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 coarse 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 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 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 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 unders