HEINE IN PARIS
Paris, 183—.
My dear Uncle H——,
We arrived in Paris last night.... (Here I omit a passage regarding the children of a family some of whom still survive.) Last night we spent a very agreeable evening at Madame Jaubert’s. There were a great many people present, for we had been invited to meet the celebrated Bellini. There were many people I did not know, and many others who were introduced to me whose names did not reach me. Signor Bellini himself came early. His appearance is charming; he is just like a fat child, pink and white, amiable and good-natured, and not in the least conceited or pretentious. Soon afterwards Prince and Princess Belgiojoso arrived. This was the first time I had set eyes on the Princess. Her beauty and the grace of her person have not, indeed, been exaggerated. She resembles a classical statue,but her face has an expression which recalls later and more romantic times. Her features are regular, but there is something mysterious and ratherstrangeabout her face and her dark orbs. Her hair is like ebony, but her skin is very white, and she smiles with a kind of wearied look, as though she were a Chinese idol. Her hands and her hair are most beautiful, and she walks into a room as if there could not be the slightest doubt that she is the most beautiful woman there. And this is true, although perhaps she is too slender. She was elegantly dressed in violet velvet, trimmed with fur, which showed her graceful figure and disappeared in the folds of a black skirt; she wore a black lace mantilla, which she took off when she came into the room. She talks well, and her voice is musical, but, at the same time, it has a cold ring like a crystal glass being tapped. Of course one could not help seeing that she was agreeable and accomplished, but I could not restrain a wicked wish to see her dethroned from her pedestal. It is impossible to say that she gives herself airs, but at the same time there is somethingirritatingabout her beauty.
As soon as they arrived, Madame Jaubert took the Prince to the pianoforte and said he must singa duet with Madame de Vergennes, and that it should be the duet out of the “Pirate,” as Bellini was there. The Prince said that he was loth to sing before the Master, but Madame Jaubert appealed to Bellini, and they both succeeded in persuading him. Madame de Vergennes herself accompanied at the pianoforte. The Prince has a real tenor voice, hisméthodeis excellent, and they sang the duet as it should be sung. Madame Jaubert said to me that if you ask musicians to a party you must let them play an active part at once in public, but if, on the other hand, you invite politicians and literary men it is best to place them in corners and let them talk.
Bellini was childish about the music: he danced with delight when they had finished, and clapped his hands and said: “Do sing it again!” Somebody suggested their singing a French song, but Bellini said: “No, no, please sing some more of my own music: I do enjoy it so much more, and you know it is much better.” So they sang something from “Norma,” and after that the trio from “The Comte Ory,” in which the Prince, M. du Tillet, and a young girl took part, with Madame de Vergennes at the pianoforte.
When the trio was over, Madame Jaubert interruptedthe music, although we were all anxious to hear more, I myself among others; but she took me aside and whispered to me that you must always stop musicbeforepeople have had enough, because the moment they have one second too much of it they will go away with the impression that they have spent a tiresome evening. I think she was right. But there was a young man there, a M. de Musset—he writes—who was both obstinate and persistent, and never ceased for a moment asking for more. Madame Jaubert was firm and turned a deaf ear to him. This young man was introduced to me: he is good-looking and well-mannered, but sulky and overdressed. He is in love with Princess Belgiojoso, and this I suppose affected him on this occasion because she was paying but scant attention to him, and talked incessantly to Major Fraser, who was there.
Gradually the greater part of the people took their departure, and we all sat down round the table in a small room and talked about table-turning and spirits. Then, I forget how, the conversation turned upon caricatures, and Princess Belgiojoso said, with a lovely smile, that nobody had ever been able to caricature her. Upon which M. de Musset instantly accepted the challenge and said he wouldmake a caricature of the Princess at once. He fetched a scrap-book which was in the room, and a pencil, and on a blank page, drew, in four strokes, her face and figure in profile, exaggerating her thinness and making an enormous black eye. It exactly resembled her; we all craned over the table to look at it, and she took up the book and said in a tone of the utmost indifference: “Really, M. de Musset, it is unfair that you should have all the talents,” and she shut the book.
Madame Jaubert took the book and put it away, and I heard her whisper to M. de Musset: “You have burnt your boats.” He turned round and looked at the Princess and his eyes filled with tears, and at that moment I felt that I could have gladly chastised her.
