THE MYSTERIOUS PRIMA DONNA.
All fashionable Paris was excited over the announcement of a new prima
donna, whose wonderful achievements in Italian opera had set even the
exacting critics of Italy wild with enthusiasm and delight.
This great artiste was no other than the renowned Louise d'Armilly. She
had never before sung in the presence of a Parisian audience, but her
fame had preceded her, and it was accepted as certain that her triumph
at the Academie Royale would be both instantaneous and overwhelming.
She was to assume the role of Lucrezia Borgia, in Donizetti's brilliant
opera of that name, a role in which the enterprising director of the
Academie Royale assured the expectant public that she possessed no
equal.
For weeks every Parisian journal had been sounding her praises with
unremitting zeal, and now her name was as familiar as a household word
in all the high society salons, where the ladies and their gallants
could talk of nothing but the approaching operatic event, while in the
cafes and on the boulevards an equal degree of interest was exhibited.
Even the masses, notwithstanding the political agitation in which they
were involved, had caught the prevailing excitement, and the leaders of
the contending parties themselves paused amid their heated discussions
to talk of Louise d'Armilly.
The career of this young and beautiful artiste had been remarkable. Her
debut had been made at Brussels, about two years before, in company with
her brother, M. Leon d'Armilly, and there, as well as at all the
theatres of Italy, La Scala, Argentina and Valle, they had roused a
perfect storm of operatic enthusiasm.
The origin of this young artiste was veiled in the deepest mystery.
Rumor ascribed to her descent from one of the oldest and most
respectable families of France; and domestic trials, among which was a
matrimonial misadventure, no less than the arrest of an Italian Prince
whom she was about to wed, on the bridal night, as an escaped galley
slave, were assigned as the cause which had given her splendid powers to
the stage.
At an earlier hour than usual--for Parisian fashion never fills the
opera-house until the curtain falls on the second act--the Rue
Lepelletier was crowded with carriages, La Pinon with fiacres, and the
Grande Bateliere and the passages to the Boulevard des Italiens with
persons on foot, all hastening toward that magnificent edifice,
constructed within the space of a single year by Debret, to replace the
building in the Rue de Richelieu ordered to be razed by the Government
because of the assassination at its door of the Duke of Berri, in
1820--that magnificent structure which accommodates two thousand
spectators with seats.
Among the first in the orchestra stalls were Beauchamp and Debray, whose
attention was divided between the stage and the arrivals of splendidly
attired elegantes in the different loges, during the overture. All the
elite of Paris seemed on the qui vive.
"It will be a splendid house," observed Debray.
"The debutante, be she whom she may, should feel flattered by such an
unexampled assemblage of all the ton of Paris."
Orchestra, balcony, galleries, amphitheatres, lobbies and parterre were
packed; every portion of the vast edifice, in short, was thronged except
a few of the loges and baignoires, into which every moment brilliant
companies were entering.
"Who is that tall, dark military man, with the heavy moustache, now
making his way into the Minister's box?" asked Beauchamp, after a pause.
"That man is no less a personage than the Governor of Algeria, Eugene
Cavaignac, Marshal of Camp," said Debray. "He reported himself at the
War Office this morning, and is the lion of the house."
"Ah!" cried the journalist; "and that is the hero of Constantine! What a
frank, open countenance, and what a distingue bearing and manner!"
"You would not suppose all that man's life passed in a camp, would you?"
"His career has, I understand, been remarkable," said Beauchamp.
"Very. His father was a Conventionist of '92, a famous old fellow, who,
among other terrible things laid at his door, is said to have pawned an
old man's life, old Labodere, for his daughter's honor; somewhat, you
remember, as Francis I. spared St. Valliar's life for the favor of the
lovely Diana of Poitiers, his only child. His aged mother is yet living,
a woman of strong mind, though seventy, and he does nothing without her
advice. His brother Godefroi's name was notorious as that of a powerful
Republican leader for years before his decease. At eighteen Eugene
entered the Polytechnic School. At twenty-two he was a sub-lieutenant in
the engineer corps of the second regiment. In '28 he was first
lieutenant in France; in '29 he was captain; in '34 he was in Algeria;
and, in '39, his cool, bold, decided but discreet conduct had made him
chef de bataillon, despite the fact that he had incurred the Royal
displeasure some years before by a disloyal toast at a banquet. In '40
he was lieutenant-colonel; in '41 marshal of camp, and first commander
of division of Tlemeen; in '43, he was conqueror of Constantine, at the
first siege of which I so nearly lost my own valuable head, and he is
now Governor of Algeria, after service there of fourteen years."
