"If anything could make a man forgive himself for being sixty years
old," said the Consul, holding up his wine-glass between his eye and
the setting sun,--for it was summer-time, "it would be that he can
remember M. ---- in her divine sixteenity at the Park Theatre, thirty
odd years ago. Egad, Sir, one couldn't help making great allowances
for _Don Giovanni_, after seeing her in _Zerlina_. She was beyond
imagination _piquante_ and delicious."
The Consul, as my readers may have partly inferred, was not a Roman
Consul, nor yet a French one. He had had the honor of representing
this great republic at one of the Hanse Towns,--I forget which,--in
President Monroe's time. I don't recollect how long he held the
office, but it was long enough to make the title stick to him for
the rest of his life with the tenacity of a militia colonelcy or
village diaconate. The country people round about used to call him
"the _Counsel_" which, I believe,--for I am not very fresh from my
school-books,--was etymologically correct enough, however
orthoepically erroneous. He had not limited his European life,
however, within the precinct of his Hanseatic consulship, but had
dispersed himself very promiscuously over the Continent, and had
seen many cities, and the manners of many men--and of some women,--
singing-women, I mean, in their public character; for the Consul,
correct of life as of ear, never sought to undeify his divinities by
pursuing them from the heaven of the stage to the purgatorial
intermediacy of the _coulisses_, still less to the lower depth of
disenchantment into which too many of them sunk in their private life.
"Yes, Sir," he went on, "I have seen and heard them all,--Catalani,
Pasta, Pezzaroni, Grisi, and all the rest of them, even Sonntag,--
though not in her very best estate; but I give you my word there is
none that has taken lodgings here," tapping his forehead, "so
permanently as the Signorina G----, or that I can see and hear so
distinctly, when I am in the mood of it, by myself. _Rosina,
Desdemona, Cinderella_, and, as I said just now, _Zerlina_,--she is
as fresh in them all to my mind's eye and ear, as if the Park
Theatre had not given way to a cursed shoe-shop, and I had been
hearing her there only last night. Let's drink her memory," the
Consul added, half in mirth and half in melancholy,--a mood to which
he was not unused, and which did not ill become him.
Now no intelligent person, who knew the excellence of the Consul's
wine, could refuse to pay this posthumous honor to the harmonious
shade of the lost Muse. The Consul was an old-fashioned man in his
tastes, to be sure, and held to the old religion of Madeira which
divided the faith of our fathers with the Cambridge Platform, and
had never given in to the later heresies which have crept into the
communion of good-fellowship from the South of France and the Rhine.
"A glass of Champagne," he would say, "is all well enough at the end
of dinner, just to take the grease out of one's throat, and get the
palate ready for the more serious vintages ordained for the solemn
and deliberate drinking by which man justifies his creation; but
Madeira, Sir, Madeira is the only stand-by that never fails a man
and can always be depended upon as something sure and steadfast."
I confess to having fallen away myself from the gracious doctrine
and works to which he had held so fast; but I am no bigot,--which
for a heretic is something remarkable,--and had no scruple about
uniting with him in the service he proposed, without demur or
protestation as to form or substance. Indeed, he disarmed fanaticism
by the curious care he bestowed on making his works conformable to
the faith that was in him; for, partly by inheritance and partly by
industrious pains, his old house was undermined by a cellar of wine
such as is seldom seen in these days of modern degeneracy. He is the
last gentleman, that I know of, of that old school that used to
import their own wine and lay it down annually themselves,--their
bins forming a kind of vinous calendar suggestive of great events.
Their degenerate sons are content to be furnished, as they want it,
from the dubious stores of the vintner, by retail.
"I suppose it was her youth and beauty, Sir," I suggested, "that
made her so rememberable to you. You know she was barely turned
seventeen when she sung in this country."
"Partly that, no doubt," replied the Consul, "but not altogether,
nor chiefly. No, Sir, it was her genius which made her beauty so
glorious. She was wonderfully handsome, though. She was a phantom of
delight, as that Lake fellow says,"--it was thus profanely that the
Consul designated the poet Wordsworth, whom he could not abide,--
"and the best thing he ever said, by Jove!"
"And did you never see her again?" I inquired.
"Once, only," he answered,--"eight or nine years afterwards, a year
or two before she died. It was at Venice, and in _Norma_. She was
different, and yet not changed for the worse. There was an
indescribable look of sadness out of her eyes, that touched one
oddly and fixed itself in the memory. But she was something apart
and by herself, and stamped herself on one's mind as Rachel did in
_Camille_ or _Phèdre_. It was true genius, and no imitation, that
made both of them what they were. But she actually had the physical
beauty which Rachel only compelled you to think she had by the force
of her genius and consummate dramatic skill, while she was on the
scene before you."
"But do you rank M. ---- with Rachel as a dramatic artist?" I asked.
"I cannot tell," he answered; "but if she had not the studied
perfection of Rachel, which was always the same and could not be
altered without harm, she had at least a capacity of impulsive
self-adaptation about her which made her for the time the character
she personated,--not always the same, but such as the woman she
represented might have been in the shifting phases of the passion
that possessed her. And to think that she died at eight-and-twenty!
What might not ten years more have made her!"
"It is odd," I observed, "that her fame should be forever connected
with the name she got by her first unlucky marriage in New York. For
it was unlucky enough, I believe,--was it not?"
"You may say that," responded the Consul, "without fear of denial or
qualification. It was disgraceful in its beginning and in its ending.
It was a swindle on a large scale; and poor Maria G---- was the one
who suffered the most by the operation."
"I have always heard," said I, "that old G---- was cheated out of
the price for which he had sold his daughter, and that M. M. ----
got his wife on false pretences."
"Not altogether so," returned the Consul. "I happen to know all
about that matter from the best authority. She was obtained on false
pretences, to be sure, but it was not G---- that suffered by them.
M. M. ----, moreover, never paid the price agreed upon, and yet G----
got it for all that."
"Indeed!" I exclaimed, "it must have been a neat operation. I cannot
exactly see how the thing was done; but I have no doubt a tale hangs
thereby, and a good one. Is it tellable?"
"I see no reason why not," said the Consul; "the sufferer made no
secret of it, and I know of no reason why I should. Mynheer Van
Holland told me the story himself, in Amsterdam, in the year
'Thirty-five."
"And who was he?" I inquired, "and what had he to do with it?"
"I'll tell you," responded the Consul, filling his glass and passing
the bottle, "if you will have the goodness to shut the window behind
you and ring for candles; for it gets chilly here among the
mountains as soon as the sun is down."
I beg your pardon,--did you make a remark?--Oh, _what mountains_? You
must really pardon me; I cannot give you such a clue as that to the
identity of my dear Consul, just now, for excellent and sufficient
reasons. But if you have paid your money for the sight of this Number,
you may take your choice of all the mountain ranges on the continent,
from the Rocky to the White, and settle him just where you like. Only
you must leave a gap to the westward, through which the river--also
anonymous for the present distress--breaks its way, and which gives
him half an hour's more sunshine than he would otherwise be entitled
to, and slope the fields down to its margin near a mile off, with
their native timber thinned so skilfully as to have the effect of
the best landscape-gardening. It is a grand and lovely scene; and
when I look at it, I do not wonder at one of the Consul's apophthegms,
namely, that the chief advantage of foreign travel is, that it
teaches you that one place is just as good to live in as another.
Imagine that the one place he had in his mind at the time was just
this one. But that is neither here nor there. When candles came, we
drew our chairs together, and he told me in substance the following
story. I will tell it in my own words,--not that they are so good as
his, but because they come more readily to the nib of my pen.