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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Gambara, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Gambara
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Release Date: August, 1999  [Etext #1873]
+Posting Date: March 4, 2010
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GAMBARA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+GAMBARA
+
+
+By Honore de Balzac
+
+
+Translated by Clara Bell and James Waring
+
+
+
+  DEDICATION
+
+  To Monsieur le Marquis de Belloy
+
+  It was sitting by the fire, in a mysterious and magnificent
+  retreat,--now a thing of the past but surviving in our memory,
+  --whence our eyes commanded a view of Paris from the heights of
+  Belleville to those of Belleville, from Montmartre to the
+  triumphal Arc de l'Etoile, that one morning, refreshed by tea,
+  amid the myriad suggestions that shoot up and die like rockets
+  from your sparkling flow of talk, lavish of ideas, you tossed to
+  my pen a figure worthy of Hoffmann,--that casket of unrecognized
+  gems, that pilgrim seated at the gate of Paradise with ears to
+  hear the songs of the angels but no longer a tongue to repeat
+  them, playing on the ivory keys with fingers crippled by the
+  stress of divine inspiration, believing that he is expressing
+  celestial music to his bewildered listeners.
+
+  It was you who created GAMBARA; I have only clothed him. Let me
+  render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, regretting only
+  that you do not yourself take up the pen at a time when gentlemen
+  ought to wield it as well as the sword, if they are to save their
+  country. You may neglect yourself, but you owe your talents to us.
+
+
+
+
+GAMBARA
+
+
+New Year's Day of 1831 was pouring out its packets of sugared almonds,
+four o'clock was striking, there was a mob in the Palais-Royal, and the
+eating-houses were beginning to fill. At this moment a coupe drew up at
+the _perron_ and a young man stepped out; a man of haughty appearance,
+and no doubt a foreigner; otherwise he would not have displayed the
+aristocratic _chasseur_ who attended him in a plumed hat, nor the coat
+of arms which the heroes of July still attacked.
+
+This gentleman went into the Palais-Royal, and followed the crowd round
+the galleries, unamazed at the slowness to which the throng of loungers
+reduced his pace; he seemed accustomed to the stately step which is
+ironically nicknamed the ambassador's strut; still, his dignity had a
+touch of the theatrical. Though his features were handsome and imposing,
+his hat, from beneath which thick black curls stood out, was perhaps
+tilted a little too much over the right ear, and belied his gravity by
+a too rakish effect. His eyes, inattentive and half closed, looked down
+disdainfully on the crowd.
+
+"There goes a remarkably good-looking young man," said a girl in a low
+voice, as she made way for him to pass.
+
+"And who is only too well aware of it!" replied her companion aloud--who
+was very plain.
+
+After walking all round the arcades, the young man looked by turns at
+the sky and at his watch, and with a shrug of impatience went into a
+tobacconist's shop, lighted a cigar, and placed himself in front of a
+looking-glass to glance at his costume, which was rather more ornate
+than the rules of French taste allow. He pulled down his collar and his
+black velvet waistcoat, over which hung many festoons of the thick gold
+chain that is made at Venice; then, having arranged the folds of his
+cloak by a single jerk of his left shoulder, draping it gracefully so
+as to show the velvet lining, he started again on parade, indifferent to
+the glances of the vulgar.
+
+As soon as the shops were lighted up and the dusk seemed to him black
+enough, he went out into the square in front of the Palais-Royal, but as
+a man anxious not to be recognized; for he kept close under the houses
+as far as the fountain, screened by the hackney-cab stand, till he
+reached the Rue Froid-Manteau, a dirty, poky, disreputable street--a
+sort of sewer tolerated by the police close to the purified purlieus of
+the Palais-Royal, as an Italian major-domo allows a careless servant to
+leave the sweepings of the rooms in a corner of the staircase.
+
+The young man hesitated. He might have been a bedizened citizen's wife
+craning her neck over a gutter swollen by the rain. But the hour was not
+unpropitious for the indulgence of some discreditable whim. Earlier, he
+might have been detected; later, he might find himself cut out. Tempted
+by a glance which is encouraging without being inviting, to have
+followed a young and pretty woman for an hour, or perhaps for a day,
+thinking of her as a divinity and excusing her light conduct by a
+thousand reasons to her advantage; to have allowed oneself to believe
+in a sudden and irresistible affinity; to have pictured, under the
+promptings of transient excitement, a love-adventure in an age when
+romances are written precisely because they never happen; to have
+dreamed of balconies, guitars, stratagems, and bolts, enwrapped in
+Almaviva's cloak; and, after inditing a poem in fancy, to stop at the
+door of a house of ill-fame, and, crowning all, to discern in Rosina's
+bashfulness a reticence imposed by the police--is not all this, I say,
+an experience familiar to many a man who would not own it?
+
+The most natural feelings are those we are least willing to confess,
+and among them is fatuity. When the lesson is carried no further, the
+Parisian profits by it, or forgets it, and no great harm is done. But
+this would hardly be the case with this foreigner, who was beginning to
+think he might pay too dearly for his Paris education.
+
+This personage was a Milanese of good family, exiled from his native
+country, where some "liberal" pranks had made him an object of suspicion
+to the Austrian Government. Count Andrea Marcosini had been welcomed in
+Paris with the cordiality, essentially French, that a man always finds
+there, when he has a pleasant wit, a sounding name, two hundred thousand
+francs a year, and a prepossessing person. To such a man banishment
+could but be a pleasure tour; his property was simply sequestrated, and
+his friends let him know that after an absence of two years he might
+return to his native land without danger.
+
+After rhyming _crudeli affanni_ with _i miei tiranni_ in a dozen or so
+of sonnets, and maintaining as many hapless Italian refugees out of his
+own purse, Count Andrea, who was so unlucky as to be a poet, thought
+himself released from patriotic obligations. So, ever since his arrival,
+he had given himself up recklessly to the pleasures of every kind which
+Paris offers _gratis_ to those who can pay for them. His talents and his
+handsome person won him success among women, whom he adored collectively
+as beseemed his years, but among whom he had not as yet distinguished a
+chosen one. And indeed this taste was, in him, subordinate to those
+for music and poetry which he had cultivated from his childhood; and
+he thought success in these both more difficult and more glorious to
+achieve than in affairs of gallantry, since nature had not inflicted on
+him the obstacles men take most pride in defying.
+
+A man, like many another, of complex nature, he was easily fascinated by
+the comfort of luxury, without which he could hardly have lived; and, in
+the same way, he clung to the social distinctions which his principles
+contemned. Thus his theories as an artist, a thinker, and a poet were in
+frequent antagonism with his tastes, his feelings, and his habits as a
+man of rank and wealth; but he comforted himself for his inconsistencies
+by recognizing them in many Parisians, like himself liberal by policy
+and aristocrats by nature.
+
+Hence it was not without some uneasiness that he found himself, on
+December 31, 1830, under a Paris thaw, following at the heels of a woman
+whose dress betrayed the most abject, inveterate, and long-accustomed
+poverty, who was no handsomer than a hundred others to be seen any
+evening at the play, at the opera, in the world of fashion, and who
+was certainly not so young as Madame de Manerville, from whom he had
+obtained an assignation for that very day, and who was perhaps waiting
+for him at that very hour.
+
+But in the glance at once tender and wild, swift and deep, which that
+woman's black eyes had shot at him by stealth, there was such a world of
+buried sorrows and promised joys! And she had colored so fiercely when,
+on coming out of a shop where she had lingered a quarter of an hour, her
+look frankly met the Count's, who had been waiting for her hard by! In
+fact, there were so many _buts_ and _ifs_, that, possessed by one of
+those mad temptations for which there is no word in any language, not
+even in that of the orgy, he had set out in pursuit of this woman,
+hunting her down like a hardened Parisian.
+
+On the way, whether he kept behind or ahead of this damsel, he studied
+every detail of her person and her dress, hoping to dislodge the insane
+and ridiculous fancy that had taken up an abode in his brain; but he
+presently found in his examination a keener pleasure than he had felt
+only the day before in gazing at the perfect shape of a woman he loved,
+as she took her bath. Now and again, the unknown fair, bending her head,
+gave him a look like that of a kid tethered with its head to the ground,
+and finding herself still the object of his pursuit, she hurried on as
+if to fly. Nevertheless, each time that a block of carriages, or any
+other delay, brought Andrea to her side, he saw her turn away from
+his gaze without any signs of annoyance. These signals of restrained
+feelings spurred the frenzied dreams that had run away with him, and he
+gave them the rein as far as the Rue Froid-Manteau, down which, after
+many windings, the damsel vanished, thinking she had thus spoilt the
+scent of her pursuer, who was, in fact, startled by this move.
+
+It was now quite dark. Two women, tattooed with rouge, who were drinking
+black-currant liqueur at a grocer's counter, saw the young woman and
+called her. She paused at the door of the shop, replied in a few soft
+words to the cordial greeting offered her, and went on her way. Andrea,
+who was behind her, saw her turn into one of the darkest yards out of
+this street, of which he did not know the name. The repulsive appearance
+of the house where the heroine of his romance had been swallowed up
+made him feel sick. He drew back a step to study the neighborhood, and
+finding an ill-looking man at his elbow, he asked him for information.
+The man, who held a knotted stick in his right hand, placed the left on
+his hip and replied in a single word:
+
+"Scoundrel!"
+
+But on looking at the Italian, who stood in the light of a street-lamp,
+he assumed a servile expression.
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir," said he, suddenly changing his tone. "There
+is a restaurant near this, a sort of table-d'hote, where the cooking is
+pretty bad and they serve cheese in the soup. Monsieur is in search
+of the place, perhaps, for it is easy to see that he is an
+Italian--Italians are fond of velvet and of cheese. But if monsieur
+would like to know of a better eating-house, an aunt of mine, who lives
+a few steps off, is very fond of foreigners."
+
+Andrea raised his cloak as high as his moustache, and fled from the
+street, spurred by the disgust he felt at this foul person, whose
+clothes and manner were in harmony with the squalid house into which
+the fair unknown had vanished. He returned with rapture to the thousand
+luxuries of his own rooms, and spent the evening at the Marquise
+d'Espard's to cleanse himself, if possible, of the smirch left by the
+fancy that had driven him so relentlessly during the day.
+
+And yet, when he was in bed, the vision came back to him, but clearer
+and brighter than the reality. The girl was walking in front of him;
+now and again as she stepped across a gutter her skirts revealed a round
+calf; her shapely hips swayed as she walked. Again Andrea longed to
+speak to her--and he dared not, he, Marcosini, a Milanese nobleman!
+Then he saw her turn into the dark passage where she had eluded him, and
+blamed himself for not having followed her.
+
+"For, after all," said he to himself, "if she really wished to avoid me
+and put me off her track, it is because she loves me. With women of that
+stamp, coyness is a proof of love. Well, if I had carried the adventure
+any further, it would, perhaps, have ended in disgust. I will sleep in
+peace."
+
+The Count was in the habit of analyzing his keenest sensations, as men
+do involuntarily when they have as much brains as heart, and he was
+surprised when he saw the strange damsel of the Rue Froid-Manteau once
+more, not in the pictured splendor of his dream but in the bare reality
+of dreary fact. And, in spite of it all, if fancy had stripped the woman
+of her livery of misery, it would have spoilt her for him; for he wanted
+her, he longed for her, he loved her--with her muddy stockings, her
+slipshod feet, her straw bonnet! He wanted her in the very house where
+he had seen her go in.
+
+"Am I bewitched by vice, then?" he asked himself in dismay. "Nay, I
+have not yet reached that point. I am but three-and-twenty, and there is
+nothing of the senile fop about me."
+
+The very vehemence of the whim that held possession of him to some
+extent reassured him. This strange struggle, these reflections, and this
+love in pursuit may perhaps puzzle some persons who are accustomed
+to the ways of Paris life; but they may be reminded that Count Andrea
+Marcosini was not a Frenchman.
+
+Brought up by two abbes, who, in obedience to a very pious father, had
+rarely let him out of their sight, Andrea had not fallen in love with a
+cousin at the age of eleven, or seduced his mother's maid by the time
+he was twelve; he had not studied at school, where a lad does not learn
+only, or best, the subjects prescribed by the State; he had lived in
+Paris but a few years, and he was still open to those sudden but deep
+impressions against which French education and manners are so strong a
+protection. In southern lands a great passion is often born of a
+glance. A gentleman of Gascony who had tempered strong feelings by much
+reflection had fortified himself by many little recipes against sudden
+apoplexies of taste and heart, and he advised the Count to indulge at
+least once a month in a wild orgy to avert those storms of the soul
+which, but for such precautions, are apt to break out at inappropriate
+moments. Andrea now remembered this advice.
+
+"Well," thought he, "I will begin to-morrow, January 1st."
+
+
+
+This explains why Count Andrea Marcosini hovered so shyly before turning
+down the Rue Froid-Manteau. The man of fashion hampered the lover, and
+he hesitated for some time; but after a final appeal to his courage
+he went on with a firm step as far as the house, which he recognized
+without difficulty.
+
+There he stopped once more. Was the woman really what he fancied her?
+Was he not on the verge of some false move?
+
+At this juncture he remembered the Italian table d'hote, and at once
+jumped at the middle course, which would serve the ends alike of his
+curiosity and of his reputation. He went in to dine, and made his way
+down the passage; at the bottom, after feeling about for some time,
+he found a staircase with damp, slippery steps, such as to an Italian
+nobleman could only seem a ladder.
+
+Invited to the first floor by the glimmer of a lamp and a strong smell
+of cooking, he pushed a door which stood ajar and saw a room dingy with
+dirt and smoke, where a wench was busy laying a table for about twenty
+customers. None of the guests had yet arrived.
+
+After looking round the dimly lighted room where the paper was dropping
+in rags from the walls, the gentleman seated himself by a stove which
+was roaring and smoking in the corner.
+
+Attracted by the noise the Count made in coming in and disposing of his
+cloak, the major-domo presently appeared. Picture to yourself a lean,
+dried-up cook, very tall, with a nose of extravagant dimensions, casting
+about him from time to time, with feverish keenness, a glance that
+he meant to be cautious. On seeing Andrea, whose attire bespoke
+considerable affluence, Signor Giardini bowed respectfully.
+
+The Count expressed his intention of taking his meals as a rule in
+the society of some of his fellow-countrymen; he paid in advance for
+a certain number of tickets, and ingenuously gave the conversation a
+familiar bent to enable him to achieve his purpose quickly.
+
+Hardly had he mentioned the woman he was seeking when Signor Giardini,
+with a grotesque shrug, looked knowingly at his customer, a bland smile
+on his lips.
