"He married a dancer!"
"And how do you mean to live?" said the girl. "The journey has ruined you, and——"
"And made me an old woman," said Marianna. "No, that is not the result of fatigue or hardship, but of grief."
"And why did you never send your man here any money?" asked the girl.
Marianna's only answer was a look, but it went to the woman's heart.
"She is proud with a vengeance!" she exclaimed. "And much good it has done her!" she added, in Giardini's ear.
All that year musicians took especial care of their instruments, and repairs did not bring in enough to enable the poor couple to pay their way; the wife, too, did not earn much by her needle, and they were compelled to turn their talents to account in the lowest form of employment. They would go out together in the dark to the Champs Élysées and sing duets, which Gambara, poor fellow, accompanied on a wretched guitar. On the way, Marianna, who on these expeditions covered her head with a sort of veil of coarse muslin, would take her husband to a grocer's shop in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and give him two or three thimblefuls of brandy to make him tipsy; otherwise he could not play. Then they would stand up together in front of the smart people sitting on the chairs, and one of the greatest geniuses of the time, the unrecognized Orpheus of Modern Music, would perform passages from his operas—pieces so remarkable that they could extract a few half-pence from Parisian supineness. When some dilettante of comic operas happened to be sitting there and did not recognize from what work they were taken, he would question the woman dressed like a Greek priestess, who held out a bottle-stand of stamped metal in which she collected charity.
"I say, my dear, what is that music out of?"
"The opera of Mahomet," Marianna would reply.
As Rossini composed an opera called Mahomet II., the amateur would say to his wife, sitting at his side: