We all laughed, and Madame Jaubert said it was a very pretty compliment. M. de Musset himself appreciated the joke quite as much as we did. But they say he really does write very well, rather in the same manner as Lord Francis Egerton.
M. de Musset remained sulky all through supper. Once or twice he said things across the table to Princess Belgiojoso, and she answered him as if she were an empty portfolio from which her real self was absent. We talked about music; Herr Heine said we were all barbarians as far as music was concerned; that it was true the Italians had a notion of what tune meant, but that the French, and especially the Parisians, did not know the difference between music and pastry. Somebody asked him how he could say such things after what we had heard that evening, and appealed to Bellini as to whether his music had ever been better interpreted.
“Ah, Bellini is a genius,” said Herr Heine, and he turned to him and added: “You are a great genius, Bellini, but you will have to expiate your genius by an early death. You are condemned to die. All great geniuses die young—very young, and you will die like Raphael and Mozart.”
“Don’t talk like that! for Heaven’s sake don’t say that!” said Bellini. “Please do not speak about death. Forbid him to talk like that,” he said to the Princess.
“Perhaps my fears are groundless,” Herr Heine said to the Princess. “Perhaps Bellini is not a genius after all. Besides which I have never heard a note of his music. I purposely came in this evening after it was all over. Is he a genius, Princess? What do you think?” Then he addressed himself again to Bellini: “Let us hope, my dear friend, that the world has made a mistake about you, and that you are not a genius after all. It is a bad thing to be. It is the gift of the wicked fairy. The good fairies have given you every other gift, the face of a cherub, the simplicity of a child, and the digestion of an ostrich. Let us hope the bad fairy did not come in and spoil it all by giving you genius.”
Bellini laughed, but I suspect he did not appreciate the joke.
Princess Belgiojoso said that Herr Heine had no right to talk like that, for he was a poet himself.
“A poet, yes,” he answered, “but not a genius. That is quite a different thing. I have never been accused of that, not even in my own country.”
“But no man is a prophet in his own country,” said Madame Jaubert.
“I am neither a prophet in my own country nor in any one else’s,” said Herr Heine. “My countrymen think I am frivolous, and the French think I am German and heavy. When I am with people like you they think I am an old professor, and when I am with professors they consider I am a frivolous mondain. When I am with Conservatives I am reckoned a Revolutionary, and by Revolutionaries I am considered a Reactionary. And when I am among the geniuses,” he said, bowing with an ironical smile towards Bellini, “I become a pedant, a philosopher, and an ignoramus, almost as bad as M. Cousin.”