+
+"_Basta_!" he exclaimed. "_Capisco_. Your Excellency has come spurred by
+two appetites. La Signora Gambara will not have wasted her time if she
+has gained the interest of a gentleman so generous as you appear to be.
+I can tell you in a few words all we know of the woman, who is really to
+be pitied.
+
+"The husband is, I believe, a native of Cremona and has just come here
+from Germany. He was hoping to get the Tedeschi to try some new music
+and some new instruments. Isn't it pitiable?" said Giardini, shrugging
+his shoulders. "Signor Gambara, who thinks himself a great composer,
+does not seem to me very clever in other ways. An excellent fellow with
+some sense and wit, and sometimes very agreeable, especially when he
+has had a few glasses of wine--which does not often happen, for he is
+desperately poor; night and day he toils at imaginary symphonies and
+operas instead of trying to earn an honest living. His poor wife is
+reduced to working for all sorts of people--the women on the streets!
+What is to be said? She loves her husband like a father, and takes care
+of him like a child.
+
+"Many a young man has dined here to pay his court to madame; but not one
+has succeeded," said he, emphasizing the word. "La Signora Marianna is
+an honest woman, monsieur, much too honest, worse luck for her! Men give
+nothing for nothing nowadays. So the poor soul will die in harness.
+
+"And do you suppose that her husband rewards her for her devotion? Pooh,
+my lord never gives her a smile! And all their cooking is done at the
+baker's; for not only does the wretched man never earn a sou; he spends
+all his wife can make on instruments which he carves, and lengthens, and
+shortens, and sets up and takes to pieces again till they produce sounds
+that will scare a cat; then he is happy. And yet you will find him the
+mildest, the gentlest of men. And, he is not idle; he is always at it.
+What is to be said? He is crazy and does not know his business. I have
+seen him, monsieur, filing and forging his instruments and eating black
+bread with an appetite that I envied him--I, who have the best table in
+Paris.
+
+"Yes, Excellenza, in a quarter of an hour you shall know the man I am. I
+have introduced certain refinements into Italian cookery that will amaze
+you! Excellenza, I am a Neapolitan--that is to say, a born cook. But of
+what use is instinct without knowledge? Knowledge! I have spent thirty
+years in acquiring it, and you see where it has left me. My history is
+that of every man of talent. My attempts, my experiments, have ruined
+three restaurants in succession at Naples, Parma, and Rome. To this day,
+when I am reduced to make a trade of my art, I more often than not give
+way to my ruling passion. I give these poor refugees some of my choicest
+dishes. I ruin myself! Folly! you will say? I know it; but how can I
+help it? Genius carries me away, and I cannot resist concocting a dish
+which smiles on my fancy.
+
+"And they always know it, the rascals! They know, I can promise
+you, whether I or my wife has stood over the fire. And what is the
+consequence? Of sixty-odd customers whom I used to see at my table every
+day when I first started in this wretched place, I now see twenty on an
+average, and give them credit for the most part. The Piedmontese, the
+Savoyards, have deserted, but the connoisseurs, the true Italians,
+remain. And there is no sacrifice that I would not make for them. I
+often give them a dinner for five and twenty sous which has cost me
+double."
+
+Signore Giardini's speech had such a full flavor of Neapolitan cunning
+that the Count was delighted, and could have fancied himself at
+Gerolamo's.
+
+"Since that is the case, my good friend," said he familiarly to the
+cook, "and since chance and your confidence have let me into the secret
+of your daily sacrifices, allow me to pay double."
+
+As he spoke Andrea spun a forty-franc piece on the stove, out of which
+Giardini solemnly gave him two francs and fifty centimes in change, not
+without a certain ceremonious mystery that amused him hugely.
+
+"In a few minutes now," the man added, "you will see your _donnina_.
+I will seat you next the husband, and if you wish to stand in his good
+graces, talk about music. I have invited every one for the evening, poor
+things. Being New Year's Day, I am treating the company to a dish in
+which I believe I have surpassed myself."
+
+Signor Giardini's voice was drowned by the noisy greetings of the
+guests, who streamed in two and two, or one at a time, after the manner
+of tables-d'hote. Giardini stayed by the Count, playing the showman by
+telling him who the company were. He tried by his witticisms to bring
+a smile to the lips of a man who, as his Neapolitan instinct told him,
+might be a wealthy patron to turn to good account.
+
+"This one," said he, "is a poor composer who would like to rise
+from song-writing to opera, and cannot. He blames the managers,
+music-sellers,--everybody, in fact, but himself, and he has no worse
+enemy. You can see--what a florid complexion, what self-conceit, how
+little firmness in his features! he is made to write ballads. The
+man who is with him and looks like a match-hawker, is a great music
+celebrity--Gigelmi, the greatest Italian conductor known; but he has
+gone deaf, and is ending his days in penury, deprived of all that made
+it tolerable. Ah! here comes our great Ottoboni, the most guileless old
+fellow on earth; but he is suspected of being the most vindictive of all
+who are plotting for the regeneration of Italy. I cannot think how they
+can bear to banish such a good man."
+
+And here Giardini looked narrowly at the Count, who, feeling himself
+under inquisition as to his politics, entrenched himself in Italian
+impassibility.
+
+"A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no political
+opinions, Excellenza," Giardini went on. "But to see that worthy man,
+who looks more like a lamb than a lion, everybody would say what I say,
+were it before the Austrian ambassador himself. Besides, in these times
+liberty is no longer proscribed; it is going its rounds again. At least,
+so these good people think," said he, leaning over to speak in the
+Count's ear, "and why should I thwart their hopes? I, for my part, do
+not hate an absolute government. Excellenza, every man of talent is for
+depotism!
+
+"Well, though full of genius, Ottoboni takes no end of pains to educate
+Italy; he writes little books to enlighten the intelligence of the
+children and the common people, and he smuggles them very cleverly
+into Italy. He takes immense trouble to reform the moral sense of our
+luckless country, which, after all, prefers pleasure to freedom,--and
+perhaps it is right."
+
+The Count preserved such an impenetrable attitude that the cook could
+discover nothing of his political views.
+
+"Ottoboni," he ran on, "is a saint; very kind-hearted; all the refugees
+are fond of him; for, Excellenza, a liberal may have his virtues. Oho!
+Here comes a journalist," said Giardini, as a man came in dressed in the
+absurd way which used to be attributed to a poet in a garret; his
+coat was threadbare, his boots split, his hat shiny, and his overcoat
+deplorably ancient. "Excellenza, that poor man is full of talent, and
+incorruptibly honest. He was born into the wrong times, for he tells the
+truth to everybody; no one can endure him. He writes theatrical articles
+for two small papers, though he is clever enough to work for the great
+dailies. Poor fellow!
+
+"The rest are not worth mentioning, and Your Excellency will find them
+out," he concluded, seeing that on the entrance of the musician's wife
+the Count had ceased to listen to him.
+
+
+
+On seeing Andrea here, Signora Marianna started visibly and a bright
+flush tinged her cheeks.
+
+"Here he is!" said Giardini, in an undertone, clutching the Count's arm
+and nodding to a tall man. "How pale and grave he is poor man! His hobby
+has not trotted to his mind to-day, I fancy."
+
+Andrea's prepossession for Marianna was crossed by the captivating charm
+which Gambara could not fail to exert over every genuine artist. The
+composer was now forty; but although his high brow was bald and lined
+with a few parallel, but not deep, wrinkles; in spite, too, of hollow
+temples where the blue veins showed through the smooth, transparent
+skin, and of the deep sockets in which his black eyes were sunk, with
+their large lids and light lashes, the lower part of his face made him
+still look young, so calm was its outline, so soft the modeling. It
+could be seen at a glance that in this man passion had been curbed to
+the advantage of the intellect; that the brain alone had grown old in
+some great struggle.
+
+Andrea shot a swift look at Marianna, who was watching him. And he noted
+the beautiful Italian head, the exquisite proportion and rich coloring
+that revealed one of those organizations in which every human power is
+harmoniously balanced, he sounded the gulf that divided this couple,
+brought together by fate. Well content with the promise he inferred from
+this dissimilarity between the husband and wife, he made no attempt to
+control a liking which ought to have raised a barrier between the fair
+Marianna and himself. He was already conscious of feeling a sort of
+respectful pity for this man, whose only joy she was, as he understood
+the dignified and serene acceptance of ill fortune that was expressed in
+Gambara's mild and melancholy gaze.
+
+After expecting to see one of the grotesque figures so often set before
+us by German novelists and writers of _libretti_, he beheld a simple,
+unpretentious man, whose manners and demeanor were in nothing strange
+and did not lack dignity. Without the faintest trace of luxury, his
+dress was more decent than might have been expected from his extreme
+poverty, and his linen bore witness to the tender care which watched
+over every detail of his existence. Andrea looked at Marianna with
+moistened eyes; and she did not color, but half smiled, in a way that
+betrayed, perhaps, some pride at this speechless homage. The Count, too
+thoroughly fascinated to miss the smallest indication of complaisance,
+fancied that she must love him, since she understood him so well.
+
+From this moment he set himself to conquer the husband rather than the
+wife, turning all his batteries against the poor Gambara, who quite
+guilelessly went on eating Signor Giardini's _bocconi_, without thinking
+of their flavor.
+
+The Count opened the conversation on some trivial subject, but at the
+first words he perceived that this brain, supposed to be infatuated on
+one point, was remarkably clear on all others, and saw that it would be
+far more important to enter into this very clever man's ideas than to
+flatter his conceits.
+
+The rest of the company, a hungry crew whose brain only responded to the
+sight of a more or less good meal, showed much animosity to the luckless
+Gambara, and waited only till the end of the first course, to give free
+vent to their satire. A refugee, whose frequent leer betrayed ambitious
+schemes on Marianna, and who fancied he could establish himself in her
+good graces by trying to make her husband ridiculous, opened fire to
+show the newcomer how the land lay at the table-d'hote.
+
+"It is a very long time since we have heard anything about the opera on
+'Mahomet'!" cried he, with a smile at Marianna. "Can it be that Paolo
+Gambara, wholly given up to domestic cares, absorbed by the charms of
+the chimney-corner, is neglecting his superhuman genius, leaving his
+talents to get cold and his imagination to go flat?"
+
+Gambara knew all the company; he dwelt in a sphere so far above them all
+that he no longer cared to repel an attack. He made no reply.
+
+"It is not given to everybody," said the journalist, "to have an
+intellect that can understand Monsieur Gambara's musical efforts, and
+that, no doubt, is why our divine maestro hesitates to come before the
+worthy Parisian public."
+
+"And yet," said the ballad-monger, who had not opened his mouth but
+to swallow everything that came within his reach, "I know some men of
+talent who think highly of the judgments of Parisian critics. I myself
+have a pretty reputation as a musician," he went on, with an air of
+diffidence. "I owe it solely to my little songs in _vaudevilles_, and
+the success of my dance music in drawing-rooms; but I propose ere long
+to bring out a mass composed for the anniversary of Beethoven's death,
+and I expect to be better appreciated in Paris than anywhere else. You
+will perhaps do me the honor of hearing it?" he said, turning to Andrea.
+
+"Thank you," said the Count. "But I do not conceive that I am gifted
+with the organs needful for the appreciation of French music. If you
+were dead, monsieur, and Beethoven had composed the mass, I would not
+have failed to attend the performance."
+
+This retort put an end to the tactics of those who wanted to set
+Gambara off on his high horse to amuse the new guest. Andrea was already
+conscious of an unwillingness to expose so noble and pathetic a mania
+as a spectacle for so much vulgar shrewdness. It was with no base
+reservation that he kept up a desultory conversation, in the course of
+which Signor Giardini's nose not infrequently interposed between
+two remarks. Whenever Gambara uttered some elegant repartee or some
+paradoxical aphorism, the cook put his head forward, to glance with pity
+at the musician and with meaning at the Count, muttering in his ear, "_E
+matto_!"
+
+Then came a moment when the _chef_ interrupted the flow of his judicial
+observations to devote himself to the second course, which he considered
+highly important. During his absence, which was brief, Gambara leaned
+across to address Andrea.
+
+"Our worthy host," said he, in an undertone, "threatens to regale us
+to-day with a dish of his own concocting, which I recommend you to
+avoid, though his wife has had an eye on him. The good man has a mania
+for innovations. He ruined himself by experiments, the last of which
+compelled him to fly from Rome without a passport--a circumstance
+he does not talk about. After purchasing the good-will of a popular
+restaurant he was trusted to prepare a banquet given by a lately made
+Cardinal, whose household was not yet complete. Giardini fancied he had
+an opportunity for distinguishing himself--and he succeeded! for that
+same evening he was accused of trying to poison the whole conclave, and
+was obliged to leave Rome and Italy without waiting to pack up. This
+disaster was the last straw. Now," and Gambara put his finger to his
+forehead and shook his head.
+
+"He is a good fellow, all the same," he added. "My wife will tell you
+that we owe him many a good turn."
+
+Giardini now came in carefully bearing a dish which he set in the middle
+of the table, and he then modestly resumed his seat next to Andrea, whom
+he served first. As soon as he had tasted the mess, the Count felt that
+an impassable gulf divided the second mouthful from the first. He
+was much embarrassed, and very anxious not to annoy the cook, who was
+watching him narrowly. Though a French _restaurateur_ may care little
+about seeing a dish scorned if he is sure of being paid for it, it is
+not so with an Italian, who is not often satiated with praises.
+
+To gain time, Andrea complimented Giardini enthusiastically, but he
+leaned over to whisper in his ear, and slipping a gold piece into his
+hand under the table, begged him to go out and buy a few bottles of
+champagne, leaving him free to take all the credit of the treat.
+
+When the Italian returned, every plate was cleared, and the room rang
+with praises of the master-cook. The champagne soon mounted these
+southern brains, and the conversation, till now subdued in the
+stranger's presence, overleaped the limits of suspicious reserve to
+wander far over the wide fields of political and artistic opinions.
+
+Andrea, to whom no form of intoxication was known but those of love and
+poetry, had soon gained the attention of the company and skilfully led
+it to a discussion of matters musical.
+
+"Will you tell me, monsieur," said he to the composer of dance-music,
+"how it is that the Napoleon of these tunes can condescend to usurp the
+place of Palestrina, Pergolesi, and Mozart,--poor creatures who must
+pack and vanish at the advent of that tremendous Mass for the Dead?"
+
+"Well, monsieur," replied the composer, "a musician always finds it
+difficult to reply when the answer needs the cooperation of a hundred
+skilled executants. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, without an orchestra
+would be of no great account."
