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 à 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 Châtelet,
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 Élysées
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-Honoré 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 Di 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