eloved; he
is admired whensoever he will. He owes his success more to his voice
than to his talent as a composer, though he would rather be a man of
genius like Rossini than a performer like Rubini. I had committed the
folly of attaching myself to him, and I was determined and resigned to
deck this idol to the end. Conti, like a great many artists, is dainty
in all his ways; he likes his ease, his enjoyments; he is always
carefully, even elegantly dressed. I do respect his courage; he is
brave; bravery, they say, is the only virtue into which hypocrisy cannot
enter. While we were travelling I saw his courage tested; he risked
the life he loved; and yet, strange contradiction! I have seen him, in
Paris, commit what I call the cowardice of thought. My friend, all this
was known to me. I said to the poor marquise: 'You don't know into what
a gulf you are plunging. You are the Perseus of a poor Andromeda; you
release me from my rock. If he loves you, so much the better! but I
doubt it; he loves no one but himself.' Gennaro was transported to
the seventh heaven of pride. I was not a marquise, I was not born a
Casteran, and he forgot me in a day. I then gave myself the savage
pleasure of probing that nature to the bottom. Certain of the result,
I wanted to see the twistings and turnings Conti would perform. My dear
child, I saw in one week actual horrors of sham sentiment, infamous
buffooneries of feeling. I will not tell you about them; you shall see
the man here in a day or two. He now knows that I know him, and he hates
me accordingly. If he could stab me with safety to himself I shouldn't
be alive two seconds. I have never said one word of all this to Beatrix.
The last and constant insult Geranno offers me is to suppose that I am
capable of communicating my sad knowledge of him to her; but he has no
belief in the good feeling of any human being. Even now he is playing a
part with me; he is posing as a man who is wretched at having left me.
You will find what I may call the most penetrating cordiality about him;
he is winning; he is chivalrous. To him, all women are madonnas. One
must live with him long before we get behind the veil of this false
chivalry and learn the invisible signs of his humbug. His tone of
conviction about himself might almost deceive the Deity. You will be
entrapped, my dear child, by his catlike manners, and you will never
believe in the profound and rapid arithmetic of his inmost thought. But
enough