+
+"Of no great account!" said Marcosini. "Why, all the world knows that
+the immortal author of _Don Giovanni_ and the _Requiem_ was named
+Mozart; and I am so unhappy as not to know the name of the inexhaustible
+writer of quadrilles which are so popular in our drawing-rooms----"
+
+"Music exists independently of execution," said the retired conductor,
+who, in spite of his deafness, had caught a few words of the
+conversation. "As he looks through the C-minor symphony by Beethoven, a
+musician is transported to the world of fancy on the golden wings of the
+subject in G-natural repeated by the horns in E. He sees a whole realm,
+by turns glorious in dazzling shafts of light, gloomy under clouds of
+melancholy, and cheered by heavenly strains."
+
+"The new school has left Beethoven far behind," said the ballad-writer,
+scornfully.
+
+"Beethoven is not yet understood," said the Count. "How can he be
+excelled?"
+
+Gambara drank a large glass of champagne, accompanying the draught by a
+covert smile of approval.
+
+"Beethoven," the Count went on, "extended the limits of instrumental
+music, and no one followed in his track."
+
+Gambara assented with a nod.
+
+"His work is especially noteworthy for simplicity of construction
+and for the way the scheme is worked out," the Count went on. "Most
+composers make use of the orchestral parts in a vague, incoherent way,
+combining them for a merely temporary effect; they do not persistently
+contribute to the whole mass of the movement by their steady and regular
+progress. Beethoven assigns its part to each tone-quality from the
+first. Like the various companies which, by their disciplined movements,
+contribute to winning a battle, the orchestral parts of a symphony
+by Beethoven obey the plan ordered for the interest of all, and are
+subordinate to an admirably conceived scheme.
+
+"In this he may be compared to a genius of a different type. In Walter
+Scott's splendid historical novels, some personage, who seems to have
+least to do with the action of the story, intervenes at a given moment
+and leads up to the climax by some thread woven into the plot."
+
+"_E vero_!" remarked Gambara, to whom common sense seemed to return in
+inverse proportion to sobriety.
+
+Andrea, eager to carry the test further, for a moment forgot all his
+predilections; he proceeded to attack the European fame of Rossini,
+disputing the position which the Italian school has taken by storm,
+night after night for more than thirty years, on a hundred stages in
+Europe. He had undertaken a hard task. The first words he spoke raised
+a strong murmur of disapproval; but neither the repeated interruptions,
+nor exclamations, nor frowns, nor contemptuous looks, could check this
+determined advocate of Beethoven.
+
+"Compare," said he, "that sublime composer's works with what by common
+consent is called Italian music. What feebleness of ideas, what limpness
+of style! That monotony of form, those commonplace cadenzas, those
+endless bravura passages introduced at haphazard irrespective of the
+dramatic situation, that recurrent _crescendo_ that Rossini brought
+into vogue, are now an integral part of every composition; those vocal
+fireworks result in a sort of babbling, chattering, vaporous mucic,
+of which the sole merit depends on the greater or less fluency of the
+singer and his rapidity of vocalization.
+
+"The Italian school has lost sight of the high mission of art. Instead
+of elevating the crowd, it has condescended to the crowd; it has won its
+success only by accepting the suffrages of all comers, and appealing to
+the vulgar minds which constitute the majority. Such a success is mere
+street juggling.
+
+"In short, the compositions of Rossini, in whom this music is
+personified, with those of the writers who are more or less of his
+school, to me seem worthy at best to collect a crowd in the street round
+a grinding organ, as an accompaniment to the capers of a puppet show.
+I even prefer French music, and I can say no more. Long live German
+music!" cried he, "when it is tuneful," he added to a low voice.
+
+This sally was the upshot of a long preliminary discussion, in which,
+for more than a quarter of an hour, Andrea had divagated in the upper
+sphere of metaphysics, with the ease of a somnambulist walking over the
+roofs.
+
+Gambara, keenly interested in all this transcendentalism, had not lost a
+word; he took up his parable as soon as Andrea seemed to have ended, and
+a little stir of revived attention was evident among the guests, of whom
+several had been about to leave.
+
+"You attack the Italian school with much vigor," said Gambara, somewhat
+warmed to his work by the champagne, "and, for my part, you are very
+welcome. I, thank God, stand outside this more or less melodic frippery.
+Still, as a man of the world, you are too ungrateful to the classic
+land whence Germany and France derived their first teaching. While the
+compositions of Carissimi, Cavalli, Scarlatti, and Rossi were being
+played throughout Italy, the violin players of the Paris opera house
+enjoyed the singular privilege of being allowed to play in gloves.
+Lulli, who extended the realm of harmony, and was the first to classify
+discords, on arriving in France found but two men--a cook and a
+mason--whose voice and intelligence were equal to performing his music;
+he made a tenor of the former, and transformed the latter into a bass.
+At that time Germany had no musician excepting Sebastian Bach.--But you,
+monsieur, though you are so young," Gambara added, in the humble tone of
+a man who expects to find his remarks received with scorn or ill-nature,
+"must have given much time to the study of these high matters of art;
+you could not otherwise explain them so clearly."
+
+This word made many of the hearers smile, for they had understood
+nothing of the fine distinctions drawn by Andrea. Giardini, indeed,
+convinced that the Count had been talking mere rhodomontade, nudged
+him with a laugh in his sleeve, as at a good joke in which he flattered
+himself that he was a partner.
+
+"There is a great deal that strikes me as very true in all you have
+said," Gambara went on; "but be careful. Your argument, while reflecting
+on Italian sensuality, seems to me to lean towards German idealism,
+which is no less fatal heresy. If men of imagination and good sense,
+like you, desert one camp only to join the other; if they cannot keep to
+the happy medium between two forms of extravagance, we shall always
+be exposed to the satire of the sophists, who deny all progress, who
+compare the genius of man to this tablecloth, which, being too short to
+cover the whole of Signor Giardini's table, decks one end at the expense
+of the other."
+
+Giardini bounded in his seat as if he had been stung by a horse-fly, but
+swift reflections restored him to his dignity as a host; he looked up to
+heaven and again nudged the Count, who was beginning to think the cook
+more crazy than Gambara.
+
+This serious and pious way of speaking of art interested the Milanese
+extremely. Seated between these two distracted brains, one so noble
+and the other so common, and making game of each other to the great
+entertainment of the crowd, there was a moment when the Count found
+himself wavering between the sublime and its parody, the farcical
+extremes of human life. Ignoring the chain of incredible events which
+had brought them to this smoky den, he believed himself to be the
+plaything of some strange hallucination, and thought of Gambara and
+Giardini as two abstractions.
+
+Meanwhile, after a last piece of buffoonery from the deaf conductor in
+reply to Gambara, the company had broken up laughing loudly. Giardini
+went off to make coffee, which he begged the select few to accept, and
+his wife cleared the table. The Count, sitting near the stove between
+Marianna and Gambara, was in the very position which the mad musician
+thought most desirable, with sensuousness on one side and idealism on
+the other. Gambara finding himself for the first time in the society
+of a man who did not laugh at him to his face, soon diverged from
+generalities to talk of himself, of his life, his work, and the musical
+regeneration of which he believed himself to be the Messiah.
+
+"Listen," said he, "you who so far have not insulted me. I will tell you
+the story of my life; not to make a boast of my perseverance, which
+is no virtue of mine, but to the greater glory of Him who has given me
+strength. You seem kind and pious; if you do not believe in me at least
+you will pity me. Pity is human; faith comes from God."
+
+Andrea turned and drew back under his chair the foot that had been
+seeking that of the fair Marianna, fixing his eyes on her while
+listening to Gambara.
+
+
+
+"I was born at Cremona, the son of an instrument maker, a fairly good
+performer and an even better composer," the musician began. "Thus at an
+early age I had mastered the laws of musical construction in its twofold
+aspects, the material and the spiritual; and as an inquisitive child
+I observed many things which subsequently recurred to the mind of the
+full-grown man.
+
+"The French turned us out of our own home--my father and me. We were
+ruined by the war. Thus, at the age of ten I entered on the wandering
+life to which most men have been condemned whose brains were busy
+with innovations, whether in art, science, or politics. Fate, or the
+instincts of their mind which cannot fit into the compartments where the
+trading class sit, providentially guides them to the spots where they
+may find teaching. Led by my passion for music I wandered throughout
+Italy from theatre to theatre, living on very little, as men can live
+there. Sometimes I played the bass in an orchestra, sometimes I was on
+the boards in the chorus, sometimes under them with the carpenters.
+Thus I learned every kind of musical effect, studying the tones of
+instruments and of the human voice, wherein they differed and how they
+harmonized, listening to the score and applying the rules taught me by
+my father.
+
+"It was hungry work, in a land where the sun always shines, where art is
+all pervading, but where there is no pay for the artist, since Rome
+is but nominally the Sovereign of the Christian world. Sometimes made
+welcome, sometimes scouted for my poverty, I never lost courage. I heard
+a voice within me promising me fame.
+
+"Music seemed to me in its infancy, and I think so still. All that is
+left to us of musical effort before the seventeenth century, proves to
+me that early musicians knew melody only; they were ignorant of harmony
+and its immense resources. Music is at once a science and an art. It is
+rooted in physics and mathematics, hence it is a science; inspiration
+makes it an art, unconsciously utilizing the theorems of science. It is
+founded in physics by the very nature of the matter it works on. Sound
+is air in motion. The air is formed of constituents which, in us, no
+doubt, meet with analogous elements that respond to them, sympathize,
+and magnify them by the power of the mind. Thus the air must include a
+vast variety of molecules of various degrees of elasticity, and capable
+of vibrating in as many different periods as there are tones from all
+kinds of sonorous bodies; and these molecules, set in motion by the
+musician and falling on our ear, answer to our ideas, according to
+each man's temperament. I myself believe that sound is identical in its
+nature with light. Sound is light, perceived under another form;
+each acts through vibrations to which man is sensitive and which he
+transforms, in the nervous centres, into ideas.
+
+"Music, like painting, makes use of materials which have the property
+of liberating this or that property from the surrounding medium and
+so suggesting an image. The instruments in music perform this part, as
+color does in painting. And whereas each sound produced by a sonorous
+body is invariably allied with its major third and fifth, whereas
+it acts on grains of fine sand lying on stretched parchment so as
+to distribute them in geometrical figures that are always the same,
+according to the pitch,--quite regular when the combination is a true
+chord, and indefinite when the sounds are dissonant,--I say that music
+is an art conceived in the very bowels of nature.
+
+"Music is subject to physical and mathematical laws. Physical laws are
+but little known, mathematics are well understood; and it is since their
+relations have been studied, that the harmony has been created to
+which we owe the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Rossini, grand
+geniuses, whose music is undoubtedly nearer to perfection than that of
+their precursors, though their genius, too, is unquestionable. The
+old masters could sing, but they had not art and science at their
+command,--a noble alliance which enables us to merge into one the finest
+melody and the power of harmony.
+
+"Now, if a knowledge of mathematical laws gave us these four great
+musicians, what may we not attain to if we can discover the physical
+laws in virtue of which--grasp this clearly--we may collect, in larger
+or smaller quantities, according to the proportions we may require, an
+ethereal substance diffused in the atmosphere which is the medium alike
+of music and of light, of the phenomena of vegetation and of animal
+life! Do you follow me? Those new laws would arm the composer with new
+powers by supplying him with instruments superior of those now in use,
+and perhaps with a potency of harmony immense as compared with that now
+at his command. If every modified shade of sound answers to a force,
+that must be known to enable us to combine all these forces in
+accordance with their true laws.
+
+"Composers work with substances of which they know nothing. Why should
+a brass and a wooden instrument--a bassoon and horn--have so little
+identity of tone, when they act on the same matter, the constituent
+gases of the air? Their differences proceed from some displacement of
+those constituents, from the way they act on the elements which are
+their affinity and which they return, modified by some occult and
+unknown process. If we knew what the process was, science and art would
+both be gainers. Whatever extends science enhances art.
+
+"Well, these are the discoveries I have guessed and made. Yes," said
+Gambara, with increasing vehemence, "hitherto men have noted effects
+rather than causes. If they could but master the causes, music would be
+the greatest of the arts. Is it not the one which strikes deepest to the
+soul? You see in painting no more than it shows you; in poetry you have
+only what the poet says; music goes far beyond this. Does it not form
+your taste, and rouse dormant memories? In a concert-room there may be a
+thousand souls; a strain is flung out from Pasta's throat, the execution
+worthily answering to the ideas that flashed through Rossini's mind
+as he wrote the air. That phrase of Rossini's, transmitted to those
+attentive souls, is worked out in so many different poems. To one it
+presents a woman long dreamed of; to another, some distant shore where
+he wandered long ago. It rises up before him with its drooping willows,
+its clear waters, and the hopes that then played under its leafy arbors.
+One woman is reminded of the myriad feelings that tortured her during
+an hour of jealousy, while another thinks of the unsatisfied cravings of
+her heart, and paints in the glowing hues of a dream an ideal lover,
+to whom she abandons herself with the rapture of the woman in the Roman
+mosaic who embraces a chimera; yet a third is thinking that this very
+evening some hoped-for joy is to be hers, and rushes by anticipation
+into the tide of happiness, its dashing waves breaking against her
+burning bosom. Music alone has this power of throwing us back
+on ourselves; the other arts give us infinite pleasure. But I am
+digressing.
+
+"These were my first ideas, vague indeed; for an inventor at the
+beginning only catches glimpses of the dawn, as it were. So I kept these
+glorious ideas at the bottom of my knapsack, and they gave me spirit to
+eat the dry crust I often dipped in the water of a spring. I worked, I
+composed airs, and, after playing them on any instrument that came to
+hand, I went off again on foot across Italy. Finally, at the age of
+two-and-twenty, I settled in Venice, where for the first time I
+enjoyed rest and found myself in a decent position. I there made the
+acquaintance of a Venetian nobleman who liked my ideas, who encouraged
+me in my investigations, and who got me employment at the Venice
+theatre.
+
+"Living was cheap, lodging inexpensive. I had a room in that Capello
+palace from which the famous Bianca came forth one evening to become a
+Grand Duchess of Tuscany. And I would dream that my unrecognized fame
+would also emerge from thence one day to be crowned.
+
+"I spent my evenings at the theatre and my days in work. Then came
+disaster. The performance of an opera in which I had experimented,
+trying my music, was a failure. No one understood my score for the
+_Martiri_. Set Beethoven before the Italians and they are out of their
+depth. No one had patience enough to wait for the effect to be produced
+by the different motives given out by each instrument, which were all at
+last to combine in a grand _ensemble_.
