eptomania up, or down as you wish. He married a
young and beautiful woman, who doubtless deserved her fate, since we
are told that she was a wonderful performer on the tambourine. He
succeeded to the post of Boieldieu, the eminent opera composer, who
began life under poor matrimonial auspices, seeing that his mother was
a milliner, from whom his father managed to escape by means of an easy
divorce law issued by the French Revolutionists.

BOIELDIEU AND GRETRY

The father married again, but with what success, I do not know. But at
any rate, his son followed his example and married Clotilde Mafleuray,
a dancer, who made him as unhappy as possible. It was said that he was
so wretched that he took to flight secretly; but it is known that his
departure was mentioned in a theatrical journal in good season. None
the less, though the flight may not have been surreptitious, it may
well be credited to domestic misery. He buried himself in Russia for
eight years, which may be placed in music's column of loss. Returning
to Paris then, he found a clear field for the great success that
followed. Soon after, in 1811, he formed an attachment with a woman who
bore him a son in 1816. Her tenderness to the composer is highly
praised; she must have given him devotion indeed, for he married her in
1827, eleven years after the birth of their son, who became also a
worthy composer. At the age of fifty-four, consumption and the
bankruptcy of the Opera Comique, and the expulsion of the king who had
pensioned him, broke down his health. He lived five years longer.

All I know of the domestic affairs of the great French opera-writer
Gretry is that he left three daughters, one of whom, Lucille, had a
one-act opera successfully produced when she was only thirteen years
old, and who was precocious enough to make an unhappy marriage and end
it in death by the time she was twenty-three.

HEROLD AND BIZET

The Frenchman Herold, son of a good musician, made ballet-music
artistic while he paced the dance of death with consumption, and died
in his forty-second year, a month after his masterpiece, "Le Pre aux
Clercs," had been produced and had wrung from him the wail: "I am going
too soon; I was just beginning to understand the stage." He had married
Adele Elise Rollet four years before, and she had borne him three
children, the eldest of whom became a Senator; the next, a daughter,
married well, and the third, a promising musician, died of his father