"And the tall and sinewy man beside him, presenting such a contrast to
Cavaignac, with his light complexion, gray hair, and sullen and not very
intelligent expression?"
"Oh! that is General Bugeaud, by some deemed the real conqueror of
Algeria. But he's not at all popular with the army. His manners are
simple and excessively blunt. He is a perfect despot with his staff,
'tis said; yet he is quite a wag when in good-humor, and, at Ministerial
dinners, can unbend and make himself as agreeable as need be wished. His
voice is as harsh as a Cossack's, and in perfect contrast to that of
Cavaignac, which is the richest and most musical you ever heard, yet
distinct, emphatic and impressive."
"Bugeaud incurred intense odium with the opposition for his unwarranted
severity as jailor of the Duchess of Berri, in '34, and his killing
Dulong in a duel, because of a deserved taunt on the subject."
"Bugeaud did his duty," said the Secretary, "though a man of his nature
could hardly perform such a duty with gentleness. Bugeaud is not a
gentleman; he knows it, and don't try to seem one. He is only a soldier.
But there comes his very particular foe; General Lamoriciere. That
magnificent woman on his arm is his wife and the sister of the lady who
follows, with her husband, the ex-Minister, Adolphe Thiers."
"What a contrast!" cried Beauchamp. "The tall and elegant figure of
Lamoriciere, in his brilliant uniform of the Spahis, half oriental, half
French, with his lovely wife, and the low, swarthy little ex-Minister in
complete black, with his huge round spectacles on his nose nearly twice
the size of his eyes, and a wife on his arm nearly double his stature.
Why, Thiers reminds me of a Ghoul gallanting a Peri."
"And yet that same dark little ex-Minister has perhaps, in many respects
the most powerful mind--at all events, the most available mind--impelled
as it is by his restless ambition, in all France. Do you observe how
incessantly his keen black eye flashes around the house, beneath his
huge glasses?"
"He seems perfectly aware that every eye in the house is directed toward
his loge. But is it true that his brother-in-law owes his rapid rise to
his influence at Court?"
"By no means," replied Debray. "If there is a man in the French army who
has achieved his own fortunes, that man is Lamoriciere. He went to
Algeria a lieutenant, and bravely and gallantly has he attained his
present brilliant position. It was he who proposed the creation of a
corps of native Arab troops, like the Sepoys of British India; and he
was appointed colonel of the first regiment of Spahis. Our quondam
friend, Maximilian Morrel, has a command in this regiment, and is a
protege of his illustrious exemplar."
"The hostility between Lamoriciere and Bugeaud arises, I suppose, from
the latter's detestable disposition, his overbearing and dictatorial
temper. Lamoriciere is not a man, I take it, to be the slave of any
one."
"Rivalry in Africa is thought to have originated the feud," remarked
Debray, "and political differences in Paris to have inflamed it.
Bugeaud is a Legitimist, and Lamoriciere a Republican."
"Silence!" cried the musical connoisseurs in the orchestra. "The curtain
rises."
As the curtain rose a hush of expectation reigned over the audience. The
hum and bustle ceased, and silence most profound succeeded. The
appearance of the fair cantatrice was the signal for such a reception as
only a Parisian audience can give, and the first strains that issued
from her lips assured them that their applause was not misplaced.
And surely never was the dark Duchess of Ferrara more faithfully
personated than by the present artiste. This vraisemblance, which is so
seldom witnessed in the opera, seemed to strike every eye. Her figure
was tall and majestic, and voluptuously developed. Her air and bearing
were haughty, dignified, and queen-like. Her complexion was very dark,
but perfectly clear; her forehead broad and high; her brows heavy, but
gracefully arched; her eyes large, black and flashing; her hair dark as
night, and arranged with great simplicity in glossy bands; and her mouth
large, but filled with teeth of pearl-like whiteness, contrasted by lips
of coral wet with the spray. The entire outline of her face was Roman,
and exhibited in its contour and lineaments even more than Roman
sternness and decision; and its effect was still more heightened by a
large mole at one corner of her mouth and the velvet robes in which she
was appropriately costumed.
