The master was a Catholic German;one of those men born old,who seem all their lives fifty years of age,even at eighty.And yet,his brown,sunken,wrinkled face still kept something infantile and artless in its dark creases.The blue of innocence was in his eyes,and a gay smile of springtide abode upon his lips.His iron-gray hair,falling naturally like that of the Christ in art,added to his ecstatic air a certain solemnity which was absolutely deceptive as to his real nature;for he was capable of committing any silliness with the most exemplary gravity.His clothes were a necessary envelope,to which he paid not the slightest attention,for his eyes looked too high among the clouds to concern themselves with such materialities.
This great unknown artist belonged to the kindly class of the self-forgetting,who give their time and their soul to others,just as they leave their gloves on every table and their umbrella at all doors.His hands were of the kind that are dirty as soon as washed.In short,his old body,badly poised on its knotted old legs,proving to what degree a man can make it the mere accessory of his soul,belonged to those strange creations which have been properly depicted only by a German,--by Hoffman,the poet of that which seems not to exist but yet has life.
Such was Schmucke,formerly chapel-master to the Margrave of Anspach;a musical genius,who was now examined by a council of devotes,and asked if he kept the fasts.The master was much inclined to answer,"Look at me!"but how could he venture to joke with pious dowagers and Jansenist confessors?This apocryphal old fellow held such a place in the lives of the two Maries,they felt such friendship for the grand and simple-minded artist,who was happy and contented in the mere comprehension of his art,that after their marriage,they each gave him an annuity of three hundred francs a year,--a sum which sufficed to pay for his lodging,beer,pipes,and clothes.Six hundred francs a year and his lessons put him in Eden.Schmucke had never found courage to confide his poverty and his aspirations to any but these two adorable young girls,whose hearts were blooming beneath the snow of maternal rigor and the ice of devotion.This fact explains Schmucke and the girlhood of the two Maries.
No one knew then,or later,what abbe or pious spinster had discovered the old German then vaguely wandering about Paris,but as soon as mothers of families learned that the Comtesse de Granville had found a music-master for her daughters,they all inquired for his name and address.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.
Mozart,Beethoven,Gluck,Paesiello,Cimarosa,Haydn,and certain secondary geniuses,developed in their souls a passionate emotion which never passed beyond the chaste enclosure of their breasts,though it permeated that other creation through which,in spirit,they winged their flight.When they had executed some great work in a manner that their master declared was almost faultless,they embraced each other in ecstasy and the old man called them his Saint Cecilias.
The two Maries were not taken to a ball until they were sixteen years of age,and then only four times a year in special houses.They were not allowed to leave their mother's side without instructions as to their behavior with their partners;and so severe were those instructions that they dared say only yes or no during a dance.The eye of the countess never left them,and she seemed to know from the mere movement of their lips the words they uttered.Even the ball-dresses of these poor little things were piously irreproachable;their muslin gowns came up to their chins with an endless number of thick ruches,and the sleeves came down to their wrists.Swathing in this way their natural charms,this costume gave them a vague resemblance to Egyptian hermae;though from these blocks of muslin rose enchanting little heads of tender melancholy.They felt themselves the objects of pity,and inwardly resented it.What woman,however innocent,does not desire to excite envy?