"'Ah! you are indeed the Pope!' cried Liszt as he knelt before him.
"A little after this Liszt took Orders. They that speak without intelligence started the rumour that it was at La Trappe. But at La Trappe there is a piano, and Liszt swore to the Holy Father that he would never touch one.
"To-day the world breathes freely. The monster has been disarmed and exorcised.
"Now when Liszt sees a piano he approaches it with curiosity and asks the use of that singular article of furniture.
"It is true there's one in his room, but he keeps his cassocks in it."
VII
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF LISZT
I
WEIMAR
After rambling over Weimar and burrowing in the Liszt museum, one feels tempted to pronounce Liszt the happiest of composers, as Yeats calls William Morris the happiest poet. A career without parallel, a victorious general at the head of his ivory army; a lodestone for men and women; a poet, diplomat, ecclesiastic, man of the world, with the sunny nature of a child, loved by all, envious of no one—surely the fates forgot to spin evil threads at the cradle of Franz Liszt. And he was not a happy man for all that. He, too, like Friedrich Nietzsche had dæmonic fantasy; but for him it was a gift, for the other a curse. Music is a liberation, and Nietzsche of all men would have benefited by its healing powers.
In Weimar Liszt walked and talked, smoked strong cigars, played, prayed—for he never missed early mass—and composed. His old housekeeper, Frau Pauline Apel, still a hale woman, shows, with loving care, the memorials in the little museum on the first floor of the Wohnhaus, which stands in the gardens of the beautiful ducal park.