The scene between the Duchess and the Spaniard, Gubetta, was received
with the utmost applause, and the pathos of that between the son and his
unknown mother, which succeeded, touched the audience to tears; but when
the maskers rushed in and her vizard was torn off, and her true name
proclaimed, and, amid her heart-rending wailings, the curtain fell on
the first act, the shouts were perfectly thunderous with enthusiasm. The
role of Gennaro was performed by the brother of the cantatrice, Leon
d'Armilly, a young man of twenty, of delicate and graceful figure, and
as decidedly blonde as his sister was brunette. Nature seemed to have
made a great mistake in sex when this brother and sister were fashioned.
Indeed, it seemed hardly possible that they could be brother and sister,
a remark constantly made by the audience, and the kindred announced on
the bills was generally viewed as one of those convenient relationships
often assumed on the stage, but having no more reality than those of the
dramatis personae themselves.
"A second Pasta!" cried Chateau-Renaud, entering the stalls immediately
on the descent of the curtain. "Heard you ever such a magnificent
contralto?"
"Saw you ever such a magnificent bust?" asked Beauchamp.
"Were it not for a few manifest impossibilities," thoughtfully remarked
Debray, "I should swear that this same angelic Louise d'Armilly was no
other than a certain very beautiful, very eccentric and very talented
young lady whom we all once knew as a star of Parisian fashion, and who,
the last time she was in this house, sat in the same loge where now sit
the African generals."
"Whom can you mean, Debray?" cried Beauchamp.
"A certain haughty young lady, who was to have married an Italian
Prince, but, on the night of the bridal, in the midst of the
festivities, the house being thronged with guests, and even while the
contract was receiving the signatures, the Prince was arrested as an
escaped galley-slave, and at his trial proved to be the illegitimate son
of the bride's mother and a certain high legal functionary, the
Procureur du Roi, now at Charenton, through whose burning zeal for
justice the horrible discovery transpired."
"Ha!" exclaimed Chateau-Renaud. "You cannot mean Eugenie Danglars,
daughter of the bankrupt baron, whom our unhappy friend Morcerf was once
to have wed?"
"The very same," quietly rejoined the Secretary; "but this lady cannot
be Mlle. Danglars, I say absolutely, for many sufficient reasons," he
quickly added; then, as if to turn the conversation, he hastily
remarked: "Ah! there are M. Dantes and M. Lamartine, as usual,
together."
"M. Dantes!" exclaimed the Count, in surprise, looking around.
"Impossible!"
"And yet most true," observed Beauchamp; "in the third loge from the
Minister's to the right. What a wonderful resemblance there is between
those men--the poet and the Deputy! One would suppose them brothers. The
same tall and elegant figure, the same white and capacious brow, the
same dark, blazing eye, the same raven hair, and, above all, the same
most unearthly and spiritual pallor of complexion."
"No wonder M. Dantes is pale," said the Count. "Have you not heard of
the occurrence of this evening in the Chamber? M. Dantes was in the
midst of one of his powerful harangues against the Government, when
suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped--coughed violently
several times, and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; then taking a
small vial from his vest pocket, he placed it to his lips, and
instantaneously, as if new life had entered him, proceeded more
eloquently than ever to the conclusion of his speech."
"I heard something of this," said Beauchamp.
"As he descended from the tribune his friends thronged around him,
anxious about his health. He quieted their apprehensions with his
peculiar smile of assurance, but I observed that his white handkerchief
was spotted with blood, and he almost immediately left the Chamber."
"That man will kill himself in the cause he has espoused," remarked
Debray. "See how ghastly he now looks. But so much the better for the
Ministry. He is a formidable foe. Indeed, that loge contains the two
most powerful opponents of the Government."
"And who are those men just entering the box?" asked Beauchamp.
"None other than the two rival astronomers of Europe," said Debray, "and
yet most intimate friends. The taller and elder, the one with gray hair,
a dark, sharp Bedouin countenance, and that large, wild, black eye, with
a smile of mingled sarcasm and humor ever on his thin lip, is Emanuel
Arago. The other, the short, robust man, with fair complexion, sandy
hair, bright blue eye and vivacious expression, is Le Verrier, the most
tireless star-gazer science has produced since Galileo. But hush! the
curtain is up."
