Read Online Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster - Free Book Online

to come down with rheumatism. Into this scene out of La Bohème there suddenly floated a tall, handsome figure in a long, black cloak of “Byronic mold” wearing a large hat with tassels. Charlie dubbed him “Monte Cristo,” but he was, in reality, an American artist named A. A. Anderson, who had independent means and a taste for the high life abroad. An entranced Charlie spent days in Anderson’s gondola “reading chatting, writing, dreaming or merely drifting.…” In his suite at the Hotel Danieli Anderson hosted a dinner that to Charlie was “the realization of a sybarite’s dream.” The exotic American would soon leave abruptly for Egypt, and a disappointed Charlie would find life at Casa Bunce to be rather drab in the aftermath. By May, Millet’s “butterfly,” as he dubbed Stoddard, had flown, leaving for Chester, England, and a man he had trysted with a year before.
    Millet was utterly bereft and poured out his love and longing for Charlie in letters that only caused his “butterfly” to flutter farther away. “Miss you? Bet your life,” he wrote. “Put yourself in my place. It isn’t the one who goes away who misses, it is he who stays. Empty chair, empty bed, empty house.” Over the door of Casa Bunce he erected a sign, UBI BOHEMIA FUIT? ( WHERE HAS BOHEMIA GONE? ) and in his letters to Charlie continually proposed scenarios where they could re-create “our little Bohemia.” It is rare to find such unabashed male passion freely expressed in nineteenth-century correspondence, and it’s clear from Millet’s letters that in the world of European Bohemia that he had embraced so completely, the strictures of his Massachusetts Puritan heritage held little sway.
    When his strained finances forced a return home to East Bridgewater in the fall of 1875, Frank’s letters to Charlie took on a near-obsessive tone as he longed for Europe and Charlie and despaired at the provincialism surrounding him. But it would not be until January of 1877 that his finances permitted him to return to the Old World. Traveling with him to France were the two sisters of his Harvard friend Royal Merrill, along with their mother and a younger brother. While a student, Frank had lived with the Merrill family for a year in Cambridge. In Paris, he would share living quarters with them in Montmartre, though even there his longing for Stoddard continued unabated.
    “Come Charlie, come!” he wrote in the spring of ’77. “My bed is very narrow but you can manage to occupy it, I hope.” This invitation was made despite the two Merrill sisters living only one floor below. Stoddard would finally visit at the end of April just as Millet was departing for Bucharest to cover the Russo-Turkish conflict for the New York Herald . From Bulgaria, Frank would attempt to stir some jealousy in Stoddard by writing that he was “spooning frightfully with a young Greek here.”
    Millet would not return to Paris until mid-April of the following year, arriving sunburned, war-weary, and bearing two crimson military decorations from the Russian czar. The Merrills had eagerly awaited the arrival of “our hero,” and by the end of 1878, Frank proclaimed himself to be in love with Elizabeth “Lily” Merrill, the elder of the two sisters. His affection for Lily seems to have been heartfelt, but he would prove to be an often-absent husband and an indifferent father. There would never be other women, however, and there are clues in Millet’s short stories and letters to indicate that his sexual attraction to men was more than just a youthful, Bohemian phase.
    “Misogynist” was a name often applied to gay men a century ago, and there was certainly a strong streak of misogyny in Millet. He opposed female artists exhibiting at the Chicago Exposition, and even his last letter to Parsons from the Titanic is heavily larded with female disparagement. In addition to railing about “obnoxious, ostentatious American women” and proclaiming the young