COUNT KUMFOED. 151 



ration,' he adds, * is unavoidable, for it would be highly 

 improper for me to continue with a person who has 

 given me so many proofs of her implacable hatred and 

 malice.' 



The lease of the villa at Auteuil was purchased by 

 Rumford in 1808. The separation between him and 

 his wife took place 'amicably' on the 13th of June* 

 1809. Ever afterwards, however, anger rankled in his 

 heart. He never mentions his wife but in terms of 

 repugnance and condemnation. His release from her fills 

 him with unnatural jubilation. On the fourth anni- 

 versary of his wedding-day he writes to his daughter : 

 ' I make choice of this day to write to you, in reality to 

 testify joy, but joy that I am away from her.' On 

 the fifth anniversary he writes thus : c You will perceive 

 that this is the anniversary of my marriage. I am 

 happy to call it to mind that I may compare my present 

 situation with the three and a half horrible years I 

 was living with that tyrannical, avaricious, unfeeling 

 woman.' The closing six months of his married life he 

 describes as a purgatory sufficiently painful to do away 

 with the sins of a thousand years. Rumford, in fact, 

 writes with the bitterness of a defeated man. His wife 

 retained her friends, while he, who a short time pre- 

 viously had been the observed of all observers, found 

 himself practically isolated. This was a new and bitter 

 experience, the thought of which, pressing on him con- 

 tinually, destroyed all magnanimity in his references 

 to her. 



From 1772 to 1800, Rumford's house at Auteuil 

 had been the residence of the widow of a man highly 

 celebrated in his day as a freethinker, but whom Lange 

 describes as ' the vain and superficial Helvetius.' It is 

 also the house in which, in the month of January 1870, 

 the young journalist Victor Noir was shot dead by Prince 



