conduct. She took an intellectual part in the new doctrines, which
swarmed, during the three years succeeding July, 1830, like gnats in
the sunshine, and turned some female heads. But, like all nobles,
Beatrix, while thinking these novel ideals superb, wanted always to
protect the nobility. Finding before long that there was no place in
this new regime for individual superiority, seeing that the higher
nobility were beginning once more the mute opposition it had formerly
made to Napoleon,--which was, in truth, its wisest course under an
empire of deeds and facts, but which in an epoch of moral causes was
equivalent to abdication,--she chose personal happiness rather than
such eclipse. About the time we were all beginning to breathe again,
Beatrix met at my house a man with whom I had expected to end my days,
--Gennaro Conti, the great composer, a man of Neapolitan origin,
though born in Marseilles. Conti has a brilliant mind; as a composer
he has talent, though he will never attain to the first rank. Without
Rossini, without Meyerbeer, he might perhaps have been taken for a man
of genius. He has one advantage over those men,--he is in vocal music
what Paganini is on the violin, Liszt on the piano, Taglioni in the
ballet, and what the famous Garat was; at any rate he recalls that
great singer to those who knew him. His is not a voice, my friend, it
is a soul. When its song replies to certain ideas, certain states of
feeling difficult to describe in which a woman sometimes finds
herself, that woman is lost. The marquise conceived the maddest
passion for him, and took him from me. The act was provincial, I
allow, but it was all fair play. She won my esteem and friendship by
the way she behaved to me. She thought me a woman who was likely to
defend her own; she did not know that to me the most ridiculous thing
in the world is such a struggle. She came to see me. That woman, proud
as she is, was so in love that she told me her secret and made me the
arbiter of her destiny. She was really adorable, and she kept her