A few days after, the Princess Mathilde sent me a lovely fan which she had painted herself, and Mr. Moulton is going to have it mounted. I am very happy to have it as a souvenir of a memorable evening, besides being an exquisite specimen of the Princess's talent as an artist. The Princess is what one might call miscellaneous. She has a Corsican father, a German mother, and a Russian husband, and as "cavaliere servente" (as they say in Italy), a Dutchman. She was born in Austria, brought up in Italy, and lives in France. She said once to Baron Haussmann, "If you go on making boulevards like that, you will shut me up like a vestal."
"I will never make another, your Highness," he answered.
Every one is very much excited about a young Swedish girl called Christine Nilsson, who has walked right into the star-light, for she really is a star of the first magnitude. She has studied with Wachtel only one year, and behold her now singing at the Théâtre Lyrique to crowded audiences in the "Flûte Enchantée." Her voice has a wonderful charm; she sings without the slightest effort, and naturally as a bird. She has some phenomenal high notes, which are clear as bells. She makes that usually tedious grand aria, which every singer makes a mess of, quite lovely and musical, hovering as she does in the regions above the upper line like a butterfly and trilling like a canary-bird. A Chinese juggler does not play with his glass balls more dexterously than she plays with all the effects and tricks of the voice. What luck for her to have blossomed like that into a full-fledged prima-donna with so little effort. I have got to know her quite well, as Miss Haggerty, who was at some school with her in Paris, invites her often to lunch and asks me to meet her.
Nilsson is tall, graceful, slight, and very attractive, without being actually handsome. She acts well and naturally, and with intelligence, without exerting herself; she has the happy faculty of understanding and seizing things au vol, instead of studying them. She has a regal future before her. A second Jenny Lind! Their careers are rather similar. Jenny Lind was a singer in cafés, and Nilsson played the violin in cafés in Stockholm. She is clever, too! She has surrounded herself by a wall of propriety, in the shape of an English dame de compagnie, and never moves unless followed by her. This lady (Miss Richardson) is correctness and primness personified, and so comme il faut that it is actually oppressive to be in the same room with her. Nilsson herself is full of fun and jokes, but at the same time dignified and serious.
Christine Nilsson gave Mrs. Haggerty a box at the Théâtre Lyrique, where she is now playing "Traviata" (I think it was the director's box), and I was invited to go with her and Clem. The box was behind the curtain and very small and very dark. But it was intensely amusing to see how things were done, and how prosaic and matter-of-fact everything was. If ever I thanked my stars that I was not a star myself it was then.
Everything looked so tawdry and claptrap: the dirty boards, the grossly painted scenery, the dingy workmen shuffling about grumbling and gruff, ordered and scolded by a vulgar superior. Of course the stars do not see all these things, because they only appear when the heavens are ready for them to shine in.
The overture, so it sounded to us, was a clash of drums, trumpets, and trombones all jumbled together. After the three knocks of the director, which started up the dust of ages into our faces until we were almost suffocated, the curtain rose slowly with great noise and rumbling.
The audience looked formidable as we saw it through the mist of cloudy gas-light, a sea of faces, of color and vagueness. The incongruity of costumes was a thing to weep over. If they had tried they could not have made it worse. The lady guests, walking and chatting, in a soi-disant elegant salon, were dressed, some in Louis XV. splendor, some in dogesses' brocades, some in modern finery, with bows and ribbons and things looped up any way. Nilsson was dressed in quite modern style—flounces, laces, and fringes, and so forth, while Alfredo had donned a black velvet coat à la something, with a huge jabot which fell over a frilled shirt-front. He wore short velvet trousers, and black-silk stockings covered his thin legs without the least attempt at padding.
The "padre" was in a shooting-jacket, evidently just in from a riding- tour. He held a riding-stick, and wore riding-gantlets which he flourished about with such wide gesticulations that I thought he was going to hit Nilsson in the face.
We could not hear the singing so well from where we sat; but the orchestra was overpowering, and the applause deafening, like peals of thunder.