+
+"I had built some hopes on the success of the _Martiri_, for we votaries
+of the blue divinity Hope always discount results. When a man believes
+himself destined to do great things, it is hard not to fancy them
+achieved; the bushel always has some cracks through which the light
+shines.
+
+"My wife's family lodged in the same house, and the hope of winning
+Marianna, who often smiled at me from her window, had done much to
+encourage my efforts. I now fell into the deepest melancholy as I
+sounded the depths of a life of poverty, a perpetual struggle in which
+love must die. Marianna acted as genius does; she jumped across every
+obstacle, both feet at once. I will not speak of the little happiness
+which shed its gilding on the beginning of my misfortunes. Dismayed at
+my failure, I decided that Italy was not intelligent enough and too much
+sunk in the dull round of routine to accept the innovations I conceived
+of; so I thought of going to Germany.
+
+"I traveled thither by way of Hungary, listening to the myriad voices
+of nature, and trying to reproduce that sublime harmony by the help
+of instruments which I constructed or altered for the purpose. These
+experiments involved me in vast expenses which had soon exhausted
+my savings. And yet those were our golden days. In Germany I was
+appreciated. There has been nothing in my life more glorious than that
+time. I can think of nothing to compare with the vehement joys I found
+by the side of Marianna, whose beauty was then of really heavenly
+radiance and splendor. In short, I was happy.
+
+"During that period of weakness I more than once expressed my passion in
+the language of earthly harmony. I even wrote some of those airs, just
+like geometrical patterns, which are so much admired in the world of
+fashion that you move in. But as soon as I made a little way I met
+with insuperable obstacles raised by my rivals, all hypercritical or
+unappreciative.
+
+"I had heard of France as being a country where novelties were favorably
+received, and I wanted to get there; my wife had a little money and we
+came to Paris. Till then no one had actually laughed in my face; but in
+this dreadful city I had to endure that new form of torture, to which
+abject poverty ere long added its bitter sufferings. Reduced to lodging
+in this mephitic quarter, for many months we have lived exclusively on
+Marianna's sewing, she having found employment for her needle in working
+for the unhappy prostitutes who make this street their hunting ground.
+Marianna assures me that among those poor creatures she has met with
+such consideration and generosity as I, for my part, ascribe to the
+ascendency of virtue so pure that even vice is compelled to respect it."
+
+"Hope on," said Andrea. "Perhaps you have reached the end of your
+trials. And while waiting for the time when my endeavor, seconding
+yours, shall set your labors in a true light, allow me, as a
+fellow-countryman and an artist like yourself, to offer you some little
+advances on the undoubted success of your score."
+
+"All that has to do with matters of material existence I leave to
+my wife," replied Gambara. "She will decide as to what we may accept
+without a blush from so thorough a gentleman as you seem to be. For my
+part,--and it is long since I have allowed myself to indulge such full
+confidences,--I must now ask you to allow me to leave you. I see
+a melody beckoning to me, dancing and floating before me, bare and
+quivering, like a girl entreating her lover for her clothes which he
+has hidden. Good-night. I must go and dress my mistress. My wife I leave
+with you."
+
+He hurried away, as a man who blames himself for the loss of valuable
+time; and Marianna, somewhat embarrassed, prepared to follow him.
+
+Andrea dared not detain her.
+
+Giardini came to the rescue.
+
+"But you heard, signora," said he. "Your husband has left you to settle
+some little matters with the Signor Conte."
+
+Marianna sat down again, but without raising her eyes to Andrea, who
+hesitated before speaking.
+
+"And will not Signor Gambara's confidence entitle me to his wife's?"
+he said in agitated tones. "Can the fair Marianna refuse to tell me the
+story of her life?"
+
+"My life!" said Marianna. "It is the life of the ivy. If you wish to
+know the story of my heart, you must suppose me equally destitute of
+pride and of modesty if you can ask me to tell it after what you have
+just heard."
+
+"Of whom, then, can I ask it?" cried the Count, in whom passion was
+blinding his wits.
+
+"Of yourself," replied Marianna. "Either you understand me by this time,
+or you never will. Try to ask yourself."
+
+"I will, but you must listen. And this hand, which I am holding, is to
+lie in mine as long as my narrative is truthful."
+
+"I am listening," said Marianna.
+
+"A woman's life begins with her first passion," said Andrea. "And my
+dear Marianna began to live only on the day when she first saw Paolo
+Gambara. She needed some deep passion to feed upon, and, above all, some
+interesting weakness to shelter and uphold. The beautiful woman's nature
+with which she is endowed is perhaps not so truly passion as maternal
+love.
+
+"You sigh, Marianna? I have touched one of the aching wounds in your
+heart. It was a noble part for you to play, so young as you were,--that
+of protectress to a noble but wandering intellect. You said to yourself:
+'Paolo will be my genius; I shall be his common sense; between us we
+shall be that almost divine being called an angel,--the sublime creature
+that enjoys and understands, reason never stifling love.'
+
+"And then, in the first impetus of youth, you heard the thousand voices
+of nature which the poet longed to reproduce. Enthusiasm clutched you
+when Paolo spread before you the treasures of poetry, while seeking to
+embody them in the sublime but restricted language of music; you admired
+him when delirious rapture carried him up and away from you, for you
+liked to believe that all this devious energy would at last come down
+and alight as love. But you knew not the tyrannous and jealous despotism
+of the ideal over the minds that fall in love with it. Gambara, before
+meeting you, had given himself over to the haughty and overbearing
+mistress, with whom you have struggled for him to this day.
+
+"Once, for an instant, you had a vision of happiness. Paolo, tumbling
+from the lofty sphere where his spirit was constantly soaring, was
+amazed to find reality so sweet; you fancied that his madness would be
+lulled in the arms of love. But before long Music again clutched
+her prey. The dazzling mirage which had cheated you into the joys of
+reciprocal love made the lonely path on which you had started look more
+desolate and barren.
+
+"In the tale your husband has just told me, I could read, as plainly as
+in the contrast between your looks and his, all the painful secrets of
+that ill-assorted union, in which you have accepted the sufferer's part.
+Though your conduct has been unfailingly heroical, though your firmness
+has never once given way in the exercise of your painful duties,
+perhaps, in the silence of lonely nights, the heart that at this moment
+is beating so wildly in your breast, may, from time to time, have
+rebelled. Your husband's superiority was in itself your worst torment.
+If he had been less noble, less single-minded, you might have deserted
+him; but his virtues upheld yours; you wondered, perhaps, whether his
+heroism or your own would be the first to give way.
+
+"You clung to your really magnanimous task as Paolo clung to his
+chimera. If you had had nothing but a devotion to duty to guide and
+sustain you, triumph might have seemed easier; you would only have
+had to crush your heart, and transfer your life into the world of
+abstractions; religion would have absorbed all else, and you would have
+lived for an idea, like those saintly women who kill all the instincts
+of nature at the foot of the altar. But the all-pervading charm of
+Paolo, the loftiness of his mind, his rare and touching proofs of
+tenderness, constantly drag you down from that ideal realm where virtue
+would fain maintain you; they perennially revive in you the energies
+you have exhausted in contending with the phantom of love. You never
+suspected this! The faintest glimmer of hope led you on in pursuit of
+the sweet vision.
+
+"At last the disappointments of many years have undermined your
+patience,--an angel would have lost it long since,--and now the
+apparition so long pursued is no more than a shade without substance.
+Madness that is so nearly allied to genius can know no cure in this
+world. When this thought first struck you, you looked back on your
+past youth, sacrificed, if not wasted; you then bitterly discerned the
+blunder of nature that had given you a father when you looked for a
+husband. You asked yourself whether you had not gone beyond the duty
+of a wife in keeping yourself wholly for a man who was bound up in his
+science. Marianna, leave your hand in mine; all I have said is true. And
+you looked about you--but now you were in Paris, not in Italy, where men
+know how to love----"
+
+"Oh! Let me finish the tale," cried Marianna. "I would rather say things
+myself. I will be honest; I feel that I am speaking to my truest friend.
+Yes, I was in Paris when all you have expressed so clearly took place
+in my mind; but when I saw you I was saved, for I had never met with
+the love I had dreamed of from my childhood. My poor dress and my
+dwelling-place had hidden me from the eyes of men of your class. A few
+young men, whose position did not allow of their insulting me, were all
+the more intolerable for the levity with which they treated me. Some
+made game of my husband, as if he were merely a ridiculous old man;
+others basely tried to win his good graces to betray me; one and all
+talked of getting me away from him, and none understood the devotion I
+feel for a soul that is so far away from us only because it is so near
+heaven, for that friend, that brother, whose handmaid I will always be.
+
+"You alone understood, did you not? the tie that binds me to him. Tell
+me that you feel a sincere and disinterested regard for my Paolo--"
+
+"I gladly accept your praises," Andrea interrupted; "but go no further;
+do not compel me to contradict you. I love you, Marianna, as we love in
+the beautiful country where we both were born, I love you with all my
+soul and with all my strength; but before offering you that love, I will
+be worthy of yours. I will make a last attempt to give back to you the
+man you have loved so long and will love forever. Till success or defeat
+is certain, accept without any shame the modest ease I can give you
+both. We will go to-morrow and choose a place where he may live.
+
+"Have you such regard for me as will allow you to make me the partner in
+your guardianship?"
+
+Marianna, surprised at such magnanimity, held out her hand to the Count,
+who went away, trying to evade the civilities of Giardini and his wife.
+
+
+
+On the following day Giardini took the Count up to the room where the
+Gambaras lodged. Though Marianna fully knew her lover's noble
+soul,--for there are natures which quickly enter into each other's
+spirit,--Marianna was too good a housewife not to betray her annoyance
+at receiving such a fine gentleman in so humble a room. Everything
+was exquisitely clean. She had spent the morning in dusting her motley
+furniture, the handiwork of Signor Giardini, who had put it together, at
+odd moments of leisure, out of the fragments of the instruments rejected
+by Gambara.
+
+Andrea had never seen anything quite so crazy. To keep a decent
+countenance he turned away from a grotesque bed, contrived by the
+ingenious cook in the case of an old harpsichord, and looked at
+Marianna's narrow couch, of which the single mattress was covered with
+a white muslin counterpane, a circumstance that gave rise in his mind to
+some sad but sweet thoughts.
+
+He wished to speak of his plans and of his morning's work; but Gambara,
+in his enthusiasm, believing that he had at last met with a willing
+listener, took possession of him, and compelled him to listen to the
+opera he had written for Paris.
+
+"In the first place, monsieur," said the composer, "allow me to explain
+the subject in a few words. Here, the hearers receiving a musical
+impression do not work it out in themselves, as religion bids us work
+out the texts of Scripture in prayer. Hence it is very difficult to make
+them understand that there is in nature an eternal melody, exquisitely
+sweet, a perfect harmony, disturbed only by revolutions independent of
+the divine will, as passions are uncontrolled by the will of men.
+
+"I, therefore, had to seek a vast framework in which effect and cause
+might both be included; for the aim of my music is to give a picture of
+the life of nations from the loftiest point of view. My opera, for
+which I myself wrote the _libretto_, for a poet would never have fully
+developed the subject, is the life of Mahomet,--a figure in whom the
+magic of Sabaeanism combined with the Oriental poetry of the Hebrew
+Scriptures to result in one of the greatest human epics, the Arab
+dominion. Mahomet certainly derived from the Hebrews the idea of a
+despotic government, and from the religion of the shepherd tribes or
+Sabaeans the spirit of expansion which created the splendid empire of
+the Khalifs. His destiny was stamped on him in his birth, for his father
+was a heathen and his mother a Jewess. Ah! my dear Count to be a great
+musician a man must be very learned. Without knowledge he can get no
+local color and put no ideas into his music. The composer who sings for
+singing's sake is an artisan, not an artist.
+
+"This magnificent opera is the continuation of the great work I
+projected. My first opera was called _The Martyrs_, and I intend to
+write a third on Jerusalem delivered. You perceive the beauty of this
+trilogy and what a variety of motives it offers,--the Martyrs, Mahomet,
+the Deliverance of Jerusalem: the God of the West, the God of the East,
+and the struggle of their worshipers over a tomb. But we will not dwell
+on my fame, now for ever lost.
+
+"This is the argument of my opera." He paused. "The first act," he went
+on, "shows Mahomet as a porter to Kadijah, a rich widow with whom his
+uncle placed him. He is in love and ambitious. Driven from Mecca, he
+escapes to Medina, and dates his era from his flight, the _Hegira_. In
+the second act he is a Prophet, founding a militant religion. In
+the third, disgusted with all things, having exhausted life, Mahomet
+conceals the manner of his death in the hope of being regarded as a
+god,--last effort of human pride.
+
+"Now you shall judge of my way of expressing in sound a great idea, for
+which poetry could find no adequate expression in words."
+
+Gambara sat down to the piano with an absorbed gaze, and his wife
+brought him the mass of papers forming his score; but he did not open
+them.
+
+"The whole opera," said he, "is founded on a bass, as on a fruitful
+soil. Mahomet was to have a majestic bass voice, and his wife
+necessarily had a contralto. Kadijah was quite old--twenty! Attention!
+This is the overture. It begins with an _andante_ in C major, triple
+time. Do you hear the sadness of the ambitious man who is not satisfied
+with love? Then, through his lamentation, by a transition to the key
+of E flat, _allegro_, common time, we hear the cries of the epileptic
+lover, his fury and certain warlike phrases, for the mighty charms of
+the one and only woman give him the impulse to multiplied loves which
+strikes us in _Don Giovanni_. Now, as you hear these themes, do you not
+catch a glimpse of Mahomet's Paradise?
+
+"And next we have a _cantabile_ (A flat major, six-eight time), that
+might expand the soul that is least susceptible to music. Kadijah has
+understood Mahomet! Then Kadijah announces to the populace the Prophet's
+interviews with the Angel Gabriel (_maestoso sostenuto_ in F Major). The
+magistrates and priests, power and religion, feeling themselves attacked
+by the innovator, as Christ and Socrates also attacked effete or
+worn-out powers and religions, persecute Mahomet and drive him out of
+Mecca (_stretto_ in C major). Then comes my beautiful dominant (G major,
+common time). Arabia now harkens to the Prophet; horsemen arrive (G
+major, E flat, B flat, G minor, and still common time). The mass of men
+gathers like an avalanche; the false Prophet has begun on a tribe the
+work he will achieve over a world (G major).
