d it was said that two theatres might have been thronged.
Alboni was nearly smothered night after night with roses and camellias,
and the stage was literally transformed into a huge bed of flowers,
over which the prima donna was obliged to walk in making her exits.
An amusing example of the _naivete_ and simplicity of her character is
narrated. On the morning after her second performance, she was seated
in her hotel on the Boulevard des Italiens, reading the _feuilletons_
of Berlioz and Fiorentino with a kind of childish pleasure, unconscious
that she was the absorbing theme of Paris talk. A friend came in, when
she asked with unaffected sincerity whether she had really sung "_assez
bien_" on Monday night, and broke into a fit of the merriest laughter
when she received the answer, "_Tres bien pour une petite fille_."
"Alboni," writes this friend, "is assuredly for a great artist the most
unpretending and simple creature in the world. She hasn't the slightest
notion of her position in her art in the eyes of the public and musical
world."

III.

Mme. Alboni's great success, it is said, made M. Vatel, the manager of
the Italiens, almost frantic with disappointment, for, acting on the
advice of Lablache, he had refused to engage her when he could have done
so at a merely nominal sum, and had thus left the grand prize open to
his rival. Her concert engagement being terminated, our prima donna made
a short tour through Austria, and returned to Paris again to make her
_debut_ in opera on December 2d, in "Semiramide," with Mme. Grisi,
Coletti, Cellini, and Tagliafico, in the cast. The caprice of audiences
was never more significantly shown than on this occasion. Alboni, on
the concert stage, had recently achieved an unmistakable and brilliant
recognition as a great vocalist, and on the night of her first lyric
appearance before a French audience a great throng had assembled.
All the celebrities of the fashionable, artistic, and literary world,
princes, Government officials, foreign ministers, dilettanti, poets,
critics, women of wit and fashion, swelled the gathering of intent
listeners, through whom there ran a subdued murmur, a low buzz of
whispering, betraying the lively interest felt. Grisi came on after the
rising of the curtain and received a most cordial burst of applause.
At length the great audience was hushed to silence, and the orchestra
played the symphonic prelude which introduces the contralto air "Eccomi
alfi