atures which quickly enter into each other's
spirit,--Marianna was too good a housewife not to betray her annoyance
at receiving such a fine gentleman in so humble a room. Everything
was exquisitely clean. She had spent the morning in dusting her motley
furniture, the handiwork of Signor Giardini, who had put it together, at
odd moments of leisure, out of the fragments of the instruments rejected
by Gambara.

Andrea had never seen anything quite so crazy. To keep a decent
countenance he turned away from a grotesque bed, contrived by the
ingenious cook in the case of an old harpsichord, and looked at
Marianna's narrow couch, of which the single mattress was covered with
a white muslin counterpane, a circumstance that gave rise in his mind to
some sad but sweet thoughts.

He wished to speak of his plans and of his morning's work; but Gambara,
in his enthusiasm, believing that he had at last met with a willing
listener, took possession of him, and compelled him to listen to the
opera he had written for Paris.

"In the first place, monsieur," said the composer, "allow me to explain
the subject in a few words. Here, the hearers receiving a musical
impression do not work it out in themselves, as religion bids us work
out the texts of Scripture in prayer. Hence it is very difficult to make
them understand that there is in nature an eternal melody, exquisitely
sweet, a perfect harmony, disturbed only by revolutions independent of
the divine will, as passions are uncontrolled by the will of men.

"I, therefore, had to seek a vast framework in which effect and cause
might both be included; for the aim of my music is to give a picture of
the life of nations from the loftiest point of view. My opera, for
which I myself wrote the _libretto_, for a poet would never have fully
developed the subject, is the life of Mahomet,--a figure in whom the
magic of Sabaeanism combined with the Oriental poetry of the Hebrew
Scriptures to result in one of the greatest human epics, the Arab
dominion. Mahomet certainly derived from the Hebrews the idea of a
despotic government, and from the religion of the shepherd tribes or
Sabaeans the spirit of expansion which created the splendid empire of
the Khalifs. His destiny was stamped on him in his birth, for his father
was a heathen and his mother a Jewess. Ah! my dear Count to be a great
musician a man must be very learned. Without knowledge he can get no
local color and put no ideas into his music.