Madam Sapphira

Madam Sapphira by Edgar Saltus

Madam Sapphira centers on Carol Nevius, a young New York lawyer, and his wife Hilda, born a Snaith, whose father is a vulgar, self-made Wall Street man and whose mother is a colorless, deprecatory woman. Nevius courts Hilda at her family's summer house at Bronx, wins her despite her father's contempt for lawyers, and marries her over the old man's grudging, mercenary blessing. Seven years into the marriage, Nevius has built a busy legal practice while Hilda, socially ambitious and resentful of his indifference to fashionable life, surrounds herself with figures like the novelist Alphabet Jones, the vulgar Andersons, the dull heir James Ablaut, and her devoted young friend Jenny Adulam, whose absent fiancé Tredegar is off ranching in Texas. Domestic frictions accumulate: Hilda's flirtation with going to Tuxedo with the Andersons and Ablaut, Nevius's jealousy over Ablaut, and a stenographer, Miss Vührer, Hilda installs in the household ostensibly to help him with letters. When Nevius must sail to Paris on business for the Interocean Canal Company, Hilda begs off accompanying him, extracting instead a promise that he return within six weeks and commissions for corsets, gloves, and lingerie. In Paris, Nevius falls ill and, delayed by fever in London under a doctor's care, receives a letter from Hilda declaring that his "affair" has come out, that her father will disinherit her unless she leaves him, and that she is heartbroken. A letter from Jones reveals that Hilda has already been telling people of a scandal and consulting a divorce firm, Tooth and Tooth. Nevius rushes back to New York only to find his house stripped of Hilda's belongings, discovers she has filed for divorce naming Janet Adulam and Miss Vührer as correspondents, and learns from Mrs. Snaith that the suit has been publicized before he could respond. Confronting old Snaith, Nevius denounces the family's manufactured evidence, recalling their earlier scheme to frame Mrs. Montrion's husband. Newspapers publish the scandal, ruining Nevius's reputation and business; Miss Adulam falls ill and Tredegar reportedly drinks himself toward ruin. Alphabet Jones stands by Nevius, arguing that Hilda has never believed her own charges and has orchestrated the publicity deliberately. Devastated, Nevius writes farewell letters, draws up a will leaving his estate to Hilda, has it witnessed by his servant Patrick and a druggist named Asquith, and takes an overdose of a sedative mixture in an attempted suicide. He is saved after Patrick, alarmed by his breathing, summons a doctor and Jones. Recovering, Nevius engages the attorney Jabez O'Donnell, who fights the suit, exposes contradictions in the testimony of servants Rebecca Hawes and the cook (coached by Mrs. Snaith), and rebuffs an offer from Tooth and Tooth to drop the charge against Miss Adulam if Nevius will supply damaging material against Vührer instead. When Vührer perjures herself on the stand, Nevius arranges for Miss Adulam's uncle, Erastus Wilberforce, to obtain medical certification of her virginity, which would demolish the case—but rather than expose her to further public ordeal, Nevius has O'Donnell quietly show the proof to Tooth and instructs him to let the divorce proceed uncontested on a fabricated, unnamed correspondent, sparing Adulam's name. The divorce is granted to Hilda on grounds of an invented infidelity, and newspapers again vilify Nevius while quietly retracting the charge against Adulam. Ruined professionally and socially, Nevius sinks into drink and then into obsessive study of Roman and ancient history, seeking understanding of Hilda's motives, unable to find any parallel for her hypocrisy. About a year after the decree, he learns from a visiting chorus girl, Blythe Sisseton, that Ablaut has been her lover and is now engaged to Hilda—and that Hilda had been writing intimate letters to Ablaut long before she ever filed suit against her husband. Jones, arriving to find Nevius armed and enraged, talks him out of violence, arguing that any defense would require exposing the letters and thus destroying what remains of decency, and that dueling conventions cannot touch a woman anyway. Left with his fury and a satirical epitaph he has sketched for Hilda, Nevius channels his rage into a chemical scheme: recalling an old rejected wedding-gift vinaigrette, he purchases a jeweled scent-bottle and a vial of prussic acid, and in the library, protected by gloves and bandages, decants the poison into the bottle, testing its potency on himself successfully. He wraps and addresses the poisoned gift and sends it off, then is seized by dread and suspense, unable to recall clearly what he has done or to whom. A telegram from Jones referencing "congratulations to Mrs. A." confirms that Hilda has already remarried. Nevius, in mounting agitation bordering on madness, questions his servant Patrick, learns of Hilda's marriage announcement in the papers, then abruptly composes himself, gives Patrick money, announces he is sailing for Europe the next day, and asks him to pack—murmuring an incongruous biblical verse about the "bearer of glad news" whose meaning is left unexplained.

By Edgar Saltus · First published 1893 · Genre: Domestic Drama, Novel of Manners, Literary Fiction · 19 chapters · 42,588 words

First lines

"I told my father that you expected to make a hundred thousand this year. He said he didn't believe in miracles."

It was Mrs. Carol Nevius who, from the head of the dinner-table, addressed her husband.

"Did he though! That's odd, seeing that it has taken a succession of them to keep him out of Sing Sing."

Mrs. Nevius laughed. She was a pretty little woman, very well dressed, with a noticeably good manner. And as she laughed it was evident that her father was not one who inspired respect.

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Madam Sapphira is listed on Textopian as a novella by Edgar Saltus, dated 1893 CE.

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decadent · fin-de-siècle · pessimistic · cynical · dark · tragic · ironic · psychological · Fifth Avenue · Manhattan society · marital conflict · infidelity

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