Fragments of an Autobiography

by Felix Moscheles

The villa stood in its own grounds. The municipality had desired to present Rossini with the site; he would not, however, accept the gracious offer unreservedly, and so it was arranged that he should occupy it on very advantageous terms.

As I passed the gates that led to the grounds I knew so well, the first thing that struck me was a notice posted up and signed by the military authorities, to the effect that all unexploded bombs and other projectiles should be buried underground, awaiting the time when they would be collected by competent artillerymen.

I left others to do the burying, and made for the house. There was no Madame Rossini on the look-out, as she used to be in former days, ready to guard the approaches to her husband's study with Cerberus-like fidelity. It was some time before I could find anybody at all. A man-servant finally emerged from the basement; he was the only soul on the premises, and evidently much shaken by recent events. It needed nobody to open the door, for one could walk in through large gaps in the walls, where the shells had done their work. Part of the staircase had been blown away, but enough of it stood to take me to the upper floor, to the room in which, three years ago, Rossini had died. The house until lately had been occupied by his widow; now all the furniture had been removed; but a large iron safe stood in the middle of the music-room, like a solid island, surrounded by a sea of brick and mortar rubbish.

I had looked round in vain for something worth preserving as a memento of this my last visit to the great Maestro's house, and had found nothing better than fragments of wall-paper and pieces of a shattered looking-glass. As I gave a final look at the scene of destruction, I descried a black-bordered paper all but buried in a thick layer of débris. Where all else was destroyed, that paper seemed a living thing. I brought it to the surface, and found it was an old copy of The Musical World, containing the obituary notice of Giacomo Rossini. When I returned to London I gave it to J. W. Davison, the editor of the journal in which it was published, so that it might be preserved to record the incidents of the master's life, and to attest the grievous disasters that befell the villa he loved so well.

CHAPTER X

PARIS AFTER THE COMMUNE

Paris emerging from her trials. It is difficult to-day to realise the magnitude of the disaster which laid low the beautiful capital of France. When I arrived within its shattered walls, the monster conflagration that would have destroyed the whole city, had it not been for the timely arrival of the Versailles troops, was all but subdued. The firemen, however, were still kept busily engaged, for clouds of smoke and tongues of fire would at intervals burst forth from the smouldering ruins. Tottering walls on the one hand, huge façades of masonry on the other, marked the places where but yesterday glorious specimens of architecture, ancient and modern, had stood. There was the shell of what had been the Tuileries, that palace built in the 16th century, which had seen so much of the history of France. Mobs had pillaged and sacked it; within its state-rooms one crowned head had been forced to wear the cap of liberty, a humiliation which did not save it from the knife of the guillotine. Some fifty years later a bourgeois king had to fly for his life from the palace; and last, it was an unfortunate Empress who had to make good her escape, and seek refuge on the shores of England.

There would be no more pillaging and sacking now; the venerable specimen of the Renaissance style was destroyed. To-day the stranger is just shown the place where the Tuileries stood; then, as the walls crashed down, burying treasures and relics of bygone days in their fall, one was appalled by the tragedy enacted before one's eyes. I had my little personal recollections too. I had danced there more than once with some of the fairest Parisians; I had drunk the future Emperor's champagne with a conviction that it was quite the best of its kind, and was evidently intended to make us understand that our host meant business, imperial business, pretty sure to be settled ere long, whether we liked it or not.