"Oh! it matters not," said the Count; "only Gennaro and the Spaniard
appear in the second act, and I have neither eyes nor ears save for the
Duchess to-night. But who are those, Beauchamp?"
"Where?"
"In the loge on the first tier, next to the Minister's and directly
opposite to that of M. Dantes?"
"Ah! two officers of the Spahis and two most exquisite women!" exclaimed
Debray. "They belong, doubtless, to the African party in the Minister's
loge. Your lorgnette, Count. What a splendid woman!"
Hardly had the Secretary raised the glass to his eyes before he dropped
it with the exclamation:
"A miracle! a miracle!"
"What?" cried both of the other young men, turning to the box at which
Debray was gazing.
"Messieurs, do you remember the fair Valentine de Villefort, whose
untimely and mysterious demise all the young people of Paris so much
bewailed, some two or three years ago, and whose lovely remains, we,
with our own eyes, saw deposited in the Saint-Meran and de Villefort
vault at Pere Lachaise, one bitter cold autumn evening, and there
listened most patiently and piously to a whole breviary of mournful
speeches, declarative of the said Valentine's most superlative
excellence?"
"Undoubtedly, we remember it well," was the reply.
"Then behold, and never dare to doubt the reappearance of the dead again
to the ocular organs of humanity."
"Valentine de Villefort!" exclaimed the Count, after a careful and
scrutinizing survey, "by all that's supernatural; and more exquisitely
lovely than ever!"
"Then it was true, after all, the strange story we heard," said
Beauchamp, "of the young lady's resurrection and marriage to Maximilian
Morrel, somewhere far away in parts unknown?"
"No doubt," replied the Count, "for, if I mistake not--and I'm sure I
don't mistake, now that I look more closely--that stalwart, splendid
fellow, with the broad forehead, black eyes and moustache, and the order
of the Legion of Honor on his breast, to set off his rich uniform of the
Spahis, and on whose arm the fair apparition is leaning, is no other
than Maximilian Morrel himself--the identical man who saved my
worthless neck from a yataghan in Algeria."
"How dark he's grown!" said Debray.
"No more so than all these African heroes--for instance, Cavaignac and
Lamoriciere."
"But what a splendid contrast there is between the young Colonel of the
Spahis and his lovely bride, if such she be! He, dark as a Corsican;
she, fair as an Englishwoman--he, upright as a poplar; she, drooping
like a willow--his hair and eyes black as midnight, while her soft,
languishing orbs are as blue as the summer sky, and her glossy ringlets
as brown as a chestnut!"
"On my word," said Beauchamp, "the Count grows poetical! Morrel had
better keep his beautiful wife out of the way! But have you discovered
who are the other couple in the box?" he added to the Secretary, who had
his lorgnette in most vigilant requisition. "Any more discoveries,
Debray?"
A sigh might have been heard as the Secretary took his glass from his
eye, and replied simply:
"Yes."
"And who now?" asked Chateau-Renaud. "There seems no end to discoveries
to-night."
"The young man who, by his decorations, seems a chef de bataillon of the
Spahis," replied Debray, "I cannot make out. But, be he whom he may, he
is effectually disguised from his most intimate friends by his luxuriant
beard and moustache. As for the lady--there is but one woman in the
world I have ever had the good fortune to behold who could be mistaken
for her."
"And that is?" said Beauchamp.
"Herself."
"And who is herself, Lucien?" asked Chateau-Renaud.
"Have you forgotten the Countess de Morcerf?"
"The Countess de Morcerf?--the wife of the general who was convicted by
the peers of felony, treason and outrage in the matter of Ali Tebelen,
Pacha of Yanina?" said Beauchamp.
"And who blew his brains out in despair?" added the Count.
"The same," said Debray. "She returned to Marseilles with her son
Albert. You remember Albert and his strange conduct in the duel with the
Count of Monte-Cristo?"
"One could hardly forget such chivalric generosity, such magnificent
magnanimity and such sublime self-control as were exhibited by the young
man on that occasion!" said Beauchamp. "It is to be hoped he was not
equally forbearing toward the Arabs in his African campaigns, although,
as his name has never been seen or heard since he entered the army, in
all probability he was."
