Part 13

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