After that we went in to supper. Almost everybody had gone; the only people who remained were Prince and Princess Belgiojoso, M. de Musset, Major Fraser, Mlle. de Rutières, a lovely Créole, the Comte d’Alton-Shée, Bellini, and Herr Heine, the German writer. I sat between him and Prince Belgiojoso. M. de Musset was on Madame Jaubert’s left, Bellini and the Princess were sitting opposite us.
Herr Heine, like all Germans, is a trifle tiringand long-winded; of course he is cultivated and accomplished, and they say he has written most interesting books, but I cannot read a word of German. He talks French well, but he is heavy and continues a subject long after one has sufficiently discussed it. This is so different from the French, who skate over every topic so lightly and never dwell too long on any subject, and understand what you want to say before you have half said it. All the same, you see at once that he is an interesting man, and every now and then he says something truly remarkable. He wears big spectacles, and his hair, which is very fair, is cut straight and is rather long and bunches over his low collar. He astonished everybody at supper by saying that the perpetual praise of Goethe and Byron tired him.
“I cannot understand you Parisians,” he said, “when you talk about poetry. You go out of the way to search out and idolize all sorts of foreign poets when you have got a real native poet who is worth all these foreigners put together.” Somebody said “Victor Hugo.” “Nothing of the sort,” he answered, “Victor Hugo is like a wheel which turns round and round in space without any intellectual cog-wheel. It is all words, words, words.But he has no thought and no real feeling. He is screaming at the top of his voice about nothing.”
“Then who is our great poet?” asked Madame Jaubert.
“Why, M. de Musset, of course,” said Herr Heine.
We all laughed, and Madame Jaubert said it was a very pretty compliment. M. de Musset himself appreciated the joke quite as much as we did. But they say he really does write very well, rather in the same manner as Lord Francis Egerton.
M. de Musset remained sulky all through supper. Once or twice he said things across the table to Princess Belgiojoso, and she answered him as if she were an empty portfolio from which her real self was absent. We talked about music; Herr Heine said we were all barbarians as far as music was concerned; that it was true the Italians had a notion of what tune meant, but that the French, and especially the Parisians, did not know the difference between music and pastry. Somebody asked him how he could say such things after what we had heard that evening, and appealed to Bellini as to whether his music had ever been better interpreted.
“Ah, Bellini is a genius,” said Herr Heine, andhe turned to him and added: “You are a great genius, Bellini, but you will have to expiate your genius by an early death. You are condemned to die. All great geniuses die young—very young, and you will die like Raphael and Mozart.”
“Don’t talk like that! for Heaven’s sake don’t say that!” said Bellini. “Please do not speak about death. Forbid him to talk like that,” he said to the Princess.
“Perhaps my fears are groundless,” Herr Heine said to the Princess. “Perhaps Bellini is not a genius after all. Besides which I have never heard a note of his music. I purposely came in this evening after it was all over. Is he a genius, Princess? What do you think?” Then he addressed himself again to Bellini: “Let us hope, my dear friend, that the world has made a mistake about you, and that you are not a genius after all. It is a bad thing to be. It is the gift of the wicked fairy. The good fairies have given you every other gift, the face of a cherub, the simplicity of a child, and the digestion of an ostrich. Let us hope the bad fairy did not come in and spoil it all by giving you genius.”
Bellini laughed, but I suspect he did not appreciate the joke.
Princess Belgiojoso said that Herr Heine had no right to talk like that, for he was a poet himself.
“A poet, yes,” he answered, “but not a genius. That is quite a different thing. I have never been accused of that, not even in my own country.”
“But no man is a prophet in his own country,” said Madame Jaubert.
“I am neither a prophet in my own country nor in any one else’s,” said Herr Heine. “My countrymen think I am frivolous, and the French think I am German and heavy. When I am with people like you they think I am an old professor, and when I am with professors they consider I am a frivolousmondain. When I am with Conservatives I am reckoned a Revolutionary, and by Revolutionaries I am considered a Reactionary. And when I am among the geniuses,” he said, bowing with an ironical smile towards Bellini, “I become a pedant, a philosopher, and an ignoramus, almost as bad as M. Cousin.”
“I wondered,” said Madame Jaubert, “whether we should get through the evening without an allusion to M. Cousin.”
“When I die,” said Herr Heine, “I should like a stool to be placed on either side of my tomb,with an inscription: ‘Here lies a man who fell from Heaven between two stools.’”
“Geniuses,” said M. de Musset....
(The end of the letter is missing)
P.S.—Bellini died suddenly to-day, so Herr Heine’s prophecy came true.