Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/230

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222
FRANCES WRIGHT D’ARUSMONT.

visit. Elizabeth Oakes Smith says: "Her husband certainly treated her in a most ungenerous and unmanly way, and I fear her daughter was not without blame. I had these particulars from a highly reliable source, namely, her lawyer. M. D'Arusmont had been penniless but for her, and he meanly endeavored to wrest her property from her, under the statutes that make a woman's person, goods, and chattels all pass to the ownership of the man who marries her. Madame D'Arusmont desired to educate her daughter for a public speaker; and to prevent this, asserting that the girl was disinclined thereto, he took her away from her mother till she, the mother, died. It is most likely that the young lady inherited neither the talents nor aspirations of her nobly-endowed mother, and was deficient, perhaps, in the more tender emotions, as we do not hear of her making any effort to see, or minister to the comfort of, the being to whom she owed life, property, and fame.”

Of a fall on the ice, Mrs. Smith relates