Suddenly, on the train to London, the clunky, lurid prose of Moods fell away, and her words began to sizzle and snap with the exhilaration of what she was seeing and what she was feeling—a resurgence of her writing talent. Anna Weld, a young woman who despised books and spent her days playing backgammon, would turn out to be an annoying companion. Taking care of her required the patience of an angel, Alcott wrote. Traveling was uncomfortable. But from the beginning of her trip, Louisa May Alcott got her prose style back and her letters home—like the letters she wrote on her trip to Washington—are vivid, funny, and compelling.
During four rainy days in London, Alcott roamed the streets and squares of London, which were more real to her from her reading than they seemed to be now that she was finally there. She took a leaf of ivy for a book of pressed flowers she was collecting for her mother. The women crossed into France, and at Brest, Louisa wrote her mother that “Market women sit all about selling queer things, among which are snails: they buy them by the pint, pick them out with a pin like nuts and seem to relish them mightily.”15 Alcott loved Brussels, hated Cologne, and was enchanted by her journey up the Rhine.
It was comically disconcerting to be in a place where no one spoke English, and her rudimentary German didn’t work. When she asked for a blanket, she was given an egg and when she thought she had ordered supper, a woman appeared with a pile of towels and an iron. At Schwalbach, the two women made their first planned stop, boarding in a family home, the house of Dr. Anton Genth, the author of The Iron Waters of Schwalbach, while Anna visited the local spa.
Spa life in the nineteenth century was a minuet in which the wealthy traveled as health tourists to take the mountain air of Germany and Switzerland and drink and bathe in water that was famous for its mineral content. Much discussion at Schwalbach centered on which mineral was predominant in the water and which was the most beneficial. While Anna Weld had massages and treatments, Alcott became increasingly bored. Louisa only had time to notice in her sharp way that visitors to the spa almost always followed the directives of a spa ditty which stuck in her head:
Arise betimes to pump repair,
First take the waters then the air,
Most moderate be in meat and drink,
and rarely, very rarely think.
August and September crawled by. Finally, after a long and anxious wait, there were letters from home. Anna seemed to feel better, and the duo were rejoined by Anna’s brother George for the next leg of their trip—to the Pension Victoria at Vevey. It was lovely to be on the move again, stopping in Heidelberg and Baden-Baden, where Alcott was delighted by the cathedral. Her first look at the Alps came at the beginning of October. “Tall, white spectral looking shapes they were, towering above the green hills and the valleys that lay between,” she wrote happily in her journal.16 Freiburg was spectacular and romantic. Alcott was charmed and delighted by the town’s many suspension bridges. Finally they reached Lausanne and Lake Léman (Lake Geneva) and then sailed across the lake to Vevey. There they checked into the Pension Victoria and George Weld once again left them for Paris.
“At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a very comfortable hotel.” So Louisa May Alcott’s friend and critic Henry James begins Daisy Miller, his eponymous novel about a pretty, young American girl who will appear in the garden of the hotel named the Trois Couronnes and be befriended by an American named Winterbourne. Although Alcott and her pretty, young aristocratic American companion, Anna Minot Weld, checked into a different hotel in the small Swiss spa town on the eastern end of Lake Léman, the story of what happened there both to Anna and Louisa may have inspired Henry James ten years later. Here in Vevey, where James set his most romantic novel, Louisa May Alcott ran straight into the most romantic experience of her own life.
When Alcott and Weld checked into the Victoria, a well-run family house with comfortable rooms, the pension already housed a strange and fascinating group of guests. There was a Frenchwoman who offered Louisa discouraging lessons in the French language. Two Scottish ladies named Glennie who had met Sir Walter Scott delighted Alcott. There was a jolly Englishwoman and her daughter. A confederate Colonel Polk with his family was determinedly rude to the Yankee women. The Victoria sounds like any boardinghouse anywhere—and Louisa was used to boardinghouses—had, in fact, grown up in them in the Boston days before the Alcott family first moved to Concord.
