, upon the whole, the singer seems
to have profited more than the woman from it, as might have been
expected. Garcia was an incomparable artist, actor, and singer (no such
Don Giovanni has ever been heard or seen since), and bestowed upon all
his children the finest musical education that ever made great natural
gifts available to the utmost to their possessors. I suppose it was from
him, too, that Marie derived with her Spanish blood the vehement,
uncontrollable nature of which M. de la Forest told me he had witnessed
such extraordinary exhibitions in her girlhood. He said she would fly
into passions of rage, in which she would set her teeth in the sleeve of
her silk gown, and tear and rend great pieces out of the thick texture
as if it were muslin; a test of the strength of those beautiful teeth,
as well as of the fury of her passion. She then would fall rigid on the
floor, without motion, breath, pulse, or color, though not fainting, in
a sort of catalepsy of rage.

Her marriage with the old French merchant Malibran was speedily followed
by their separation; he went to France, leaving his divine devil of a
wife in New York, and during his absence she used to write letters to
him, which she frequently showed to M. de la Forest, who was her
intimate friend and adviser, and took a paternal interest in all her
affairs. These epistles often expressed so much cordial kindness and
warmth of feeling toward her husband, that M. de la Forest, who knew her
separation from him to have been entirely her own act and choice, and
any decent agreement and harmonious life between them absolutely
impossible, was completely puzzled by such professions toward a man with
whom she was determined never to live, and occasionally said to her,
"What do you mean? Do you wish your husband to come here to you? or do
you contemplate going to him? In short, what is your intention in
writing with all this affection to a man from whom you have separated
yourself?" Upon this view of her epistle, which did not appear to have
struck her, M. de la Forest said, she would (instead of rewriting it)
tack on to it, with the most ludicrous inconsistency, a sort of
revocatory codicil, in the shape of a postscript, expressing her decided
desire that her husband should remain where he was, and her own explicit
determination never again to enter into any more intimate relations with
him than were compatible with a correspondence from opposite sides of
the Atlantic