romeo, but felt the aging Katharine suited her perfectly. Compared to the anguish and messiness of Charlotte’s private life, Katharine’s pain is wonderfully pure, closer to the suffering of Charlotte’s puritan ancestors. The role let Charlotte play the wronged wife, to bathe in the audience’s sympathy for a woman betrayed.
She dressed for the role as if for a funeral, in black silk velvet, skillfully embroidered with gold vines that climbed her body. Invisible inside the hem was a band of extravagant hand-wrought lace, an opulent bit of perfectionism the audience would never see. The material was weighted at the hem, so that when she walked it looked like she was treading water. As she moved, her teardrop pearl earrings swung against the high ivory collar of her dress. Everything about her was pure and noble.
Reviews were rapturous, some of the best she’d ever received. In London she was celebrated by poets, painters, composers, singers—artists of all kinds. She spent her vacation in Paris with a new friend who unlike Max had an upbeat temperament, and with her two dogs: a hound named Guy and a terrier called Gyp. She also bought a fast new horse and spent her leisure time riding.
In the spring, Charlotte returned to Rome and Max came home to her, having spent a “miserable winter” without her. Charlotte was secretly thrilled at the reversal. “I believe in her suffering,” Charlotte wrote to Grace. “I am proud to say that, notwithstanding what she made me suffer, I still believe in Miss Hays.” Still, Charlotte had not been entirely alone in London, and Max was “very indignant to find my little friend had almost seemed to take her place. Very penitent and wretched. Having found and had the generosity to confess her mistake in having left me… And now that she has found her mistake, and in a short time, now, we shall be together again. Never again perhaps to be what she once was. But still perhaps better that I am not so dependent upon her and that she has tried others.” They lived together for the next three years, until finally tensions erupted so publically neither could deny that it was time to end it.
It was April 1857, Charlotte was at her desk at home in Rome. She was writing a letter when Max came downstairs and demanded to know who it was addressed to. When Charlotte refused to answer, Max tried to snatch the letter from her. Charlotte ran across the room with the letter and stuffed it in her mouth rather than “give her the satisfaction.” “I’ll make you swallow it!” Max shouted, and chased Charlotte around the house trying to shove the note down her throat.
Hattie arrived at that moment and tried to keep them apart, but to her shock Max only cursed at her and tore away. They continued arguing “like fishwives,” until Hattie left, disgusted. Two days later, Max wrestled her bags out the door into the chilly spring air and left Rome and Charlotte behind. If Charlotte thought she would come back again, she realized the finality of Max’s decision when she received a note from a lawyer; Max was suing her for more than $2,000. She claimed Charlotte owed her this because she had given up her career for their relationship. Though the two women weren’t legally married, Max felt she had a reasonable case and was in any event angry enough to drag Charlotte into court. Charlotte paid the amount in full, bringing the whole affair to a bitter end.
The bust-up with Matilda Hays left Charlotte feeling skittish. Their passion had threatened Charlotte’s reputation as a matronly, “pure” woman who only experienced violent emotion onstage. She policed her public image to protect her private life. It was better to seem an old maid than a woman who loved other women.
When Charlotte met Emma Stebbins, it was spring in Rome and the ground was warming, the banks of the Tiber thrumming with green new growth. Americans began to flood into Rome in larger numbers, resting against boulders after the steep climb to the Colosseum and filling the streets and cafés. Women sweated and fainted under a new extreme fashion called the crinoline—a wide brass or metal hoop that extended for several feet on either side and held the waist in a vice-like grip.
Charlotte was immediately attracted to Emma’s sense of self-sufficiency and the quiet, ladylike demeanor that hid a talented sculptor. Emma had grown up comfortably, the daughter of a wealthy family in Boston. Now, at forty-one (the same age as Charlotte), she was following in the footsteps of other women sculptors, like Harriet Hosmer and had moved to Rome to learn from the old masters.
Being
