Francesca's
first husband had been assassinated. Antonia bore Stradivari five
children: a daughter, who died at the age of twenty; a son, who died in
infancy; a son, who died at twenty-four; a son, who became a priest and
lasted seventy-seven years, and, finally, a son, Paolo, the only child
of Stradivari that seems to have married, and certainly the only one
who handed down the family name. How happy Antonia was with her
husband, we do not know. "As rich as Stradivari," became a proverb. She
died at the age of seventy-three, and Stradivari survived her less than
one year; this may have been because he was overcome with grief; or
because he was already nearly ninety years of age.

In the workshop of Stradivari was a fiddle-maker named Andreas
Guarnieri, who had two sons, Pietro and Giuseppe, who had a son named
Pietro, and a more famous cousin named Giuseppe, who was a dissipated
genius, and blasphemously gave himself the nickname, "del Gesu." Of him
there is a pretty fable, that once being sent to prison for debt, he
won over the jailer's daughter, and she brought him stealthily wood and
implements with which he made the so-called "prison fiddles," of whose
curious shape Charles Reade said: "Such is the force of genius that I
believe in our secret hearts we love these impudent fiddles best; they
are so full of chic." As Giuseppe called himself "Gesu," so there was
a member of the famous violin-making family of Guadagnini who was
called "John the Baptist," and of whom I only know that he belonged to
a large family.

TARTINI

But to turn from these unsatisfactory violin makers to violin players:
I know nothing of the great Corelli's personal history; his pupil
Geminiani is said to have led a life full of romance. Philidor spent
his years chiefly in the intrigues of chess-playing. The great Tartini,
whom the devil visited in the dream he immortalised in his famous
Sonata del Diavolo, had a checkerboard career. As a young university
student he fell in love with a niece of Cardinal Cornaro, and married
her in secret. Like Romeo, his romance brought him separation and
exile. His parents cast him off; the cardinal made his life unsafe. He
fled from Padua, and took up the violin to save him from starvation.
"And some have greatness thrust upon them."

One day, as he was playing at the monastery where he was in retirement,
the wind blew aside a curtain just as a fellow townsman was passing. He
took home the news, and by th