+
+"He promises the Arabs universal dominion, and they believe him because
+he is inspired. The _crescendo_ begins (still in the dominant). Here
+come some flourishes (in C major) from the brass, founded on the
+harmony, but strongly marked, and asserting themselves as an expression
+of the first triumphs. Medina has gone over to the Prophet, and the
+whole army marches on Mecca (an explosion of sound in C major). The
+whole power of the orchestra is worked up like a conflagration; every
+instrument is employed; it is a torrent of harmony.
+
+"Suddenly the _tutti_ is interrupted by a flowing air (on the minor
+third). You hear the last strain of devoted love. The woman who had
+upheld the great man dies concealing her despair, dies at the moment of
+triumph for him in whom love has become too overbearing to be content
+with one woman; and she worships him enough to sacrifice herself to the
+greatness of the man who is killing her. What a blaze of love!
+
+"Then the Desert rises to overrun the world (back to C major). The whole
+strength of the orchestra comes in again, collected in a tremendous
+quintet grounded on the fundamental bass--and he is dying! Mahomet is
+world-weary; he has exhausted everything. Now he craves to die a god.
+Arabia, in fact, worships and prays to him, and we return to the first
+melancholy strain (C minor) to which the curtain rose.
+
+"Now, do you not discern," said Gambara, ceasing to play, and turning to
+the Count, "in this picturesque and vivid music--abrupt, grotesque, or
+melancholy, but always grand--the complete expression of the life of
+an epileptic, mad for enjoyment, unable to read or write, using all his
+defects as stepping-stones, turning every blunder and disaster into
+a triumph? Did not you feel a sense of his fascination exerted over a
+greedy and lustful race, in this overture, which is an epitome of the
+opera?"
+
+At first calm and stern, the maestro's face, in which Andrea had been
+trying to read the ideas he was uttering in inspired tones, though the
+chaotic flood of notes afforded no clue to them, had by degrees glowed
+with fire and assumed an impassioned force that infected Marianna and
+the cook. Marianna, too, deeply affected by certain passages in which
+she recognized a picture of her own position, could not conceal the
+expression of her eyes from Andrea.
+
+Gambara wiped his brow, and shot a glance at the ceiling of such fierce
+energy that he seemed to pierce it and soar to the very skies.
+
+"You have seen the vestibule," said he; "we will now enter the palace.
+The opera begins:--
+
+"Act I. Mahomet, alone on the stage, begins with an air (F natural,
+common time), interrupted by a chorus of camel-drivers gathered
+round a well at the back of the stage (they sing in contrary
+time--twelve-eight). What majestic woe! It will appeal to the most
+frivolous women, piercing to their inmost nerves if they have no heart.
+Is not this the very expression of crushed genius?"
+
+To Andrea's great astonishment,--for Marianna was accustomed to
+it,--Gambara contracted his larynx to such a pitch that the only sound
+was a stifled cry not unlike the bark of a watch-dog that has lost
+its voice. A slight foam came to the composer's lips and made Andrea
+shudder.
+
+"His wife appears (A minor). Such a magnificent duet! In this number I
+have shown that Mahomet has the will and his wife the brains. Kadijah
+announces that she is about to devote herself to an enterprise that will
+rob her of her young husband's love. Mahomet means to conquer the world;
+this his wife has guessed, and she supports him by persuading the people
+of Mecca that her husband's attacks of epilepsy are the effect of his
+intercourse with the angels (chorus of the first followers of Mahomet,
+who come to promise him their aid, C sharp minor, _sotto voce_). Mahomet
+goes off to seek the Angel Gabriel (_recitative_ in F major). His wife
+encourages the disciples (_aria_, interrupted by the chorus, gusts of
+chanting support Kadijah's broad and majestic air, A major).
+
+"Abdallah, the father of Ayesha,--the only maiden Mahomet has found
+really innocent, wherefore he changed the name of Abdallah to Abubekir
+(the father of the virgin),--comes forward with Ayesha and sings against
+the chorus, in strains which rise above the other voices and supplement
+the air sung by Kadijah in contrapuntal treatment. Omar, the father
+of another maiden who is to be Mahomet's concubine, follows Abubekir's
+example; he and his daughter join in to form a quintette. The girl
+Ayesha is first soprano, Hafsa second soprano; Abubekir is a bass, Omar
+a baritone.
+
+"Mahomet returns, inspired. He sings his first _bravura_ air, the
+beginning of the _finale_ (E major), promising the empire of the world
+to those who believe in him. The Prophet seeing the two damsels, then,
+by a gentle transition (from B major to G major), addresses them in
+amorous tones. Ali, Mahomet's cousin, and Khaled, his greatest general,
+both tenors, now arrive and announce the persecution; the magistrates,
+the military, and the authorities have all proscribed the Prophet
+(_recitative_). Mahomet declares in an invocation (in C) that the Angel
+Gabriel is on his side, and points to a pigeon that is seen flying away.
+The chorus of believers responds in accents of devotion (on a modulation
+to B major). The soldiers, magistrates, and officials then come on
+(_tempo di marcia_, common time, B major). A chorus in two divisions
+(_stretto_ in E major). Mahomet yields to the storm (in a descending
+phrase of diminished sevenths) and makes his escape. The fierce and
+gloomy tone of this _finale_ is relieved by the phrases given to the
+three women who foretell Mahomet's triumph, and these motives are
+further developed in the third act in the scene where Mahomet is
+enjoying his splendor."
+
+The tears rose to Gambara's eyes, and it was only upon controlling his
+emotion that he went on.
+
+"Act II. The religion is now established. The Arabs are guarding the
+Prophet's tent while he speaks with God (chorus in A minor). Mahomet
+appears (a prayer in F). What a majestic and noble strain is this that
+forms the bass of the voices, in which I have perhaps enlarged the
+borders of melody. It was needful to express the wonderful energy of
+this great human movement which created an architecture, a music, a
+poetry of its own, a costume and manners. As you listen, you are walking
+under the arcades of the Generalife, the carved vaults of the Alhambra.
+The runs and trills depict that delicate mauresque decoration, and the
+gallant and valorous religion which was destined to wage war against the
+gallant and valorous chivalry of Christendom. A few brass instruments
+awake in the orchestra, announcing the Prophet's first triumph (in a
+broken _cadenza_). The Arabs adore the Prophet (E flat major), and the
+Khaled, Amru, and Ali arrive (_tempo di marcia_). The armies of the
+faithful have taken many towns and subjugated the three Arabias. Such a
+grand recitative!--Mahomet rewards his generals by presenting them with
+maidens.
+
+"And here," said Gambara, sadly, "there is one of those wretched
+ballets, which interrupt the thread of the finest musical tragedies! But
+Mahomet elevates it once more by his great prophetic scene, which poor
+Monsieur Voltaire begins with these words:
+
+  "Arabia's time at last has come!
+
+"He is interrupted by a chorus of triumphant Arabs (twelve-eight
+time, _accelerando_). The tribes arrive in crowds; the horns and brass
+reappear in the orchestra. General rejoicings ensue, all the voices
+joining in by degrees, and Mahomet announces polygamy. In the midst of
+all this triumph, the woman who has been of such faithful service to
+Mahomet sings a magnificent air (in B major). 'And I,' says she, 'am
+I no longer loved?' 'We must part. Thou art but a woman, and I am a
+Prophet; I may still have slaves but no equal.' Just listen to this duet
+(G sharp minor). What anguish! The woman understands the greatness her
+hands have built up; she loves Mahomet well enough to sacrifice
+herself to his glory; she worships him as a god, without criticising
+him,--without murmuring. Poor woman! His first dupe and his first
+victim!
+
+"What a subject for the _finale_ (in B major) is her grief, brought out
+in such sombre hues against the acclamations of the chorus, and mingling
+with Mahomet's tones as he throws his wife aside as a tool of no further
+use, still showing her that he can never forget her! What fireworks of
+triumph! what a rush of glad and rippling song go up from the two young
+voices (first and second soprano) of Ayesha and Hafsa, supported by Ali
+and his wife, by Omar and Abubekir! Weep!--rejoice!--Triumph and tears!
+Such is life."
+
+Marianna could not control her tears, and Andrea was so deeply moved
+that his eyes were moist. The Neapolitan cook was startled by the
+magnetic influence of the ideas expressed by Gambara's convulsive
+accents.
+
+The composer looked round, saw the group, and smiled.
+
+"At last you understand me!" said he.
+
+No conqueror, led in pomp to the Capitol under the purple beams of
+glory, as the crown was placed on his head amid the acclamations of a
+nation, ever wore such an expression. The composer's face was radiant,
+like that of a holy martyr. No one dispelled the error. A terrible smile
+parted Marianna's lips. The Count was appalled by the guilelessness of
+this mania.
+
+"Act III," said the enchanted musician, reseating himself at the piano.
+"(_Andantino, solo_.) Mahomet in his seraglio, surrounded by women, but
+not happy. Quartette of Houris (A major). What pompous harmony, what
+trills as of ecstatic nightingales! Modulation (into F sharp minor). The
+theme is stated (on the dominant E and repeated in F major). Here every
+delight is grouped and expressed to give effect to the contrast of the
+gloomy _finale_ of the first act. After the dancing, Mahomet rises and
+sings a grand _bravura_ air (in F minor), repelling the perfect and
+devoted love of his first wife, but confessing himself conquered by
+polygamy. Never has a musician had so fine a subject! The orchestra
+and the chorus of female voices express the joys of the Houris, while
+Mahomet reverts to the melancholy strain of the opening. Where is
+Beethoven," cried Gambara, "to appreciate this prodigious reaction of my
+opera on itself? How completely it all rests on the bass.
+
+"It is thus that Beethoven composed his E minor symphony. But his heroic
+work is purely instrumental, whereas here, my heroic phrase is worked
+out on a sextette of the finest human voices, and a chorus of the
+faithful on guard at the door of the sacred dwelling. I have every
+resource of melody and harmony at my command, an orchestra and voices.
+Listen to the utterance of all these phases of human life, rich and
+poor;--battle, triumph, and exhaustion!
+
+"Ali arrives, the Koran prevails in every province (duet in D minor).
+Mahomet places himself in the hands of his two fathers-in-law; he will
+abdicate his rule and die in retirement to consolidate his work. A
+magnificent sextette (B flat major). He takes leave of all (solo in F
+natural). His two fathers-in-law, constituted his vicars or Khalifs,
+appeal to the people. A great triumphal march, and a prayer by all the
+Arabs kneeling before the sacred house, the Kasbah, from which a pigeon
+is seen to fly away (the same key). This prayer, sung by sixty voices
+and led by the women (in B flat), crowns the stupendous work expressive
+of the life of nations and of man. Here you have every emotion, human
+and divine."
+
+Andrea gazed at Gambara in blank amazement. Though at first he had been
+struck by the terrible irony of the situation,--this man expressing the
+feelings of Mahomet's wife without discovering them in Marianna,--the
+husband's hallucination was as nothing compared with the composer's.
+There was no hint even of a poetical or musical idea in the hideous
+cacophony with which he had deluged their ears; the first principles of
+harmony, the most elementary rules of composition, were absolutely alien
+to this chaotic structure. Instead of the scientifically compacted
+music which Gambara described, his fingers produced sequences of fifths,
+sevenths, and octaves, of major thirds, progressions of fourths with no
+supporting bass,--a medley of discordant sounds struck out haphazard
+in such a way as to be excruciating to the least sensitive ear. It is
+difficult to give any idea of the grotesque performance. New words would
+be needed to describe this impossible music.
+
+Andrea, painfully affected by this worthy man's madness, colored, and
+stole a glance at Marianna; while she, turning pale and looking down,
+could not restrain her tears. In the midst of this chaos of notes,
+Gambara had every now and then given vent to his rapture in exclamations
+of delight. He had closed his eyes in ecstasy; had smiled at his piano;
+had looked at it with a frown; put out his tongue at it after the
+fashion of the inspired performer,--in short, was quite intoxicated
+with the poetry that filled his brain, and that he had vainly striven to
+utter. The strange discords that clashed under his fingers had obviously
+sounded in his ears like celestial harmonies.
+
+A deaf man, seeing the inspired gaze of his blue eyes open on another
+world, the rosy glow that tinged his cheeks, and, above all, the
+heavenly serenity which ecstasy stamped on his proud and noble
+countenance, would have supposed that he was looking on at the
+improvisation of a really great artist. The illusion would have been
+all the more natural because the performance of this mad music required
+immense executive skill to achieve such fingering. Gambara must have
+worked at it for years.
+
+Nor were his hands alone employed; his feet were constantly at work
+with complicated pedaling; his body swayed to and fro; the perspiration
+poured down his face while he toiled to produce a great _crescendo_
+with the feeble means the thankless instrument placed at his command.
+He stamped, puffed, shouted; his fingers were as swift as the serpent's
+double tongue; and finally, at the last crash on the keys, he fell back
+in his chair, resting his head on the top of it.
+
+"_Per Bacco!_ I am quite stunned," said the Count as he left the house.
+"A child dancing on the keyboard would make better music."
+
+"Certainly mere chance could not more successfully avoid hitting two
+notes in concord than that possessed creature has done during the past
+hour," said Giardini.
+
+"How is it that the regular beauty of Marianna's features is not
+spoiled by incessantly hearing such a hideous medley?" said the Count to
+himself. "Marianna will certainly grow ugly."
+
+"Signor, she must be saved from that," cried Giardini.
+
+"Yes," said Andrea. "I have thought of that. Still, to be sure that
+my plans are not based on error, I must confirm my doubts by another
+experiment. I will return and examine the instruments he has invented.
+To-morrow, after dinner, we will have a little supper. I will send in
+some wine and little dishes."
+
+The cook bowed.
+
+Andrea spent the following day in superintending the arrangement of the
+rooms where he meant to install the artist in a humble home.
+
+In the evening the Count made his appearance, and found the wine,
+according to his instructions, set out with some care by Marianna and
+Giardini. Gambara proudly exhibited the little drums, on which lay
+the powder by means of which he made his observations on the pitch and
+quality of the sounds emitted by his instruments.
+
+"You see," said he, "by what simple means I can prove the most important
+propositions. Acoustics thus can show me the analogous effects of sound
+on every object of its impact. All harmonies start from a common centre
+and preserve the closest relations among themselves; or rather, harmony,
+like light, is decomposable by our art as a ray is by a prism."
+
+He then displayed the instruments constructed in accordance with his
+laws, explaining the changes he had introduced into their constitution.