But this particular boardinghouse in this particular Swiss village was about to be the scene of one of the most vivid experiences of Alcott’s life. There is some disagreement among her biographers about the meaning of what happened next, but there is no disagreement about the fact that it happened in the person of a twenty-year-old Polish refugee who had fought in the Polish insurrection against Russia, whose lungs were deteriorating, leaving him with a brutal hacking cough, and who was a talented piano player. “I like boys and oysters raw,” Alcott wrote, years later in a chapter of Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag titled “My Boys.” “Though good manners are always pleasing, I don’t mind the rough outside burr which repels most people, and perhaps that is the reason why the burrs open and let me see the soft lining and taste the sweet nut hidden inside.”17
This particular sweet nut was named Ladislas Wisniewski—two hiccoughs and a sneeze will give you the name perfectly, Alcott joked. But she and Anna Weld called him Laddie. In an early encounter, Louisa asked Laddie to play the Polish national anthem, an anthem that had caused Cossack soldiers to massacre 500 Poles in Wisniewski’s home village. As the villagers sang, Laddie told his sympathetic audience, the Cossacks attacked. Laddie was happy to oblige, but he told Alcott he would rather not play if it would offend a Russian guest. Alcott, infuriated on his behalf, told him to play it anyway, “I should rather enjoy that insult to your bitter enemy,” she snapped. “Ah Mademoiselle it is true we are enemies,” her new friend Laddie gently explained, “but we are also gentlemen.” Laddie began by teaching Alcott a kind of manners that were as foreign to her as his language; both delighted her.
The thirty-three-year-old Yankee spinster and the sickly young Polish patriot took long walks around Vevey, enjoying the views of the Alps and the flat blue lake. They sailed on the lake and gave each other English and French lessons. The month of November passed in a lovely haze. “A little romance with L.W.,” Alcott wrote in her journal. “L. very interesting and good.”18 Laddie brought his friend a flower at every dinner, tucked little affectionate notes under the door of her room, and asked her to call him by his family pet name Varho. The two of them spoke for hours after dinner.
“Lake Léman will never seem so lovely again as when Laddie and I roamed about its shores, floated on its bosom, or laid splendid plans for the future in the garden of the old château,” Alcott wrote.19 On December 6, Louisa and Anna said good-bye to Laddie and headed for Geneva, where they would meet George Weld again and head south to Nice as their itinerary dictated.20 Alcott and Laddie said a sad good-bye, not realizing that they were to meet again soon.
During the four months Alcott spent in Nice, she worked on her French, saw the sights, and grew increasingly restless in her position of paid companion to a young woman who rarely even wanted to go out of doors. At first Alcott suffered from insomnia, and then she was driven stir-crazy by Anna, who was sick and fidgety and complained that nothing was right in heaven and earth. When it suited her, Anna would treat Louisa as a friend, but their underlying connection, based on money, seemed close to the surface when she got bored. Still, on her occasional days off Alcott visited an old Franciscan monastery, and the Villa Valrosa. At the local theater, she was able to see Adelaide Ristori in Medea and in Elizabeth. “Never saw such acting,” wrote the former actress Alcott; “it was splendid and the changes from the young, violent, coquettish woman to the peevish old crone dying with her crown on, vain, ambitious & remorseful.”21
By May, Alcott had had enough, although she had agreed to stay with Anna Weld for a full year. She quit, leaving Anna Weld to travel alone. O
n the first of the month, Alcott left for Paris alone, “feeling as happy as a freed bird,” she wrote.22 As her train from Nice approached Paris, Louisa May Alcott began to wish she might run into Laddie while she was there, but they had not communicated and she had no idea how that might happen. As she got off the train at the Gare du Nord feeling exhausted and homesick and bewildered after the twelve hours of sitting upright in a train car, she caught a flash of a blue and white cap waving wildly in the air. It was the irrepressible Laddie, who had found out where she was planning to stay and called the landlady every day until he figured out the day and train of her arrival. “Next day began the pleasantest fortnight in my year of travel,” Alcott wrote.
