Accordingly, at the proper time, Liszt went to Rome—­as he thought.  Really, he was going to Canossa.  The priest was bespoken, and the altar of the church of San Carlo al Corso decorated.  On the very eve of the wedding, when Liszt was with the princess, they were startled to receive a messenger from the Pope, demanding a postponement of the marriage, and the delivery for review of the documents upon which the divorce had been granted.  The papers were surrendered, and the disconsolate princess gave way to a superstitious resignation to fate.

It seems that the amiable relatives of the princess, chancing to be in Rome and hearing of the wedding, determined to prevent it at all cost.  Before the Pope they charged her with securing the divorce by perjury.  The princess had friends at court, who could have procured the satisfactory conclusion of the matter.  The Cardinal Hohenlohe offered his own chapel for the marriage.  But the princess was as immovable in her new determination as she had been in her old.

She had resisted for thirteen years the efforts of the Russian court to decoy her back to Russia.  For the next fifteen years she resisted Liszt’s ardent wooing to marriage.  Even when, on the 10th of March, 1864, her former husband died and gave her that divorce which even Rome considers sufficient, she would not wed.  Her stay of one year in the Holy City had brought her into the whirlpool of Church society and Church politics.  She turned her voracious intellect toward theology; and the interests of the Church, as La Mara says, grew in her eyes far more important than the petty ambitions of art.

The woman with a mission had changed her mission.  Knowing how powerful was her influence over Liszt, she thought to begin her new work at home, and it was on Liszt that she practised her first churchly seductions.

In his youth it had taken all the power of his father and mother to keep him out of the Church; small wonder, then, that when, in the evening fatigue of his life, the woman of his heart beckoned him to the candle-lighted peace of vespers, he should yield.

Religion had always been as much an art to him, as art had been a religion.  By papal dispensation Liszt was admitted into Holy Orders on the 25th of April, 1865, and the Cardinal Hohenlohe, who had not been granted the privilege of marrying Liszt, was given the privilege of shaving his head and turning him into a tonsured abbe.

There was a great sensation in 1868, when Liszt, who had thirty years before run away from Paris with a comtesse, returned as a saint, and in full regalia conducted a mass of his own, at Saint Eustache.  The critic and dictionary-maker, Fetis, declared that the whole affair was simply an advertising scheme of Liszt’s.  But Liszt was taking himself seriously.  The Pope had called him “My dear Palestrina,” and he desired to reform church music as Palestrina had done.

The fact that this ecclesiastical passion was brief, does not prove that it was not sincere; in Liszt’s case it would rather prove its sincerity.  And by corollary the fact that it was sincere, rather proved that it would be brief.