+And finally he announced that to conclude this preliminary inspection,
+which could only satisfy a superficial curiosity, he would perform on an
+instrument that contained all the elements of a complete orchestra, and
+which he called a _Panharmonicon_.
+
+"If it is the machine in that huge case, which brings down on us the
+complaints of the neighborhood whenever you work at it, you will not
+play on it long," said Giardini. "The police will interfere. Remember
+that!"
+
+"If that poor idiot stays in the room," said Gambara in a whisper to the
+Count, "I cannot possibly play."
+
+Andrea dismissed the cook, promising a handsome reward if he would keep
+watch outside and hinder the neighbors or the police from interfering.
+Giardini, who had not stinted himself while helping Gambara to wine, was
+quite willing.
+
+Gambara, without being drunk, was in the condition when every power of
+the brain is over-wrought; when the walls of the room are transparent;
+when the garret has no roof, and the soul soars in the empyrean of
+spirits.
+
+Marianna, with some little difficulty, removed the covers from an
+instrument as large as a grand piano, but with an upper case added. This
+strange-looking instrument, besides this second body and its keyboard,
+supported the openings or bells of various wind instruments and the
+closed funnels of a few organ pipes.
+
+"Will you play me the prayer you say is so fine at the end of your
+opera?" said the Count.
+
+To the great surprise of both Marianna and the Count, Gambara began
+with a succession of chords that proclaimed him a master; and their
+astonishment gave way first to amazed admiration and then to perfect
+rapture, effacing all thought of the place and the performer. The
+effects of a real orchestra could not have been finer than the voices
+of the wind instruments, which were like those of an organ and combined
+wonderfully with the harmonies of the strings. But the unfinished
+condition of the machine set limits to the composer's execution, and his
+idea seemed all the greater; for, often, the very perfection of a work
+of art limits its suggestiveness to the recipient soul. Is not this
+proved by the preference accorded to a sketch rather than a finished
+picture when on their trial before those who interpret a work in their
+own mind rather than accept it rounded off and complete?
+
+The purest and serenest music that Andrea had ever listened to rose up
+from under Gambara's fingers like the vapor of incense from an altar.
+The composer's voice grew young again, and, far from marring the noble
+melody, it elucidated it, supported it, guided it,--just as the feeble
+and quavering voice of an accomplished reader, such as Andrieux, for
+instance, can expand the meaning of some great scene by Corneille or
+Racine by lending personal and poetical feeling.
+
+This really angelic strain showed what treasures lay hidden in that
+stupendous opera, which, however, would never find comprehension so
+long as the musician persisted in trying to explain it in his present
+demented state. His wife and the Count were equally divided between the
+music and their surprise at this hundred-voiced instrument, inside which
+a stranger might have fancied an invisible chorus of girls were hidden,
+so closely did some of the tones resemble the human voice; and they
+dared not express their ideas by a look or a word. Marianna's face was
+lighted up by a radiant beam of hope which revived the glories of her
+youth. This renascence of beauty, co-existent with the luminous glow of
+her husband's genius, cast a shade of regret on the Count's exquisite
+pleasure in this mysterious hour.
+
+"You are our good genius!" whispered Marianna. "I am tempted to believe
+that you actually inspire him; for I, who never am away from him, have
+never heard anything like this."
+
+"And Kadijah's farewell!" cried Gambara, who sang the _cavatina_ which
+he had described the day before as sublime, and which now brought tears
+to the eyes of the lovers, so perfectly did it express the loftiest
+devotion of love.
+
+"Who can have taught you such strains?" cried the Count.
+
+"The Spirit," said Gambara. "When he appears, all is fire. I see the
+melodies there before me; lovely, fresh in vivid hues like flowers. They
+beam on me, they ring out,--and I listen. But it takes a long, long time
+to reproduce them."
+
+"Some more!" said Marianna.
+
+Gambara, who could not tire, played on without effort or antics. He
+performed his overture with such skill, bringing out such rich and
+original musical effects, that the Count was quite dazzled, and at last
+believed in some magic like that commanded by Paganini and Liszt,--a
+style of execution which changes every aspect of music as an art, by
+giving it a poetic quality far above musical inventions.
+
+"Well, Excellenza, and can you cure him?" asked Giardini, as Andrea came
+out.
+
+"I shall soon find out," replied the Count. "This man's intellect
+has two windows; one is closed to the world, the other is open to the
+heavens. The first is music, the second is poetry. Till now he has
+insisted on sitting in front of the shuttered window; he must be got
+to the other. It was you, Giardini, who first started me on the right
+track, by telling me that your client's mind was clearer after drinking
+a few glasses of wine."
+
+"Yes," cried the cook, "and I can see what your plan is."
+
+"If it is not too late to make the thunder of poetry audible to his
+ears, in the midst of the harmonies of some noble music, we must put him
+into a condition to receive it and appreciate it. Will you help me to
+intoxicate Gambara, my good fellow? Will you be none the worse for it?"
+
+"What do you mean, Excellenza?"
+
+Andrea went off without answering him, laughing at the acumen still left
+to this cracked wit.
+
+On the following day he called for Marianna, who had spent the morning
+in arranging her dress,--a simple but decent outfit, on which she had
+spent all her little savings. The transformation would have destroyed
+the illusions of a mere dangler; but Andrea's caprice had become a
+passion. Marianna, diverted of her picturesque poverty, and looking like
+any ordinary woman of modest rank, inspired dreams of wedded life.
+
+He handed her into a hackney coach, and told her of the plans he had in
+his head; and she approved of everything, happy in finding her admirer
+more lofty, more generous, more disinterested than she had dared to
+hope. He took her to a little apartment, where he had allowed himself to
+remind her of his good offices by some of the elegant trifles which have
+a charm for the most virtuous women.
+
+"I will never speak to you of love till you give up all hope of your
+Paolo," said the Count to Marianna, as he bid her good-bye at the Rue
+Froid-Manteau. "You will be witness to the sincerity of my attempts.
+If they succeed. I may find myself unequal to keeping up my part as a
+friend; but in that case I shall go far away, Marianna. Though I have
+firmness enough to work for your happiness, I shall not have so much as
+will enable me to look on at it."
+
+"Do not say such things. Generosity, too, has its dangers," said she,
+swallowing down her tears. "But are you going now?"
+
+"Yes," said Andrea; "be happy, without any drawbacks."
+
+
+
+If Giardini might be believed, the new treatment was beneficial to both
+husband and wife. Every evening after his wine, Gambara seemed less
+self-centered, talked more, and with great lucidity; he even spoke
+at last of reading the papers. Andrea could not help quaking at his
+unexpectedly rapid success; but though his distress made him aware of
+the strength of his passion, it did not make him waver in his virtuous
+resolve.
+
+One day he called to note the progress of this singular cure. Though the
+state of the patient at first gave him satisfaction, his joy was dashed
+by Marianna's beauty, for an easy life had restored its brilliancy.
+He called now every evening to enjoy calm and serious conversation, to
+which he contributed lucid and well considered arguments controverting
+Gambara's singular theories. He took advantage of the remarkable acumen
+of the composer's mind as to every point not too directly bearing on his
+manias, to obtain his assent to principles in various branches of
+art, and apply them subsequently to music. All was well so long as the
+patient's brain was heated with the fumes of wine; but as soon as he had
+recovered--or, rather, lost--his reason, he was a monomaniac once more.
+
+However, Paolo was already more easily diverted by the impression
+of outside things; his mind was more capable of addressing itself to
+several points at a time.
+
+Andrea, who took an artistic interest in his semi-medical treatment,
+thought at last that the time had come for a great experiment. He would
+give a dinner at his own house, to which he would invite Giardini
+for the sake of keeping the tragedy and the parody side by side,
+and afterwards take the party to the first performance of _Robert le
+Diable_. He had seen it in rehearsal, and he judged it well fitted to
+open his patient's eyes.
+
+By the end of the second course, Gambara was already tipsy, laughing
+at himself with a very good grace; while Giardini confessed that his
+culinary innovations were not worth a rush. Andrea had neglected nothing
+that could contribute to this twofold miracle. The wines of Orvieto and
+of Montefiascone, conveyed with the peculiar care needed in moving
+them, Lachrymachristi and Giro,--all the heady liqueurs of _la cara
+Patria_,--went to their brains with the intoxication alike of the grape
+and of fond memory. At dessert the musician and the cook both abjured
+every heresy; one was humming a _cavatina_ by Rossini, and the other
+piling delicacies on his plate and washing them down with Maraschino
+from Zara, to the prosperity of the French _cuisine_.
+
+The Count took advantage of this happy frame of mind, and Gambara
+allowed himself to be taken to the opera like a lamb.
+
+At the first introductory notes Gambara's intoxication appeared to clear
+away and make way for the feverish excitement which sometimes brought
+his judgment and his imagination into perfect harmony; for it was their
+habitual disagreement, no doubt, that caused his madness. The ruling
+idea of that great musical drama appeared to him, no doubt, in its noble
+simplicity, like a lightning flash, illuminating the utter darkness in
+which he lived. To his unsealed eyes this music revealed the immense
+horizons of a world in which he found himself for the first time, though
+recognizing it as that he had seen in his dreams. He fancied himself
+transported into the scenery of his native land, where that beautiful
+Italian landscape begins at what Napoleon so cleverly described as the
+_glacis_ of the Alps. Carried back by memory to the time when his
+young and eager brain was as yet untroubled by the ecstasy of his too
+exuberant imagination he listened with religious awe and would not utter
+a single word. The Count respected the internal travail of his soul.
+Till half-past twelve Gambara sat so perfectly motionless that the
+frequenters of the opera house took him, no doubt, for what he was--a
+man drunk.
+
+On their return, Andrea began to attack Meyerbeer's work, in order
+to wake up Gambara, who sat sunk in the half-torpid state common in
+drunkards.
+
+"What is there in that incoherent score to reduce you to a condition of
+somnambulism?" asked Andrea, when they got out at his house. "The story
+of _Robert le Diable_, to be sure, is not devoid of interest, and Holtei
+has worked it out with great skill in a drama that is very well written
+and full of strong and pathetic situations; but the French librettist
+has contrived to extract from it the most ridiculous farrago of
+nonsense. The absurdities of the libretti of Vesari and Schikander are
+not to compare with those of the words of Robert le Diable; it is a
+dramatic nightmare, which oppresses the hearer without deeply moving
+him.
+
+"And Meyerbeer has given the devil a too prominent part. Bertram and
+Alice represent the contest between right and wrong, the spirits of
+good and evil. This antagonism offered a splendid opportunity to the
+composer. The sweetest melodies, in juxtaposition with harsh and crude
+strains, was the natural outcome of the form of the story; but in the
+German composer's score the demons sing better than the saints. The
+heavenly airs belie their origin, and when the composer abandons the
+infernal motives he returns to them as soon as possible, fatigued with
+the effort of keeping aloof from them. Melody, the golden thread that
+ought never to be lost throughout so vast a plan, often vanishes from
+Meyerbeer's work. Feeling counts for nothing, the heart has no part
+in it. Hence we never come upon those happy inventions, those artless
+scenes, which captivate all our sympathies and leave a blissful
+impression on the soul.
+
+"Harmony reigns supreme, instead of being the foundation from which
+the melodic groups of the musical picture stand forth. These discordant
+combinations, far from moving the listener, arouse in him a feeling
+analogous to that which he would experience on seeing a rope-dancer
+hanging to a thread and swaying between life and death. Never does a
+soothing strain come in to mitigate the fatiguing suspense. It really is
+as though the composer had had no other object in view than to produce
+a baroque effect without troubling himself about musical truth or unity,
+or about the capabilities of human voices which are swamped by this
+flood of instrumental noise."
+
+"Silence, my friend!" cried Gambara. "I am still under the spell of
+that glorious chorus of hell, made still more terrible by the long
+trumpets,--a new method of instrumentation. The broken _cadenzas_ which
+give such force to Robert's scene, the _cavatina_ in the fourth act, the
+_finale_ of the first, all hold me in the grip of a supernatural power.
+No, not even Gluck's declamation ever produced so prodigious an effect,
+and I am amazed by such skill and learning."
+
+"Signor Maestro," said Andrea, smiling, "allow me to contradict you.
+Gluck, before he wrote, reflected long; he calculated the chances,
+and he decided on a plan which might be subsequently modified by his
+inspirations as to detail, but hindered him from ever losing his way.
+Hence his power of emphasis, his declamatory style thrilling with
+life and truth. I quite agree with you that Meyerbeer's learning is
+transcendent; but science is a defect when it evicts inspiration, and
+it seems to me that we have in this opera the painful toil of a refined
+craftsman who in his music has but picked up thousands of phrases out
+of other operas, damned or forgotten, and appropriated them, while
+extending, modifying, or condensing them. But he has fallen into the
+error of all selectors of _centos_,--an abuse of good things. This
+clever harvester of notes is lavish of discords, which, when too often
+introduced, fatigue the ear till those great effects pall upon it which
+a composer should husband with care to make the more effective use of
+them when the situation requires it. These enharmonic passages recur
+to satiety, and the abuse of the plagal cadence deprives it of its
+religious solemnity.
+
+"I know, of course, that every musician has certain forms to which he
+drifts back in spite of himself; he should watch himself so as to avoid
+that blunder. A picture in which there were no colors but blue and red
+would be untrue to nature, and fatigue the eye. And thus the constantly
+recurring rhythm in the score of _Robert le Diable_ makes the work, as
+a whole, appear monotonous. As to the effect of the long trumpets, of
+which you speak, it has long been known in Germany; and what Meyerbeer
+offers us as a novelty was constantly used by Mozart, who gives just
+such a chorus to the devils in _Don Giovanni_."
+
+By plying Gambara, meanwhile, with fresh libations, Andrea thus strove,
+by his contradictoriness, to bring the musician back to a true sense of
+music, by proving to him that his so-called mission was not to try to
+regenerate an art beyond his powers, but to seek to express himself in
+another form; namely, that of poetry.
+
+"But, my dear Count, you have understood nothing of that stupendous
+musical drama," said Gambara, airily, as standing in front of Andrea's
+piano he struck the keys, listened to the tone, and then seated himself,
+meditating for a few minutes as if to collect his ideas.
+
+"To begin with, you must know," said he, "that an ear as practised as
+mine at once detected that labor of choice and setting of which you
+spoke. Yes, the music has been selected, lovingly, from the storehouse
+of a rich and fertile imagination wherein learning has squeezed every
+idea to extract the very essence of music. I will illustrate the
+process."
+
+He rose to carry the candles into the adjoining room, and before sitting
+down again he drank a full glass of Giro, a Sardinian wine, as full of
+fire as the old wines of Tokay can inspire.
