In The Memoirs of Malibran, by the Countess de Merlin, is the emphatic statement that out of respect to the wishes of M. de Beriot, the husband of Malibran, no posthumous sketch or cast of her face of any kind was taken. M. Edmond Cottinet, however, in a private note to Mrs. Clara Bell, wrote: “When Madame Malibran died I was very young, but I remember distinctly hearing my mother told that de Beriot, the husband of her friend, had taken her mask, and that it had helped him to execute the crowned bust of the great singer which now decorates the private cabinet of her son. His bust, nevertheless, is not a good likeness, nor is it agreeable. But it is a touching proof of the love of the widower. Is it not wonderful that simply by the force of this love a musician should have been transformed into a sculptor? This was M. de Beriot’s only work in this line of art.” Later, M. Cottinet, having seen a photograph of the mask, added: “It is she! The first moment I saw it I recognized it, with feelings of profound emotion and tender pity. It is she, with her slightly African type, containing, perhaps, a little negro blood (her father, Garcia, being of Spanish-Moorish descent). It is she as death found her, her face ruined by that terrible fall from her horse.... It is undoubtedly the mask from which her husband made the bust, which did not seem to be as charming as she was. Mr. Hutton may be perfectly satisfied that he possesses an authentic cast.”
MARIA F. MALIBRAN
The head of Schiller has lain as uneasily since his death as if he had worn a crown, or, like Cromwell, had rejected one. The story of its posthumous wanderings is very grewsome. It is told at length by Emil Palleske in his Life of Schiller, and at greater length by Mr. Andrew Hamilton. The poet left a widow and family almost friendless and almost penniless; his brother-in-law Wolzogen was absent, and Goethe lay very ill. A cast of Schiller’s head was taken by Klauer; and his body, hurriedly put into a plain deal coffin of the cheapest kind, was buried in a public vault, with nothing to designate whose body it was, and without the utterance of a word or a note of requiem. Twenty-one years later, as was the custom of the place, this public vault was emptied, and the bones it contained were scattered to make room for a new collection. Friends of Schiller, after great and unpleasant labor, gathered together twenty-three of these dishonored skulls, from which they selected as Schiller’s that one “which differed enormously from all the rest in size and shape;” they compared it with Klauer’s cast, and accepted its identity. It was then deposited, with no little ceremony, in the hollow pedestal containing Dannecker’s colossal bust of Schiller in the Grand Ducal Library at Weimar. Goethe, however, desiring to recover more of the mortal part of his friend, had the head removed again and fitted to the rest of the bones of the body. These bones were deposited also in the Library, and the head put back in its pedestal. In 1827, at the suggestion of Louis of Bavaria, the head and the trunk were reunited and placed in a vault which the grand duke had built for himself and for his own family; and there, by the side of Goethe, who joined him in 1832, Schiller still rests.
Palleske, describing Schiller’s death, says: “Suddenly an electric shock seemed to vibrate through him, the most perfect peace lit up his countenance, his features were those of one calmly sleeping.” And this is the impression his death-mask gives.
Carlyle in one of his flash-light pictures thus photographed Schiller—the negative was found in the Commonplace-book of the late Lord Houghton—“He was a man with long red hair, aquiline nose, hollow cheeks, and covered with snuff.”
A strange uneasiness seems to have possessed the bones of many of the great composers. Mozart’s skull is said to be in the possession of Prof. Hyrtl, the famous anatomist of Vienna, who proposes to bequeath it to the Mozarteum at Salzburg. Mozart, like Schiller, was buried by an impoverished family in a grave unmarked save by a musical grave-digger, who secured the head—according to what seems to be very vague tradition—ten years later, and kept it, so long as he himself lived, in a cupboard in his humble lodgings in the precincts of the Cemetery of St. Marx. From him it passed to a second grave-digger, also musical, from whom it came into the possession of the Hyrtls. Those who have examined it, however, say that it has none of the peculiarities which, according to the existing theories of phrenology, should mark the presence of musical genius. And these peculiarities, strangely enough, are said to have been lacking in the skulls of Haydn, Schubert, and Beethoven, each of which, like the skulls of Mozart and Schiller and of Shakspere’s Yorick, had a tongue in it, and could sing once; and each seems to have been knocked about the mazzard with a sexton’s spade, and to have been used to point a moral, and, perhaps, even to stop a bunghole.