have its martyrs. Once started on that theme, Gennaro reaches the most
dishevelled pathos that any German professor of philosophy ever
spluttered to his audience. You admire his convictions, but he hasn't
any. Bearing his hearers to heaven on a song which seems a mysterious
fluid shedding love, he casts an ecstatic glance upon them; he is
examining their enthusiasm; he is asking himself: 'Am I really a god
to them?' and he is also thinking: 'I ate too much macaroni to-day.'
He is insatiable of applause, and he wins it. He delights, he is
beloved; he is admired whensoever he will. He owes his success more to
his voice than to his talent as a composer, though he would rather be
a man of genius like Rossini than a performer like Rubini. I had
committed the folly of attaching myself to him, and I was determined
and resigned to deck this idol to the end. Conti, like a great many
artists, is dainty in all his ways; he likes his ease, his enjoyments;
he is always carefully, even elegantly dressed. I do respect his
courage; he is brave; bravery, they say, is the only virtue into which
hypocrisy cannot enter. While we were travelling I saw his courage
tested; he risked the life he loved; and yet, strange contradiction! I
have seen him, in Paris, commit what I call the cowardice of thought.
My friend, all this was known to me. I said to the poor marquise: 'You
don't know into what a gulf you are plunging. You are the Perseus of a
poor Andromeda; you release me from my rock. If he loves you, so much
the better! but I doubt it; he loves no one but himself.' Gennaro was
transported to the seventh heaven of pride. I was not a marquise, I
was not born a Casteran, and he forgot me in a day. I then gave myself
the savage pleasure of probing that nature to the bottom. Certain of
the result, I wanted to see the twistings and turnings Conti would
perform. My dear child, I saw in one week actual horrors of sham
sentiment, infamous buffooneries of feeling. I will not tell you about
them; you shall see the man here in a day or two. He now knows that I