+
+"Now, you see," said Gambara, "this music is not written for
+misbelievers, nor for those who know not love. If you have never
+suffered from the virulent attacks of an evil spirit who shifts your
+object just as you are taking aim, who puts a fatal end to your highest
+hopes,--in one word, if you have never felt the devil's tail whisking
+over the world, the opera of _Robert le Diable_ must be to you, what the
+Apocalypse is to those who believe that all things will end with
+them. But if, persecuted and wretched, you understand that Spirit of
+Evil,--the monstrous ape who is perpetually employed in destroying the
+work of God,--if you can conceive of him as having, not indeed loved,
+but ravished, an almost divine woman, and achieved through her the
+joy of paternity; as so loving his son that he would rather have him
+eternally miserable with himself than think of him as eternally happy
+with God; if, finally, you can imagine the mother's soul for ever
+hovering over the child's head to snatch it from the atrocious
+temptations offered by its father,--even then you will have but a faint
+idea of this stupendous drama, which needs but little to make it worthy
+of comparison with Mozart's _Don Giovanni_. _Don Giovanni_ is in its
+perfection the greater, I grant; _Robert le Diable_ expresses ideas,
+_Don Giovanni_ arouses sensations. _Don Giovanni_ is as yet the only
+musical work in which harmony and melody are combined in exactly the
+right proportions. In this lies its only superiority, for _Robert_ is
+the richer work. But how vain are such comparisons since each is so
+beautiful in its own way!
+
+"To me, suffering as I do from the demon's repeated shocks, Robert spoke
+with greater power than to you; it struck me as being at the same time
+vast and concentrated.
+
+"Thanks to you, I have been transported to the glorious land of dreams
+where our senses expand, and the world works on a scale which is
+gigantic as compared with man."
+
+He was silent for a space.
+
+"I am trembling still," said the ill-starred artist, "from the four bars
+of cymbals which pierced to my marrow as they opened that short,
+abrupt introduction with its solo for trombone, its flutes, oboes,
+and clarionet, all suggesting the most fantastic effects of color. The
+_andante_ in C minor is a foretaste of the subject of the evocation of
+the ghosts in the abbey, and gives grandeur to the scene by anticipating
+the spiritual struggle. I shivered."
+
+Gambara pressed the keys with a firm hand and expanded Meyerbeer's theme
+in a masterly _fantasia_, a sort of outpouring of his soul after the
+manner of Liszt. It was no longer the piano, it was a whole orchestra
+that they heard; the very genius of music rose before them.
+
+"That was worthy of Mozart!" he exclaimed. "See how that German can
+handle his chords, and through what masterly modulations he raises the
+image of terror to come to the dominant C. I can hear all hell in it!
+
+"The curtain rises. What do I see? The only scene to which we gave the
+epithet infernal: an orgy of knights in Sicily. In that chorus in F
+every human passion is unchained in a bacchanalian _allegro_. Every
+thread by which the devil holds us is pulled. Yes, that is the sort of
+glee that comes over men when they dance on the edge of a precipice;
+they make themselves giddy. What _go_ there is in that chorus!
+
+"Against that chorus--the reality of life--the simple life of every-day
+virtue stands out in the air, in G minor, sung by Raimbaut. For a moment
+it refreshed my spirit to hear the simple fellow, representative of
+verdurous and fruitful Normandy, which he brings to Robert's mind in the
+midst of his drunkenness. The sweet influence of his beloved native land
+lends a touch of tender color to this gloomy opening.
+
+"Then comes the wonderful air in C major, supported by the chorus in C
+minor, so expressive of the subject. '_Je suis Robert_!' he immediately
+breaks out. The wrath of the prince, insulted by his vassal, is already
+more than natural anger; but it will die away, for memories of his
+childhood come to him, with Alice, in the bright and graceful _allegro_
+in A major.
+
+"Can you not hear the cries of the innocent dragged into this infernal
+drama,--a persecuted creature? '_Non, non_,'" sang Gambara, who made the
+consumptive piano sing. "His native land and tender emotions have come
+back to him; his childhood and its memories have blossomed anew in
+Robert's heart. And now his mother's shade rises up, bringing with it
+soothing religious thoughts. It is religion that lives in that beautiful
+song in E major, with its wonderful harmonic and melodic progression in
+the words:
+
+  "Car dans les cieux, comme sur la terre,
+  Sa mere va prier pour lui.
+
+"Here the struggle begins between the unseen powers and the only human
+being who has the fire of hell in his veins to enable him to resist
+them; and to make this quite clear, as Bertram comes on, the great
+musician has given the orchestra a passage introducing a reminiscence of
+Raimbaut's ballad. What a stroke of art! What cohesion of all the parts!
+What solidity of structure!
+
+"The devil is there, in hiding, but restless. The conflict of the
+antagonistic powers opens with Alice's terror; she recognizes the devil
+of the image of Saint Michael in her village. The musical subject
+is worked out through an endless variety of phases. The antithesis
+indispensable in opera is emphatically presented in a noble
+_recitative_, such as a Gluck might have composed, between Bertram and
+Robert:
+
+  "Tu se sauras jamais a quel exces je t'aime.
+
+"In that diabolical C minor, Bertram, with his terrible bass, begins his
+work of undermining which will overthrow every effort of the vehement,
+passionate man.
+
+"Here, everything is appalling. Will the crime get possession of the
+criminal? Will the executioner seize his victim? Will sorrow consume
+the artist's genius? Will the disease kill the patient? or, will the
+guardian angel save the Christian?
+
+"Then comes the _finale_, the gambling scene in which Bertram tortures
+his son by rousing him to tremendous emotions. Robert, beggared,
+frenzied, searching everything, eager for blood, fire, and sword, is his
+own son; in this mood he is exactly like his father. What hideous glee
+we hear in Bertram's words: '_Je ris de tes coups_!' And how perfectly
+the Venetian _barcarole_ comes in here. Through what wonderful
+transitions the diabolical parent is brought on to the stage once more
+to make Robert throw the dice.
+
+"This first act is overwhelming to any one capable of working out the
+subjects in his very heart, and lending them the breadth of development
+which the composer intended them to call forth.
+
+"Nothing but love could now be contrasted with this noble symphony of
+song, in which you will detect no monotony, no repetitions of means and
+effects. It is one, but many; the characteristic of all that is truly
+great and natural.
+
+"I breathe more freely; I find myself in the elegant circle of a gallant
+court; I hear Isabella's charming phrases, fresh, but almost melancholy,
+and the female chorus in two divisions, and in _imitation_, with a
+suggestion of the Moorish coloring of Spain. Here the terrifying music
+is softened to gentler hues, like a storm dying away, and ends in the
+florid prettiness of a duet wholly unlike anything that has come before
+it. After the turmoil of a camp full of errant heroes, we have a picture
+of love. Poet! I thank thee! My heart could not have borne much more. If
+I could not here and there pluck the daisies of a French light opera, if
+I could not hear the gentle wit of a woman able to love and to charm,
+I could not endure the terrible deep note on which Bertram comes in,
+saying to his son: '_Si je la permets_!' when Robert had promised the
+princess he adores that he will conquer with the arms she has bestowed
+on him.
+
+"The hopes of the gambler cured by love, the love of a most beautiful
+woman,--did you observe that magnificent Sicilian, with her hawk's eye
+secure of her prey? (What interpreters that composer has found!) the
+hopes of the man are mocked at by the hopes of hell in the tremendous
+cry: '_A toi, Robert de Normandie_!'
+
+"And are not you struck by the gloom and horror of those long-held
+notes, to which the words are set: '_Dans la foret prochaine_'? We find
+here all the sinister spells of _Jerusalem Delivered_, just as we find
+all chivalry in the chorus with the Spanish lilt, and in the march tune.
+How original is the _alegro_ with the modulations of the four cymbals
+(tuned to C, D, C, G)! How elegant is the call to the lists! The whole
+movement of the heroic life of the period is there: the mind enters into
+it; I read in it a romance, a poem of chivalry. The _exposition_ is now
+finished; the resources of music would seem to be exhausted; you have
+never heard anything like it before; and yet it is homogeneous. You have
+had life set before you, and its one and only _crux_: 'Shall I be happy
+or unhappy?' is the philosopher's query. 'Shall I be saved or damned?'
+asks the Christian."
+
+With these words Gambara struck the last chord of the chorus, dwelt on
+it with a melancholy modulation, and then rose to drink another large
+glass of Giro. This half-African vintage gave his face a deeper flush,
+for his passionate and wonderful sketch of Meyerbeer's opera had made
+him turn a little pale.
+
+"That nothing may be lacking to this composition," he went on, "the
+great artist has generously added the only _buffo_ duet permissible for
+a devil: that in which he tempts the unhappy troubadour. The composer
+has set jocosity side by side with horror--a jocosity in which he mocks
+at the only realism he had allowed himself amid the sublime imaginings
+of his work--the pure calm love of Alice and Raimbaut; and their life is
+overshadowed by the forecast of evil.
+
+"None but a lofty soul can feel the noble style of these _buffo_ airs;
+they have neither the superabundant frivolity of Italian music nor the
+vulgar accent of French commonplace; rather have they the majesty of
+Olympus. There is the bitter laughter of a divine being mocking the
+surprise of a troubadour Don-Juanizing himself. But for this dignity we
+should be too suddenly brought down to the general tone of the opera,
+here stamped on that terrible fury of diminished sevenths which resolves
+itself into an infernal waltz, and finally brings us face to face with
+the demons.
+
+"How emphatically Bertram's couplet stands out in B minor against that
+diabolical chorus, depicting his paternity, but mingling in fearful
+despair with these demoniacal strains.
+
+"Then comes the delightful transition of Alice's reappearance, with
+the _ritornel_ in B flat. I can still hear that air of angelical
+simplicity--the nightingale after a storm. Thus the grand leading
+idea of the whole is worked out in the details; for what could be more
+perfectly in contrast with the tumult of devils tossing in the pit than
+that wonderful air given to Alice? '_Quand j'ai quitte la Normandie_.'
+
+"The golden thread of melody flows on, side by side with the mighty
+harmony, like a heavenly hope; it is embroidered on it, and with what
+marvelous skill! Genius never lets go of the science that guides it.
+Here Alice's song is in B flat leading into F sharp, the key of the
+demon's chorus. Do you hear the tremolo in the orchestra? The host of
+devils clamor for Robert.
+
+"Bertram now reappears, and this is the culminating point of musical
+interest; after a _recitative_, worthy of comparison with the finest
+work of the great masters, comes the fierce conflict in E flat between
+two tremendous forces--one on the words '_Oui, tu me connais_!' on a
+diminished seventh; the other, on that sublime F, '_Le ciel est avec
+moi_.' Hell and the Crucifix have met for battle. Next we have Bertram
+threatening Alice, the most violent pathos ever heard--the Spirit of
+Evil expatiating complacently, and, as usual, appealing to personal
+interest. Robert's arrival gives us the magnificent unaccompanied trio
+in A flat, the first skirmish between the two rival forces and the man.
+And note how clearly that is expressed," said Gambara, epitomizing the
+scene with such passion of expression as startled Andrea.
+
+"All this avalanche of music, from the clash of cymbals in common time,
+has been gathering up to this contest of three voices. The magic of evil
+triumphs! Alice flies, and you have the duet in D between Bertram and
+Robert. The devil sets his talons in the man's heart; he tears it to
+make it his own; he works on every feeling. Honor, hope, eternal and
+infinite pleasures--he displays them all. He places him, as he did
+Jesus, on the pinnacle of the Temple, and shows him all the treasures of
+the earth, the storehouse of sin. He nettles him to flaunt his courage;
+and the man's nobler mind is expressed in his exclamation:
+
+  "Des chevaliers de ma patrie
+  L'honneur toujours fut le soutien!
+
+"And finally, to crown the work, the theme comes in which sounded
+the note of fatality at the beginning. Thus, the leading strain, the
+magnificent call to the deed:
+
+  "Nonnes qui reposez sous cette froide pierre,
+  M'entendez-vous?
+
+"The career of the music, gloriously worked out, is gloriously finished
+by the _allegro vivace_ of the bacchanalian chorus in D minor. This,
+indeed, is the triumph of hell! Roll on, harmony, and wrap us in
+a thousand folds! Roll on, bewitch us! The powers of darkness have
+clutched their prey; they hold him while they dance. The great genius,
+born to conquer and to reign, is lost! The devils rejoice, misery
+stifles genius, passion will wreck the knight!"
+
+And here Gambara improvised a _fantasia_ of his own on the bacchanalian
+chorus, with ingenious variations, and humming the air in a melancholy
+drone as if to express the secret sufferings he had known.
+
+"Do you hear the heavenly lamentations of neglected love?" he said.
+"Isabella calls to Robert above the grand chorus of knights riding forth
+to the tournament, in which the _motifs_ of the second act reappear to
+make it clear that the third act has all taken place in a supernatural
+sphere. This is real life again. This chorus dies away at the approach
+of the hellish enchantment brought by Robert with the talisman. The
+deviltry of the third act is to be carried on. Here we have the duet
+with the viol; the rhythm is highly expressive of the brutal desires of
+a man who is omnipotent, and the Princess, by plaintive phrases, tries
+to win her lover back to moderation. The musician has here placed
+himself in a situation of great difficulty, and has surmounted it in the
+loveliest number of the whole opera. How charming is the melody of the
+_cavatina 'Grace pour toi!'_ All the women present understood it well;
+each saw herself seized and snatched away on the stage. That part alone
+would suffice to make the fortune of the opera. Every woman felt herself
+engaged in a struggle with some violent lover. Never was music so
+passionate and so dramatic.
+
+"The whole world now rises in arms against the reprobate. This _finale_
+may be criticised for its resemblance to that of _Don Giovanni_; but
+there is this immense difference: in Isabella we have the expression of
+the noblest faith, a true love that will save Robert, for he scornfully
+rejects the infernal powers bestowed on him, while Don Giovanni persists
+in his unbelief. Moreover, that particular fault is common to every
+composer who has written a _finale_ since Mozart. The _finale_ to _Don
+Giovanni_ is one of those classic forms that are invented once for all.
+
+"At last religion wins the day, uplifting the voice that governs worlds,
+that invites all sorrow to come for consolation, all repentance to be
+forgiven and helped.
+
+"The whole house was stirred by the chorus:
+
+  "Malheureaux on coupables
+  Hatez-vous d'accourir!