Laddie escorted her to her lodgings at Madame Dyne’s on the Rue de Rivoli, and the two friends spent the next days together seeing everything Paris had to offer and their evenings reading and writing and sharing a piano bench while Laddie played and Louisa listened. Louisa May Alcott’s journals are detailed and voluble for the months she spends in Europe and traveling with Anna Weld. When they get to Paris, the journals stop and skip the seventeen days Louisa and Laddie spent together.
The difference in Laddie and Louisa’s ages and the threat of death from his diseased and weak lungs made their romantic life an impossibility—they could not conceivably be courting—and this seemed to release both of them into an intimacy rare in Louisa May Alcott’s life. Laddie encouraged her to call him ma drogha in Polish, saying that it was the word for “friend.” Only when the two of them had an evening out with some of his French friends did she find that she had been calling him “my darling” all along.
He was her darling. The two of them went shopping for a hat for Louisa and settled on a becoming pearl-colored number with a simple crepe rose. They went to moonlight concerts in the Champs-Élysées, took trips out of the city, and, best of all, had long talks in Louisa’s pleasant rooms with the gas turned low and the scenes of the Rue de Rivoli under her balcony. In “My Boys,” Alcott tells of how Laddie confided his secret sorrow over a young woman he had loved but who had been forced to marry another man by her conventional parents. Who knows what she confided in him?
After their Paris interlude, they wrote letters to each other for a few years, and then his letters stopped, leading Louisa to conclude, sadly, that he had died. She used him, she admitted, as the model for Laurie, the lively next-door neighbor of the March girls in Little Women who falls in love with Jo, “as far as a pale pen and ink sketch could embody a living, loving boy.”23
What really happened in Paris during those two weeks in the spring of 1866? It was a golden time in the world. In Paris, Degas was beginning to draw ballerinas, Monet was painting landscapes, and Courbet was painting a woman with a parrot. Baudelaire was writing poetry, and Émile Zola, essays and novels.
At home Reconstruction was proceeding full-tilt and hadn’t yet met the local obstacles that would turn it into one of the most dreadful jokes of history. Over President Andrew Johnson’s protests, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing due process and the rights of former slaves. Two years later, President Johnson would be impeached by that same unruly Congress. Did Louisa May Alcott and her Laddie become lovers? Did those long evenings lead to a physical intimacy to match the closeness of their hearts and minds? Probably not. Alcott’s description of their good-bye, their last moments, in which they tenderly kissed and her heart was torn in two, does not sound as if they had done a lot of previous kissing.
Whether or not Louisa May Alcott ever had a lover at all is a matter of some debate. It’s a measure of our narrow sexual standards in the modern world that many assume that, if she didn’t have a male lover, she must have had longings for the same sex. A few years later, Alcott was visited by a young woman, Mabel Loomis, who was the embodiment of sexuality and who was studying at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. As a curvaceous young nymphet, Loomis understood that her fortune lay in her looks, her slightly raised upper lip and young body, but she also wanted to be a writer. She was delighted to meet the by-then-famous writer Louisa May Alcott who, in a lighthearted aside, confessed to Loomis that she had never had a lover.24 Loomis was mildly shocked.25
In speculating on Louisa May Alcott’s sex life, we stumble over the ethics of context. We can guess. Even Alcott’s time with Laddie is so poorly documented that one biographer—Martha Saxton—writes that Laddie’s affair was actually with Anna Weld and that the two lovers used Alcott as a foil for their romance. During the years when Alcott might have been dreaming about men, she was so worried about money and illness that her dreams were cut short. A need to survive can burn away a need for sexual intimacy. In fact, Alcott’s two weeks in Paris were her first real vacation ever. The neediness of her family and the shadow of her father were far away, and although she missed them, their absence also seemed to liberate her.
