Bonaparte, after the informer had been brought before him, suggested to the officers of his staff, the Prefect of Police and other functionaries whom he had assembled, that it would be as well not to let him appear at the Opera in the evening; but the general opinion was, that on the contrary, he should be forced to go, and ultimately it was decided that until the commencement of the performance everything should be allowed to take place as if the conspiracy had not been discovered.
AN OPERATIC PLOT.
In the evening the First Consul went to the Opera, attended by a number of superior officers, all in plain clothes. The first act passed off quietly enough—in all probability, far too quietly to please the composer, for some two hundred persons among the audience, including the conspirators, the police and the officers attached to Bonaparte's person, were thinking of anything but the music of les Horaces. It was necessary, however, to pay very particular attention to the music of the second act in which the scene of the oath occurred.
The sentinels outside the Consul's box had received orders to let no one approach who had not the pass word, issued an hour before for the opera only; and as a certain number of conspirators had taken up their positions in the corridors, to extinguish the lights at the signal agreed upon, a certain number of Bonaparte's officers were sent also into the corridors to prevent the execution of this manœuvre. The scene of the oath was approaching, when a body of police went to the boxes in which the leaders of the plot were assembled, found them with fireworks and grenades in their hands, notified to them their arrest in the politest manner, cautioned them against creating the slightest disturbance, and led them so dexterously and quietly into captivity, that their disappearance from the theatre was not observed, or if so, was doubtless attributed to the badness of Porta's music. The officers in the corridors carried pistols, and at the proper moment seized the appointed lamp-extinguishers. Then the old Horatius came forward and exclaimed--
"Jurez donc devant moi, par le ciel qui m'écoute.
Que le dernier de vous sera mort ou vainqueur."
The orchestra "attacked" the introduction to the quartett. The fatal prelude must have sounded somewhat unmusical to the ear of the First Consul; but the conspirators were now all in custody and assembled in one of the vestibules on the ground floor.
LES MYSTERES D'ISIS.
On the 24th of December, 1800, the day on which the "infernal machine" was directed against the First Consul on his way to the Opera, a French version of Haydn's Creation was to be executed. Indeed, the performance had already commenced, when, during the gentle adagio of the introduction, the dull report of an explosion, as if of a cannon, was heard, but without the audience being at all alarmed. Immediately afterwards the First Consul appeared in his box with Lannes, Lauriston, Berthier, and Duroc. Madame Bonaparte, as she was getting into her carriage, thought of some alteration to make in her dress, and returned to her apartments for a few minutes. But for this delay her carriage would have passed before the infernal machine at the moment of its explosion. Ten minutes afterwards she made her appearance at the Opera with her daughter, Mademoiselle Hortense Beauharnais, Madame Murat, and Colonel Rapp. The performance of the Creation continued as if nothing had happened; and the report, which had interfered so unexpectedly with the effect of the opening adagio, was explained in various ways; the account generally received in the pit being, that a grocer going into his cellar with a candle, had set light to a barrel of gunpowder. Two houses were said to have been blown up. This was at the beginning of the first part of the Creation; at the end of the second, the number had probably increased to half a dozen.
Under the consulate and the empire, the arts did not flourish greatly in France; not for want of direct encouragement on the part of the ruler, but rather because he at the same time encouraged far above everything else the art of war. Until the appearance of Spontini with la Vestale, the Académie, under Napoleon Bonaparte, whether known as Bonaparte or Napoleon, was chiefly supported by composers who composed without inventing, and who, with the exception of Cherubini, were either very feeble originators or mere plagiarists and spoliators. Even Mozart did not escape the French arrangers. His Marriage of Figaro had been brought out in 1798, with all the prose dialogue of Beaumarchais's comedy substituted for the recitative of the original opera. Les Mystères d'Isis, an adaptation, perversion, disarrangement of Die Zauberflötte, with several pieces suppressed, or replaced by fragments from the Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Haydn's symphonies, was produced on the 23rd of August, 1801, under the auspices of Morel the librettist, and Lachnith the musician.
Les Misères d'Isis was the appropriate name given to this sad medley by the musicians of the orchestra. Lachnith was far from being ashamed of what he had done. On the contrary, he gloried in it, and seemed somehow or other to have persuaded himself that the pieces which he had stolen from Mozart and Haydn were his own compositions. One evening, when he was present at the representation of Les Mystères d'Isis, he was affected to tears, and exclaimed, "No, I will compose no more! I could never go beyond this!"