Hortense was very pretty to-night also; all in blue—blue tulle that enveloped her slender figure like a cloud and lent a soft shade to her brunette face. She was much preoccupied with the début of her musician. She wondered how the spoiled Parisians would like this music from the provinces and whether, as Rosalie had said, the tabor-player ought not to be framed in a landscape of gray olive-trees and hills that look like lace. Silently, though very anxious in the rustle of fans, conversations in low voice and the tuning of the instruments, she counted the pieces that must come before Valmajour appeared.
A blow from the leader with his bow on his desk, a rustling of paper on the platform as the chorus rises, music in hand, a long look of the victims toward the high doorway clogged with black coats, as if yearning to flee, and the first notes of a choral by Glück ring through the room and soar upward to the glassy ceiling where the winter’s night lays its blue sheets of cold.
“Ah, dans ce bois funeste et sombre....”
The concert has begun.
The taste for music has increased greatly in France within the last few years. Particularly in Paris, the Sunday concerts and those given during Holy Week, and the numberless musical clubs, have aroused the public taste and made the works of the great masters known to all, making a musical education the fashion. But at bottom Paris is too full of life, too given over to intellect, really to love music, that absorbing goddess who holds you motionless without voice or thought in a floating web of harmony, and hypnotizes you like the ocean; in Paris the follies that are done in her name are like those committed by a fop for a mistress who is the fashion; it is a passion of chic, played to the gallery, commonplace and hollow to the point of ennui!
Ennui!
Yes, boredom was the prevailing note of this concert at the Ministry of Public Instruction. Beneath that forced admiration, that expression of simulated ecstasy which belongs to the worldly side of the sincerest woman, the look of boredom rose higher and higher; there soon appeared unmistakable signs that dimmed the brilliant smile and shining eyes and changed completely their charming, languishing poses, like the motion of birds upon the branches or when sipping water drop by drop. On the long rows of endless chairs these fine ladies, one woman after the other, would make their fight, trying to reanimate themselves with cries of “Bravo! Divine! Delicious!” and then, one after another, would succumb to the rising torpor which ascended like the mists above a sounding sea, driving far away into the distance of indifference all the artists who defiled before them one by one.
And yet the most famous and illustrious artists of Paris were there, interpreting classical music with all the scientific exactness it demands, which, alas, cannot be acquired save at the expense of years. Why, it is thirty years now that Mme. Vauters has been singing that beautiful romanza of Beethoven “L’Apaisement,” and yet never has she done it with more passion than this evening. But it seems as if strings were lacking to the instrument; one can hear the bow scraping on the violin. And behold! of the great singer of former days and of that famous classical beauty there remains nothing else but well studied attitudes, an irreproachable method and that long white hand which at the last stanza brushes aside a tear from the corner of her eye, made deep with charcoal—a tear that translates a sob which her voice can no longer render.
What singer save Mayol, handsome Mayol, has ever sighed forth the serenade from “Don Juan” with such ethereal delicacy—that passion which is like the love of a dragon-fly? Unfortunately people don’t hear it any longer. There is no use for him to rise atiptoe with outstretched neck and draw out the note to its very end, while accompanying it with the easy gesture of a yarn-spinner seizing her wool with two fingers—nothing comes out, nothing! Paris is grateful for pleasures which are past and applauds all the same; but these used-up voices, these withered and too well-known faces, medals whose design has been gradually eaten away by passing from hand to hand, can never dissipate the heavy fog which infests the Minister’s party. No, notwithstanding every effort which Roumestan makes to enliven it, notwithstanding the enthusiastic bravos which he hurls in his loudest voice into the phalanx of black coats, nor the “Hush!” with which he frightens people who attempt to converse two apartments away, and who thereafter prowl about silent as spectres in that strong illumination and change their places with every precaution in the hopes of finding some distraction, their backs rounded and their arms swinging—or fall completely crushed upon the low arm-chairs, their opera hats suspended between their legs—idiotic and with faces empty of expression!
At one time, it is true, the appearance of Alice Bachellery on the stage wakes up and enlivens the audience; a struggling bunch of curious people assails each of the two doors of the hall in order to see the little diva in her short skirt on the platform, her mouth half open and her long lashes quivering as if with surprise at seeing all this multitude.