We were still laughing when a copy boy entered with a trayful of dispatches. “Allow me,” said Mr. Bell. “It will take but a minute to skim over these wires.” But he interrupted himself immediately.
“There’s a job for you, Fisher,” he said, handing me a Paris dispatch. “Blowitz cables that your Aunt Rosine is dying. Hope she will leave you a lot of money. ‘The Times’ will take eight hundred words on Rosine, sixpence a word, you know. Let me have them by seven to-night.”
“My, I wish I had an aunt that I could make sixpence a word out of,” said Mark, as we were going down the lift, which is British for elevator. “Who is, or was, this relative of yours in which ‘The Times’ is interested to the extent of eight hundred words?”
“Why Rosine Stoltz, whom Verdi called ‘his divine inspiration,’ the creator of Aida and of the title roles of most of Rossini’s Grand Operas.”
“That’s a jolly mouthful,” assented Mark, “but couldn’t she do anything but sing?”
“She was not only the solitary rival ever recognized by Jenny Lind, but the greatest collector of titles ever,” I replied. “De Blowitz calls her the Duchess of L’Esignano, but she was also the Spanish Princess of Peace, the Princess Godoy, the Marchioness of Altavilla and the Countess and Baroness of Ketchendorff.”
“In that case,” said Mark, “that story about her dying is vastly exaggerated, for she has six lives coming to her before she is finally through. But how and where did she get all those high-sounding names?”
“Bought ’em, of course. Her last husband, the Prince Godoy, was a racetrack tout in Paris and they were married on his highness’ deathbed, Auntie engaging to pay the funeral expenses. L’Esignano and Altavilla she likewise married in extremis, as lawyers have it. The Barony and the Countship she acquired through her lover, the saintly Prince Albert, husband of Victoria.”
“She was a Frenchwoman, you said?”
“Born in Paris as Victoire Noel.”