_13 Rosengasse, Frankfurt, Tuesday Morning, August 1872._
... Last night I was at the theatre and heard _Die Judin_ (_La Juive_),
and was thereby terribly excited. At last, in the middle of the fifth
act, which was perfectly beastly, I had to slope. I could stand even
seeing the cauldron with the sham fire beneath, and the two hateful
executioners in red; but when at last the girl's courage breaks down,
and, grasping her father's arm, she cries out--O so shudderfully!--I
thought it high time to be out of that _galere_, and so I do not know
yet whether it ends well or ill; but if I ever afterwards find that they
do carry things to the extremity, I shall think more meanly of my
species. It was raining and cold outside, so I went into a _Bierhalle_,
and sat and brooded over a _Schnitt_ (half-glass) for nearly an hour. An
opera is far more _real_ than real life to me. It seems as if stage
illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional
illusion of them all--an opera--would never stale upon me. I wish that
life was an opera. I should like to _live_ in one; but I don't know in
what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so constituted.
Besides, it would soon pall: imagine asking for three-kreuzer cigars in
recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your dirty
clothes in a sustained and _flourishous_ aria.
I am in a right good mood this morning to sit here and write to you; but
not to give you news. There is a great stir of life, in a quiet, almost
country fashion, all about us here. Some one is hammering a beef-steak
in the _rez-de-chaussee_: there is a great clink of pitchers and noise
of the pump-handle at the public well in the little square-kin round the
corner. The children, all seemingly within a month, and certainly none
above five, that always go halting and stumbling up and down the
roadway, are ordinarily very quiet, and sit sedately puddling in the
gutter, trying, I suppose, poor little devils! to understand their
_Muttersprache_; but they, too, make themselves heard from time to time
in little incomprehensible antiphonies, about the drift that comes down
to them by their rivers from the strange lands higher up the Gasse.
Above all, there is here such a twittering of canaries (I can see twelve
out of our window), and such continual visitation of grey doves and
big-nosed sparrows, as make our little bye-street into a perfect aviary.
I look across the Gasse at our opposite neighbour, as he dandles his
baby about, and occasionally takes a spoonful or two of some pale slimy
nastiness that looks like _dead porridge_, if you can take the
conception. These two are his only occupations. All day long you can
hear him singing over the brat when he is not eating; or see him eating
when he is not keeping baby. Besides which, there comes into his house a
continual round of visitors that puts me in mind of the luncheon hour at
home. As he has thus no ostensible avocation, we have named him "the
W.S." to give a flavour of respectability to the street.
Enough of the Gasse. The weather is here much colder. It rained a good
deal yesterday; and though it is fair and sunshiny again to-day, and we
can still sit, of course, with our windows open, yet there is no more
excuse for the siesta; and the bathe in the river, except for
cleanliness, is no longer a necessity of life. The Main is very swift.
In one part of the baths it is next door to impossible to swim against
it, and I suspect that, out in the open, it would be quite
impossible.--Adieu, my dear mother, and believe me, ever your
affectionate son,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
(_Rentier_).