The Princess Metternich receives after midnight every evening. If one is in the theater or at a soirée it is all right, but to sit up till twelve o'clock to go to her is very tiresome, though when you are once there you do not regret having gone. It is something to see her smoking her enormous cigars. The other night Richard Wagner, who had been to the theater with the Metternichs, was there. I was glad to see him, though he is so dreadfully severe, solemn, and satirical. He found fault with everything; he thought the theaters in Paris horribly dirty, mal soignés, bad style, bad actors, orchestra second-rate, singers worse, public ignorant, etc. He smiled once with such a conscious look and scanned people's faces, as if to say, "I, Richard Wagner, have smiled!" But he can very well put on airs, for he is a genius. At Les Italiens, Patti, Mario, Alboni, and Delle Sedie are singing "Rigoletto." They are all splendid. Alboni is immensely fat and round as a barrel—but what a voice! It simply rolls out in billows of melody. The "quartette" was magnificent, and was encored. Patti and Mario are at daggers drawn, and hate each other like poison, so their love-making is reduced to a minimum, and they make as little as possible. In their fondest embraces they hold each other at arm's length and glare into each other's eyes. Mario is such a splendid actor one would think he could conquer his dislike for her and play the lover better. The Barbier de Séville is, I think, his best role; he acts with so much humor and sings so exquisitely and with such refinement. Even in the tipsy scene he is the fine gentleman. Patti sings in the singing lesson Venzano's waltz and "Il Bacio." Her execution is wonderful, faultless, and brilliant.
We went to a soirée given by the Marquise de Boissy, better known as Byron's Countess Guiccioli, who inspired so many of his beautiful poems; but when you see her dyed and painted you wonder how the blasé Byron could have been all fire and flame for her. Fagnani, the painter, who did that awful simpering portrait of me, painted her, it being stipulated that he should make her look ten years younger than she is. He had a hard time of it! But now, being old and married to the senator, Marquis de Boissy, she has lost all claim to celebrity, and is reduced to giving forlorn soirées with a meager buffet.
Beaumont is a charming painter, and a friend of Henry's. When he comes here, as he does very often, he puts us all in a good-humor; even my father-in-law forgets to grumble at the reduced price of stocks and the increased rate of exchange. His picture of Circé charming the pigs is very pretty. Helen and I are both in it; he wanted her ear and hair and my eyes and hair. I am not Circé; I only stand in the background admiring a pig. To reward us he painted a fan for each: mine has arrows, doves, my initials, "Beware," and cherubim all mixed up, making a lovely fan.
Baroness Alphonse Rothschild sent me her box for the opera, and I asked the Metternichs and Herr Wagner, the composer, who was dining at the Embassy, to go with me, and they accepted. The Rothschilds' box is one of the largest in the opera-house. The Princess Metternich created a sensation when we entered—she always does—but Herr Wagner passed unnoticed. He sat behind and pretended to go to sleep. He thought everything most mediocre. The opera was "Faust," which I thought was beautifully put on the stage, with Madame Miolan Carvalho as Marguerite and Faure as Mephistopheles. They both sang and acted to perfection; but Wagner pooh-poohed at them and everything else. Abscheulich and grässlich alternated in his condemning sentences. Nothing pleased him.
He fidgeted about and was very cross during the fifth act, where the ballet is danced.
"Why did Gounod insert that idiotic ballet? It is banal and de trop."
(France is the only place where this fifth act is performed.)
"You must blame Goethe for that," retorted the Princess Metternich. "Why did he make Faust go to the Champs Élysées if he did not want him to see any dancing?"
"Why, indeed?" grumbled Wagner. "Goethe had much better have let Marguerite die on her straw and not of send her up in clouds of glory like the Madonna to heaven, and with ballet music."
"Well," said the Princess, "I don't see any difference between a ballet in heaven and a ballet in Venusberg."
The Emperor has made a fine coup de popularité. He refused to have the new boulevard named after his mother, and cleverly proposed it to be called Richard Lenoir, the man who led his fellow-workmen in the Revolution.