ERNAL

Paganini, as everybody knows, sold his soul to the devil for fame. He
made the best of the gamble, as he usually did when he gambled; for the
poor, innocent Lucifer got only a fourth-rate soul, while Paganini
secured a fame that will not be surpassed while fiddlers fiddle.

Gambling was not Paganini's only vice. In spite of the fact that he
will always be almost as famous for his multiplex ugliness as for his
skill, women found him fascinating, and kept him busy. When he was only
seventeen, a beautiful dame of Bologna abducted him and held him
prisoner in her country chateau, as once Liszt, his rival in technical
fame, was kept a few months. Can there be any secret technical virtue
in being kidnapped thus? The fair Bolognese kept Paganini captive for
three years in this retreat, where he fed upon scenery, love, and
music. For her sake he practised her favourite instrument, the guitar,
and worked miracles with it as with the violin. At the age of twenty,
Paganini broke the spell and resumed his gipsying, persuading the
public, and not without reason, that he was aided by magic. He lived
for many years with the singer, Antonia Bianchi, who bore him a son,
Achille, whom he legitimised. Antonia was devotion itself, until she
was gradually driven to a jealousy that was almost fiendish, and led to
a separation. Paganini himself tells this story:

"Antonia was constantly tormented by the most fearful jealousy. One
day, she happened to be behind my chair when I was writing some lines
in the album of a great pianist, and, when she read the few amiable
words I had composed in honour of the artist, to whom the book
belonged, she tore it from my hands, demolished it on the spot. So
fearful was her rage, she would have assassinated me."

When he died, he left his son a fortune of $400,000. Surely this sum
alone proves the justice of the popular belief that he had sold himself
to the devil, and, knowing it, none can doubt the story Liszt quotes in
one of his essays concerning the G string of Paganini's violin: "It was
the intestine of his wife, whom he had killed with his own hands."
There is no record of the secret marriage, but there is record enough
of the superhuman power of the melodies he drew from that string.

DE BERIOT, SONTAG, AND MALIBRAN

Among the chief contemporaries of Paganini was De Beriot. When he was
not quite thirty, he found himself in Paris at the time of the deadly
vocal feud between Sontag and Mal