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.
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