"Well, well," cried the Secretary, impatiently, "the Countess retired to
Marseilles, and there she is said to have resided in utter seclusion, in
company only with Morrel's beautiful wife, devoting the vast wealth of
the deceased Count to philanthropic objects, having received it, as his
widow, only with the understanding it should be thus bestowed."
"But the rumor was," said Beauchamp, "and indeed I was so assured by M.
de Boville himself, Receiver-General of the Hospitals, at the time, that
the Countess gave all the Count's fortune to the hospitals, and that he
himself registered the deed of gift."
"Oh! that was only some twelve or thirteen hundred thousand francs,"
said Debray. "Three months after her settlement at Marseilles, in a
small house in the Allees de Meillan, said to be her own by maternal
inheritance, a letter came to her from Thomson and French, of Rome,
stating that there was a deposit in their house, to the credit of the
estate of the late Count, of the enormous sum of two millions of francs,
subject to her sole control and order, as the Count's only heir, in the
absence of his son."
"Two millions of francs!" cried the two young men in a breath.
"Even so, Messieurs," said Debray. "The story does sound rather
oriental; but I have reason to know that it is entirely true, for I made
diligent inquiry about it when last at Marseilles."
"And what took you to Marseilles, Lucien?" asked the Count
significantly.
"The Ministry," replied Debray, with evident confusion, coloring deeply.
"But why does not the Countess marry again?" asked Chateau-Renaud,
surveying her faultless form and face through his glass. "In the prime
of life, rich, and, despite her past troubles, most exquisitely
beautiful, it is strange she don't make herself and some one else
happy!"
"Especially as no one could ever accuse her of having very desperately
loved her dear first husband," added the journalist. "Why don't she
marry, Lucien?"
"How the devil should I know!" replied the Secretary in great confusion.
"You don't suppose I ever asked her the question, do you?"
"Upon my word," exclaimed the Count, laughing, "I shall begin to think
you have, if you take it so warmly. But, hist! the bell! The curtain
rises. We mustn't lose the third act of Donizetti's chef d'oeuvre,
with such a Lucrezia, for any woman living."
But it was very evident that much of the magnificent performance of the
debutante and her companion, in the thrilling scene between the Duke and
Duchess of Ferrara and the young Captain Gennaro, was lost to the
Secretary.
"Do you observe, Beauchamp, how strangely fascinated with the new
cantatrice seems the young officer of the Spahis who accompanies the
Countess?" he whispered. "Do but look. He sits like one transfixed."
"And the Countess seems transfixed also, though not by the same object,"
was the reply. "How excessively pale, yet how beautiful she is! That
plain black dress, without ornament or jewel, and her raven hair, parted
simply on her forehead, enhance her voluptuous charms infinitely more
than could the most gorgeous costume. Heavens! what a happy man will he
be who can call her his!"
"Amen!" said Debray, and the word seemed to rise from the very depths of
his heart. "But she will never marry. Some early disappointment, even
before her union with Morcerf, has withered her heart, and the terrible
divorce which parted her from him, although she never loved him, will
keep her single forever. Her first and only love is either dead
or--worse--married to another."
"See, see, Lucien!" cried Beauchamp, hurriedly; "at whom does she gaze
so intently, and yet so sadly? It cannot be Lamartine, for there sits
his lovely young English wife at his side; nor can it be old Arago, nor
young Le Verrier; and yet some one in that box it surely is."
"M. Dantes?" cried Debray.
"Impossible! That man seems hardly conscious that there are such beings
as women. His whole soul is in affairs of state."
"His whole soul seems somewhere else just at present," exclaimed the
Secretary, bitterly. "Look!"
"How dreadfully pale he is!" said Beauchamp; "and yet his eyes fairly
blaze. Is it the Countess he gazes at?"
"Is it M. Dantes she gazes at?"
At that moment, amid the wild farewell of the mother to her son, upon
the stage, the curtain came down, and at the same instant, M. Dantes
hastily pressed his white handkerchief to his lips, and, leaning on the
arms of Lamartine and Arago, hastily left the box.
"Ha! the Countess faints!" cried Debray, as the door closed on M.
Dantes. "Do they know each other, then?"