LAST DAYS Mary Colum,wife of Padraic Colum the poet, relates how she saw Constance at one of AE’s crowded gatherings. She recalls how the mystic romance of such gatherings during her student days was gone, but despite this the place was crowded with young men and women sitting around drinking tea and coffee, talking about literature, the construction of plays and novels and the role of assonance in poetry. She continued… "The usual traditional liberal visiting English man was slating British Imperialism, especially as it had had been exercised in Ireland. Another was giving and account of George Moore, who has now settled in London with his Aubusson carpet. Mrs Russell was handing around tea and coffee and AE was talking of pictures he had painted in Donegal. But strangest, and at the same time most familiar, sight of all was Constance Markievicz sitting in her usual place on the couch in the corner, a brown dog lying at her feet.There she sat, she who had fought side by side by side with men in the Insurrection of 1916, her being condemned to death with the other leaders, had had her death sentence commuted to imprisonment, and had recently been released after serving part of her term. Yeats, who had known her in her youth as the daughter of the great land owner of his native Sligo, had described her in a poem riding to hounds, "The beauty of her countryside". But now as she sat there, she whom I remembered as a beautiful women, only second in beauty to Maud Gonne, was haggard and old, dressed in ancient demoded clothes; the outline of her face was the same, but the expression was different; the familiar eyes that blinked at me from behind glasses were bereft of the old fire and eagerness; she gave me a limp hand and barely spoke to me. The last time I had seen her before the Howth gun-running and a little while before we left for America, she had been most interesting, telling me of her stay at Oscar Wilde’s house in London shortly before the great scandal broke. His wife[Constance Lloyd, daughter of an Irish barrister], a friend of Constance’s, was then very happy that his affair with Lilly Langtry was finished and was looking forward to a tranquil domestic life with their two children. I had known Constance Markievicz in a vibrant maturity at the height of her beauty and her courage, when she was engaged in masculine activities, the training and drilling of boys in a National Youth Movement she had founded. She would on occasions get herself up in a Paris frock and, when few others in Dublin used cosmetics, put powder and rouge on her face. A remark of hers to me when I was a young girl I always remembered for it had a real feminine vanity: "I am not interested in men, for I have had the pick of too many men". She had lived strongly and passionately several different kinds of lives; as Constance Gore Booth, Sir Henry’s daughter, she had been a great rider of horses, a follower of hounds and a hunter of foxes; she had been a society beauty who had frequented fashionable gatherings and the balls of the Viceroy; her sister Eva Gore Booth was one of the new Irish writers. Then she had been an art student in Paris at the great Ateliers, where she had married a Polish painter, Count Casimir Markievicz. Then, when the Irish Renaissance began, she had returned to Dublin bringing her Slav husband with her… After her release from prison she had been elected to Dáil Eireann while it was still an underground body, the first women parliamentary representative either in England or Ireland. Now as I saw her she was obviously a dying woman, sunk in dejection, a dejection resulting either from her imprisonment or from the loss of her hopes. What she had fought for had not really come into being; maybe nothing on earth could have brought it into being, so romantic and heroic was it. What she talked about now struck me as very strange, considering what she had just come through. She was writing a play, and she held forth about it as if it were her one interest in life. She had been a fighting Irish woman, a woman of high aristocratic courage who was afraid of nothing… It made me sad to see how little attention was paid to Constance Gore Booth by those in the room; perhaps the habitués of AE’s had become accustomed to seeing her here, sitting exhausted there in the corner, the brown poodle at her feet. Their indifference did not know her; her name would pass into the history of her Country, as she well knew." (Mary Colum "Life and the Dream") A General election was called in June 1927. Constance broke her arm during the election campaign and while cranking her old ford, but remained undeterred. Constance was re-elected. She walked with de Valera and the other Republican deputies in an attempt to enter the Dáil without taking the oath. The attempt failed. Towards the end of June 1927 Constance fell gravely ill. Dr Kathleen Lynn advised that she be hospitalised. She chose the public ward in Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital. Sir William Taylor immediately operated for appendicitis. Initially the operation seemed successful, but her condition rapidly deteriorated. She underwent a further operation on the 8th July. She had developed peritonitis, and remained desperately ill. Kathleen Lynn who had left on holidays was contacted by Mrs Sheehy-Skefington, accompanied by the son of Erskine Childers, to advise that Constance remained in extremis. Her friends gathered around her, these included Dr Kathleen Lynn, Helena Moloney, Mary Perolz, May Coughlin, Florie O’Connell and Esther Roper. A prayer of vigil was held in the hospital board room. On the following morning Sir William Taylor spoke to Esther Roper saying… "It’s a miracle but I think she will recover. I never expected her to live out the night." Esther Roper when walking the streets was confronted by so many strangers, all of whom enquired as to the well-being of the Countess. She records meeting a woman with her eyes full of tears saying… "Ah what would the people in the slums do without her, she’s given up everything for us and she thinks what’s good enough for us is good enough for her. Please God she’ll get better." Three days after the vigil night Casimir and Stas arrived from Warsaw. They ordered roses for her. She described this as the happiest day of her life. She seemed resigned to her end, saying… "It’s so beautiful to have this love and kindness before I go." Later she admitted her deep weariness of spirit saying… "I sometimes long for the peace of the Republican plot." She died at 1 a.m. on 15th July. Casimir was beside her at her death. Casimir sent this telegraph to Josslyn Her body was brought to lie in state at the Rotunda. Her funeral was an outpouring of emotion. Whilst flowers were rare, at the time, the cortčge had eight lorry loads of them. The streets were crowded in their thousands. The official organisations which marched included Sinn Fein, Fianna Eireann, Inghinidhe Na hEireann, Cumann Na mBann, ITGWU and the Irish Citizen Army. TRIBUTES Eamonn de Valera as leader of Fianna Fail, and her close colleague through the years of revolution, pronounced the oration: "The friend of the toiler, the lover of the poor. Ease and station she put aside and took the hard way of service with the weak and downtrodden. Sacrifices, misunderstanding and scorn lay on her road she adopted, but she trod unflinchingly. She now lies at rest with her fellow Champions of the right- mourned by the people whose liberties she fought for, blessed by the loving prayers of the poor she tried so hard to befriend. We know the friendliness, the great woman’s heart of her, the great Irish soul of her, we know the loss we have suffered is not to be repaired. It is sadly we leave but we pray High Heaven that all she longed and hoped for may one day be achieved." Eamonn de Valera carrying her coffin with P.J.Rutledge and Frank Aiken Final rest place:The Republican Plot,Glasnevin