Louisa had already written ahead to friends in England, and she was the kind of woman who kept to her schedule. She spent a pleasant ten days with one group of Alcott friends in their house near Wimbledon and another fortnight with a different family in their house in Notting Hill. At the Taylors’, there were dinners and parties, and the American was introduced to anyone who was anyone in London. She met Theodore Parker’s publisher and a friend of Elizabeth and Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill and the politicians William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. With the Conways, she excitedly went to hear Dickens read and came away bitterly disappointed in the man and his performance. “Youth and comeliness were gone, but the foppishness remained, and the red-faced man, with false teeth and the voice of a worn-out actor had his scanty grey hair curled.”26
While in London, Alcott also visited the publisher George Routledge, who agreed to publish Moods in England and pay the equivalent of $25. Then on the seventh of July she left London for Liverpool and boarded the ship Africa for a stormy, dull trip back across the North Atlantic during which she was often seasick. Her sister Anna’s husband, John Pratt, was there to meet her when the ship finally docked in Boston Harbor at night. Her homecoming was satisfyingly dramatic. “Nan & babies at the gate, May flying wildly around the lawn & Marmee crying at the door.” Everyone cried, and Louisa presented them with gifts. Books for her father on Raphael and Hegel and for her mother the bound volume of flowers and leaves pressed from everywhere she had traveled.
By the end of July, the old Concord problems had reasserted themselves along with the acerbic Yankee attitude. “Louisa has got back, didn’t have a very good time, so confined that she had very little time to see until after she left her companion,” John Pratt wrote to the family friend Alfred Whitman with classic New England black humor, “& then looking with all the eyes she had, & all the feet she had, & all the hands she had, & all the faculty she had till she contrived to see considerable for a lone woman, without funds, in a short space of time.”27
In Louisa’s absence, her mother had become sicker and bills had been left unpaid. Her sister Anna was living in Concord with her two sons and using an ear trumpet; her husband, John, visited his wife and family from his work in Boston on weekends. Her mother had borrowed money to extend Louisa’s visit to England. First Louisa managed, with the help of John Pratt, to get William Weld to pay the remainder of the $300 owed her for her work as a companion to his daughter. Then referring to herself as “the money-maker,” and grateful that she no longer had to teach or sew since writing had become her most reliable source of income, Louisa set to work writing twelve stories for almost as many editors during the remainder of the year. There were rejections. Her long tale and the first that shows the influence of her travels, titled “A Modern Mephistopheles,” was turned down by Elliott of Elliott, Thames & Talbot because he said it was too long and too sensational.
A book of fairy tales, which she had sent to Howard Tick-nor in Boston, was, as he wrote her “lost in the hurly-burly.” Later, Ticknor paid Alcott for the loss.28 The moneymaker just ploughed through it all, writing about the men
and women she had seen abroad churning out the more lucrative stories with titles like “Thrice Tempted,” “Hope’s Debut,” “Taming a Tartar,” “The Baron’s Gloves,” and “The Mysterious Key and What It Opened” for Frank Leslie.
By January, Louisa, obviously ill again, collapsed in exhaustion. The family debt oppressed her. She hated debts like the devil, she wrote in her journal. They seemed to be making her sick; they were certainly part of the cause of her exhaustion. Although she imagined that the mercury poison had been somehow reactivated in her system, this hardly seems likely. For five months, she had such severe headaches that she was unable to write and spent most of her time in bed. “Louisa Alcott has been alarmingly ill,” Franklin Sanborn wrote to a friend. “Her head being overworked and taking revenge by neuralgia. She is now forbidden to either read or to write—which is to her a great deprivation.”29
As always, the robust and reliable Louisa slowly got better. By April she was up and walking again and, of course, thinking of writing more stories for money to pay the bills. She relapsed and had to return to bed. It wasn’t until May 2 that she finally was able to come downstairs.
The summer in Concord had its lovely healing effects. Summer had always been a good time for Louisa in the country, and the summer of 1867 was no exception. She had two interesting business offers, one from Thomas Niles, who had worked for James T. Fields and had been there on the day Fields turned down her essay about going out to service. Niles was now an editor at Roberts Brothers Publishing Company, and when she approached him about publishing her next novel, he suggested that she should try writing a book for young girls. She said she would try, but privately she rebelled. At the same time, she was offered the job of contributing editor at Merry’s Museum, a children’s magazine, for $500 a year.
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