age to confide
his poverty and his aspirations to any but these two adorable young
girls, whose hearts were blooming beneath the snow of maternal rigor and
the ice of devotion. This fact explains Schmucke and the girlhood of the
two Maries.

No one knew then, or later, what abbe or pious spinster had discovered
the old German then vaguely wandering about Paris, but as soon as
mothers of families learned that the Comtesse de Granville had found
a music-master for her daughters, they all inquired for his name and
address. Before long, Schmucke had thirty pupils in the Marais. This
tardy success was manifested by steel buckles to his shoes, which were
lined with horse-hair soles, and by a more frequent change of linen. His
artless gaiety, long suppressed by noble and decent poverty, reappeared.
He gave vent to witty little remarks and flowery speeches in his
German-Gallic patois, very observing and very quaint and said with an
air which disarmed ridicule. But he was so pleased to bring a laugh
to the lips of his two pupils, whose dismal life his sympathy had
penetrated, that he would gladly have made himself wilfully ridiculous
had he failed in being so by nature.

According to one of the nobler ideas of religious education, the young
girls always accompanied their master respectfully to the door. There
they would make him a few kind speeches, glad to do anything to give
him pleasure. Poor things! all they could do was to show him their
womanhood. Until their marriage, music was to them another life within
their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams for
reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct
of protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to
overwhelm them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home, they
flung themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and spent
themselves upon it. Melody, harmony, and composition, three daughters
of heaven, whose choir was led by an old Catholic faun drunk with music,
were to these poor girls the compensation of their trials; they
made them, as it were, a rampart against their daily lives. Mozart,
Beethoven, Gluck, Paesiello, Cimarosa, Haydn, and certain secondary
geniuses, developed in their souls a passionate emotion which never
passed beyond the chaste enclosure of their breasts, though it permeated
that other creation through which, in spirit, they winged their flight.
When they had executed some