Gambara Part 7

"I thought of the same thing a few days ago," replied Andrea. "I mentioned you to the secretary of the Austrian Emba.s.sy, and you have permission to recross the Alps as soon as you please. I have a castle in Croatia which I rarely visit. There you may combine the offices of gate-keeper, butler, and steward, with two hundred crowns a year. Your wife will have as much for doing all the rest of the work. You may make all the experiments you please _in anima vili_, that is to say on the stomach of my va.s.sals. Here is a cheque for your traveling expenses."

Giardini kissed the Count's hand after the Neapolitan fashion.

"Excellenza," said he, "I accept the cheque, but beg to decline the place. It would dishonor me to give up my art by losing the opinion of the most perfect epicures, who are certainly to be found in Paris."

When Andrea arrived at Gambara's lodgings, the musician rose to welcome him.

"My generous friend," said he, with the utmost frankness, "you either 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sage '_Gloire a 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 G.o.d 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 Chatelet, 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 n.o.bleman, 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 pa.s.sion.

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 f.a.g 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 Elysees 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 coa.r.s.e muslin, would take her husband to the grocer's shop in the Faubourg Saint-Honore 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 pa.s.sages 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 c.o.c.k-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 Ma.s.similla De 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sumes a divine aspect: men cannot understand them."

This speech was well worth the forty francs bestowed by Ma.s.similla; 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 G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances made pathetic:

"Water is a product of burning."

PARIS, June 1837.