+
+"In the terrific tumult of raving passions, the holy Voice would have
+been unheard; but at this critical moment it sounds like thunder; the
+divine Catholic Church rises glorious in light. And here I was amazed to
+find that after such lavish use of harmonic treasure, the composer
+had come upon a new vein with the splendid chorus: '_Gloire a la
+Providence_' in the manner of Handel.
+
+"Robert rushes on with his heartrending cry: '_Si je pouvais prier_!'
+and Bertram, driven by the infernal decree, pursues his son, and makes a
+last effort. Alice has called up the vision of the Mother, and now comes
+the grand trio to which the whole opera has led up: the triumph of the
+soul over matter, of the Spirit of Good over the Spirit of Evil. The
+strains of piety prevail over the chorus of hell, and happiness appears
+glorious; but here the music is weaker. I only saw a cathedral
+instead of hearing a concert of angels in bliss, and a divine prayer
+consecrating the union of Robert and Isabella. We ought not to have been
+left oppressed by the spells of hell; we ought to emerge with hope in
+our heart.
+
+"I, as musician and a Catholic, wanted another prayer like that in
+_Mose_. I should have liked to see how Germany would contend with Italy,
+what Meyerbeer could do in rivalry with Rossini.
+
+"However, in spite of this trifling blemish, the writer cannot say that
+after five hours of such solid music, a Parisian prefers a bit of ribbon
+to a musical masterpiece. You heard how the work was applauded; it will
+go through five hundred performances! If the French really understand
+that music----"
+
+"It is because it expresses ideas," the Count put in.
+
+"No; it is because it sets forth in a definite shape a picture of the
+struggle in which so many perish, and because every individual life is
+implicated in it through memory. Ah! I, hapless wretch, should have been
+too happy to hear the sound of those heavenly voices I have so often
+dreamed of."
+
+Hereupon Gambara fell into a musical day-dream, improvising the most
+lovely melodious and harmonious _cavatina_ that Andrea would ever hear
+on earth; a divine strain divinely performed on a theme as exquisite as
+that of _O filii et filioe_, but graced with additions such as none but
+the loftiest musical genius could devise.
+
+The Count sat lost in keen admiration; the clouds cleared away, the blue
+sky opened, figures of angels appeared lifting the veil that hid the
+sanctuary, and the light of heaven poured down.
+
+There was a sudden silence.
+
+The Count, surprised at the cessation of the music, looked at Gambara,
+who, with fixed gaze, in the attitude of a visionary, murmured the word:
+"God!"
+
+Andrea waited till the composer had descended from the enchanted realm
+to which he had soared on the many-hued wings of inspiration, intending
+to show him the truth by the light he himself would bring down with him.
+
+"Well," said he, pouring him out another bumper of wine and clinking
+glasses with him, "this German has, you see, written a sublime opera
+without troubling himself with theories, while those musicians who write
+grammars of harmony may, like literary critics, be atrocious composers."
+
+"Then you do not like my music?"
+
+"I do not say so. But if, instead of carrying musical principles to an
+extreme--which takes you too far--you would simply try to arouse
+our feelings, you would be better understood, unless indeed you have
+mistaken your vocation. You are a great poet."
+
+"What," cried Gambara, "are twenty-five years of study in vain? Am I to
+learn the imperfect language of men when I have the key to the heavenly
+tongue? Oh, if you are right,--I should die."
+
+"No, no. You are great and strong; you would begin life again, and I
+would support you. We would show the world the noble and rare alliance
+of a rich man and an artist in perfect sympathy and understanding."
+
+"Do you mean it?" asked Gambara, struck with amazement.
+
+"As I have told you, you are a poet more than a musician."
+
+"A poet, a poet! It is better than nothing. But tell me truly, which do
+you esteem most highly, Mozart or Homer?"
+
+"I admire them equally."
+
+"On your honor?"
+
+"On my honor."
+
+"H'm! Once more. What do you think of Meyerbeer and Byron?"
+
+"You have measured them by naming them together."
+
+The Count's carriage was waiting. The composer and his noble physician
+ran down-stairs, and in a few minutes they were with Marianna.
+
+As they went in, Gambara threw himself into his wife's arms, but she
+drew back a step and turned away her head; the husband also drew back
+and beamed on the Count.
+
+"Oh, monsieur!" said Gambara in a husky voice, "you might have left me
+my illusions." He hung his head, and then fell.
+
+"What have you done to him? He is dead drunk!" cried Marianna, looking
+down at her husband with a mingled expression of pity and disgust.
+
+The Count, with the help of his servant, picked up Gambara and laid him
+on his bed.
+
+Then Andrea left, his heart exultant with horrible gladness.
+
+
+
+The Count let the usual hour for calling slip past next day, for he
+began to fear lest he had duped himself and had made this humble couple
+pay too dear for their improved circumstances and added wisdom, since
+their peace was destroyed for ever.
+
+At last Giardini came to him with a note from Marianna.
+
+"Come," she wrote, "the mischief is not so great as you so cruelly meant
+it to be."
+
+"Excellenza," said the cook, while Andrea was making ready, "you
+treated us splendidly last evening. But apart from the wine, which
+was excellent, your steward did not put anything on the table that was
+worthy to set before a true epicure. You will not deny, I suppose, that
+the dish I sent to you on the day when you did me the honor to sit down
+at my board, contained the quintessence of all those that disgraced your
+magnificent service of plate? And when I awoke this morning I remembered
+the promise you once made me of a place as _chef_. Henceforth I consider
+myself as a member of your household."
+
+"I thought of the same thing a few days ago," replied Andrea. "I
+mentioned you to the secretary of the Austrian Embassy, and you have
+permission to recross the Alps as soon as you please. I have a castle
+in Croatia which I rarely visit. There you may combine the offices of
+gate-keeper, butler, and steward, with two hundred crowns a year. Your
+wife will have as much for doing all the rest of the work. You may make
+all the experiments you please _in anima vili_, that is to say on the
+stomach of my vassals. Here is a cheque for your traveling expenses."
+
+Giardini kissed the Count's hand after the Neapolitan fashion.
+
+"Excellenza," said he, "I accept the cheque, but beg to decline the
+place. It would dishonor me to give up my art by losing the opinion of
+the most perfect epicures, who are certainly to be found in Paris."
+
+When Andrea arrived at Gambara's lodgings, the musician rose to welcome
+him.
+
+"My generous friend," said he, with the utmost frankness, "you either
+took advantage, last evening, of the weakness of my brain to make a fool
+of me, or else your brain is no more capable of standing the test of
+the heady liquors of our native Latium, than mine is. I will assume this
+latter hypothesis; I would rather doubt your digestion than your heart.
+Be this as it may, henceforth I drink no more wine--for ever. The
+abuse of good liquor last evening led me into much guilty folly. When I
+remember that I very nearly----" He gave a glance of terror at Marianna.
+"As to the wretched opera you took me to hear, I have thought it over,
+and it is, after all, music written on ordinary lines, a mountain of
+piled-up notes, _verba et voces_. It is but the dregs of the nectar
+I can drink in deep draughts as I reproduce the heavenly music that I
+hear! It is a patchwork of airs of which I could trace the origin. The
+passage '_Gloire a la Providence_' is too much like a bit of Handel;
+the chorus of knights is closely related to the Scotch air in _La Dame
+Blanche_; in short, if this opera is a success, it is because the music
+is borrowed from everybody's--so it ought to be popular.
+
+"I will say good-bye to you, my dear friend. I have had some ideas
+seething in my brain since the morning that only wait to soar up to
+God on the wings of song, but I wished to see you. Good-bye; I must ask
+forgiveness of the Muse. We shall meet at dinner to-night--but no wine;
+at any rate, none for me. I am firmly resolved--"
+
+"I give him up!" cried Andrea, flushing red.
+
+"And you restore my sense of conscience," said Marianna. "I dared not
+appeal to it! My friend, my friend, it is no fault of ours; he does not
+want to be cured."
+
+
+
+Six years after this, in January 1837, such artists as were so unlucky
+as to damage their wind or stringed instruments, generally took them to
+the Rue Froid-Manteau, to a squalid and horrible house, where, on the
+fifth floor, dwelt an old Italian named Gambara.
+
+For five years past he had been left to himself, deserted by his wife;
+he had gone through many misfortunes. An instrument on which he had
+relied to make his fortune, and which he called a _Panharmonicon_, had
+been sold by order of the Court on the public square, Place du Chatelet,
+together with a cartload of music paper scrawled with notes. The day
+after the sale, these scores had served in the market to wrap up butter,
+fish, and fruit.
+
+Thus the three grand operas of which the poor man would boast, but which
+an old Neapolitan cook, who was now but a patcher up of broken meats,
+declared to be a heap of nonsense, were scattered throughout Paris on
+the trucks of costermongers. But at any rate, the landlord had got his
+rent and the bailiffs their expenses.
+
+According to the Neapolitan cook--who warmed up for the street-walkers
+of the Rue Froid-Manteau the fragments left from the most sumptuous
+dinners in Paris--Signora Gambara had gone off to Italy with a Milanese
+nobleman, and no one knew what had become of her. Worn out with
+fifteen years of misery, she was very likely ruining the Count by her
+extravagant luxury, for they were so devotedly adoring, that in all his
+life, Giardini could recall no instance of such a passion.
+
+Towards the end of that very January, one evening when Giardini was
+chatting with a girl who had come to buy her supper, about the divine
+Marianna--so poor, so beautiful, so heroically devoted, and who had,
+nevertheless, "gone the way of them all," the cook, his wife, and the
+street-girl saw coming towards them a woman fearfully thin, with a
+sunburned, dusty face; a nervous walking skeleton, looking at the
+numbers, and trying to recognize a house.
+
+"_Ecco la Marianna_!" exclaimed the cook.
+
+Marianna recognized Giardini, the erewhile cook, in the poor fellow she
+saw, without wondering by what series of disasters he had sunk to keep
+a miserable shop for secondhand food. She went in and sat down, for she
+had come from Fontainebleau. She had walked fourteen leagues that day,
+after begging her bread from Turin to Paris.
+
+She frightened that terrible trio! Of all her wondrous beauty nothing
+remained but her fine eyes, dimmed and sunken. The only thing faithful
+to her was misfortune.
+
+She was welcomed by the skilled old instrument mender, who greeted her
+with unspeakable joy.
+
+"Why, here you are, my poor Marianna!" said he, warmly. "During your
+absence they sold up my instrument and my operas."
+
+It would have been difficult to kill the fatted calf for the return of
+the Samaritan, but Giardini contributed the fag end of a salmon, the
+trull paid for wine, Gambara produced some bread, Signora Giardini lent
+a cloth, and the unfortunates all supped together in the musician's
+garret.
+
+When questioned as to her adventures, Marianna would make no reply; she
+only raised her beautiful eyes to heaven and whispered to Giardini:
+
+"He married a dancer!"
+
+"And how do you mean to live?" said the girl. "The journey has ruined
+you, and----"
+
+"And made me an old woman," said Marianna. "No, that is not the result
+of fatigue or hardship, but of grief."
+
+"And why did you never send your man here any money?" asked the girl.
+
+Marianna's only answer was a look, but it went to the woman's heart.
+
+"She is proud with a vengeance!" she exclaimed. "And much good it has
+done her!" she added in Giardini's ear.
+
+All that year musicians took especial care of their instruments, and
+repairs did not bring in enough to enable the poor couple to pay their
+way; the wife, too, did not earn much by her needle, and they were
+compelled to turn their talents to account in the lowest form of
+employment. They would go out together in the dark to the Champs Elysees
+and sing duets, which Gambara, poor fellow, accompanied on a wretched
+guitar. On the way, Marianna, who on these expeditions covered her head
+with a sort of veil of coarse muslin, would take her husband to the
+grocer's shop in the Faubourg Saint-Honore and give him two or three
+thimblefuls of brandy to make him tipsy; otherwise he could not play.
+Then they would stand up together in front of the smart people sitting
+on the chairs, and one of the greatest geniuses of the time, the
+unrecognized Orpheus of Modern Music, would perform passages from his
+operas--pieces so remarkable that they would extract a few half-pence
+from Parisian supineness. When some _dilettante_ of comic operas
+happened to be sitting there and did not recognize from what work they
+were taken, he would question the woman dressed like a Greek priestess,
+who held out a bottle-stand of stamped metal in which she collected
+charity.
+
+"I say, my dear, what is that music out of?"
+
+"The opera of _Mahomet_," Marianna would reply.
+
+As Rossini composed an opera called _Mahomet II._, the amateur would say
+to his wife, sitting at his side:
+
+"What a pity it is that they will never give us at the Italiens any
+operas by Rossini but those we know. That is really fine music!"
+
+And Gambara would smile.
+
+
+
+Only a few days since, this unhappy couple had to pay the trifling sum
+of thirty-six francs as arrears for rent for the cock-loft in which they
+lived resigned. The grocer would not give them credit for the brandy
+with which Marianna plied her husband to enable him to play. Gambara
+was, consequently, so unendurably bad that the ears of the wealthy were
+irresponsive, and the tin bottle-stand remained empty.
+
+It was nine o'clock in the evening. A handsome Italian, the Principessa
+Massimilla De Varese, took pity on the poor creatures; she gave them
+forty francs and questioned them, discerning from the woman's thanks
+that she was a Venetian. Prince Emilio would know the history of their
+woes, and Marianna told it, making no complaints of God or men.
+
+"Madame," said Gambara, as she ended, for he was sober, "we are
+victims of our own superiority. My music is good. But as soon as music
+transcends feeling and becomes an idea, only persons of genius should
+be the hearers, for they alone are capable of responding to it! It is my
+misfortune that I have heard the chorus of angels, and believed that men
+could understand the strains. The same thing happens to women when their
+love assumes a divine aspect: men cannot understand them."
+
+This speech was well worth the forty francs bestowed by Massimilla;
+she took out a second gold piece, and told Marianna she would write to
+Andrea Marcosini.
+
+"Do not write to him, madame!" exclaimed Marianna. "And God grant you to
+always be beautiful!"
+
+"Let us provide for them," said the Princess to her husband; "for this
+man has remained faithful to the Ideal which we have killed."
+
+As he saw the gold pieces, Gambara shed tears; and then a vague
+reminiscence of old scientific experiments crossed his mind, and the
+hapless composer, as he wiped his eyes, spoke these words, which the
+circumstances made pathetic:
+
+"Water is a product of burning."
+
+
+PARIS, June 1837.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+     Varese, Emilio Memmi, Prince of
+       Massimilla Doni
+
+     Varese, Princess of
+       Massimilla Doni
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Gambara, by Honore de Balzac
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