3-052-314 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Margaret at the Fountain" by Ary Scheffer, from Sir Richard Wallace's Loan Collection, 1872. '...a well-known scene in Goethe's "Faust." Poor Gretchen (that is to say, Margaret), some time after her seduction, meets Lieschen, another girl of her acquaintance, at the public fountain...Lieschen asks whether she has heard the shameful news about their former companion, Barbelchen, who has been detected in a lapse from feminine virtue..."That's what comes of her pride and her idleness, the vain, stuck-up thing! When we were forced to keep hard at work, she was strolling in Cremorne Gardens with her lover, as she called him! and he was dancing with her, and treating her to cakes and wine...so now you see the end of it!" "Poor thing!" says Gretchen, with heartfelt sympathy. "Why, you don't pity her?" exclaims the bitter Lieschen; "I say, it serves her right; let her bear the disgrace, let her do penance!" "Perhaps he will marry her after all," is the faint suggestion of Gretchen. "He won't be such a fool," returns Lieschen...Such is the severity of this world, more especially of the female sex, towards these who have fallen in a moment of weakness, or have, like the unhappy Margaret herself, been made the victims of base and selfish deception'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.