Who can describe the enthusiasm, the triumphs, of this famous, and at the same time fatal night! The audience was frantic; men wept and women screamed and fainted; while both Klaus and Stenio sat looking paler than two ghosts. At the first touch of Paganini’s magic bow, both Franz and Samuel felt as if the icy hand of death had touched them. Carried away by an irresistible enthusiasm, which turned into a violent, unearthly mental torture, they dared neither look into each other’s faces, nor exchange one word during the whole performance.
At midnight, while the chosen delegates of the Musical Societies and the Conservatory of Paris unhitched the horses, and dragged the carriage of the grand artist home in triumph, the two Germans returned to their modest lodging, and it was a pitiful sight to see them. Mournful and desperate, they placed themselves in their usual seats at the fire-corner, and neither for a while opened his mouth.
“Samuel!” at last exclaimed Franz, pale as death itself. “Samuel—it remains for us now but to die!... Do you hear me?... We are worthless! We were two madmen to have ever hoped that any one in this world would ever rival ... him.”
The name of Paganini stuck in his throat, as in utter despair he fell into his arm chair.
The old professor’s wrinkles suddenly became purple. His little greenish eyes gleamed phosphorescently as, bending toward his pupil, he whispered to him in hoarse and broken tones:
“Nein, Nein! Thou art wrong, my Franz! I have taught thee, and thou hast learned all of the great art that a simple mortal, and a Christian by baptism, can learn from another simple mortal. Am I to blame because these accursed Italians, in order to reign unequaled in the domain of art, have recourse to Satan and the diabolical effects of Black Magic?”
Franz turned his eyes upon his old master. There was a sinister light burning in those glittering orbs; a light telling plainly that, to secure such a power, he, too, would not scruple to sell himself, body and soul, to the Evil One.
But he said not a word, and, turning his eyes from his old master’s face, gazed dreamily at the dying embers.
The same long-forgotten incoherent dreams, which, after seeming such realities to him in his younger days, had been given up entirely, and had gradually faded from his mind, now crowded back into it with the same force and vividness as of old. The grimacing shades of Ixion, Sisyphus and Tantalus resurrected and stood before him, saying: