ad begun to be mellowed
and softened by experience, and there was scarcely any pitch of artistic
greatness to which she might not aspire.

Rumors of her approaching marriage had already begun to circulate, and
it soon became known that Sophie Cruvelli was about to quit the stage.
On January 5, 1856, she married Baron Vigier, a wealthy young Parisian,
the son of Count Vigier, whose father had endowed the city of Paris with
the immense bathing establishments on the Seine which bear his name,
and who, in the time of the Citizen King, was a member of the Chamber of
Deputies, and afterward a peer of France. Mme. Vigier resides with her
husband in their splendid mansion at Nice, and, though she has sung on
many occasions in the salons of the fashionable world and for charity,
she has been steadfast in her retirement from professional life. She
has composed many songs, and even some piano-forte works, though her
compositions are as unique and defiant of rules as was her eccentric
life.

Sophie Cruvelli was only eight years on the operatic stage, but during
that period she impressed herself on the world as one of the great
singers not only of her own age, but of any age; yet far greater in her
possibilities than in her attainment. She had by no means reached
the zenith of her professional ability when she suddenly retired into
private life. There have been many singers who have filled a more
active and varied place in the operatic world; never one who was more
munificently endowed with the diverse gifts which enter into the highest
power for lyric drama. She had queenly beauty of face and form, the most
vehement dramatic passion, a voice alike powerful, sweet, and flexible,
and an energy of temperament which scorned difficulties. Had her
operatic career extended itself to the time, surely foreshadowed in her
last performances, when a finer art should have subdued her grand gifts
into that symmetry and correlation so essential to the best attainment,
it can hardly be questioned that her name would not have been surpassed,
perhaps not equaled, in lyric annals. A star of the first magnitude was
quenched when the passion of love subdued her professional ambition.
Sophie Cruvelli, though her artistic life was far briefer than those
of other great singers, has been deemed worthy of a place among these
sketches, as an example of what may be called the supreme endowment of
nature in the gifts of dramatic song.

THERESA TITIENS