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’hôte, 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 abbés, 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’hôte, 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’hôte. 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 ambassadorI 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
despotism!
“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’hôte.
“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 music,
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 to 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.