e,
during its unhoped-for triumph in the fifteen years of the Restoration
to reconstruct itself, was about to go to pieces, bit by bit, under the
battering-ram of the bourgeoisie. She heard the famous words of Monsieur
Laine: 'Kings are departing!' This conviction, I believe was not without
its influence on her conduct. She took an intellectual part in the new
doctrines, which swarmed, during the three years succeeding July, 1830,
like gnats in the sunshine, and turned some female heads. But, like all
nobles, Beatrix, while thinking these novel ideals superb, wanted always
to protect the nobility. Finding before long that there was no place
in this new regime for individual superiority, seeing that the higher
nobility were beginning once more the mute opposition it had formerly
made to Napoleon,--which was, in truth, its wisest course under an
empire of deeds and facts, but which in an epoch of moral causes was
equivalent to abdication,--she chose personal happiness rather than such
eclipse. About the time we were all beginning to breathe again, Beatrix
met at my house a man with whom I had expected to end my days,--Gennaro
Conti, the great composer, a man of Neapolitan origin, though born in
Marseilles. Conti has a brilliant mind; as a composer he has talent,
though he will never attain to the first rank. Without Rossini, without
Meyerbeer, he might perhaps have been taken for a man of genius. He has
one advantage over those men,--he is in vocal music what Paganini is
on the violin, Liszt on the piano, Taglioni in the ballet, and what the
famous Garat was; at any rate he recalls that great singer to those who
knew him. His is not a voice, my friend, it is a soul. When its song
replies to certain ideas, certain states of feeling difficult to
describe in which a woman sometimes finds herself, that woman is lost.
The marquise conceived the maddest passion for him, and took him from
me. The act was provincial, I allow, but it was all fair play. She won
my esteem and friendship by the way she behaved to me. She thought me a
woman who was likely to defend her own; she did not know that to me the
most ridiculous thing in the world is such a struggle. She came to see
me. That woman, proud as she is, was so in love that she told me her
secret and made me the arbiter of her destiny. She was really adorable,
and she kept her place as woman and as marquise in my eyes. I must tell
you, dear friend, that while women are sometimes bad,