In mournful lament are heard the exile's voices, softly, lightly floating, the violin's Angel song mingles with theirs, above, around them, whispering memories of joys forever lost.
Gesa listens--listens--his bow stops, he sees the little green chamber, the smiling friend at the old spinet, and beside him the lovely maiden, her hands clasped in one another, her delicate head slightly bent toward the shoulder, as if it were grown too heavy. "Nessun maggior dolore," he murmurs. The whole audience shouts. The orchestra applauds standing--the amateurs crowd round the stage. But there!--what is this? Panting, breathless, foam on his lips, rage in his eyes, the violinist presses forward through the ranks of the orchestra, up to the director.
"Wretch! Murderer!" he shrieks and strikes him with his bow across the face, then sinks unconscious to the floor. De Sterny passes a hand across his brow, and while the violinist is being carried out, he turns to the capelmeister, who is hurrying up and says with that practiced presence of mind which teaches a man of the world heroism on the scaffold.
"A sudden attack of delirium tremens. You really might have taken pains to spare me such a painful scene!"
The rehearsal proceeded. Gesa was taken home. As soon as he recovered consciousness he sought in all the closets and chests for the original score of his "Inferno" of which he had lent a copy to de Sterny. He never found the manuscript. All he discovered were the disconnected parts of his unfinished opera.
XIX
Between the Boulevard exterieur, "Boulevard des Crimes" as the popular voice has named it, and the Buttes Montmartre, stretches a quarter of Paris which is behind the Rue Ravestein in remoteness from the world, but far surpasses it in wretchedness. No mournful redeemer here stretches out his crucified arms to mankind, as if he would say: "I would have warmed you all in my bosom, but you have nailed my hands fast!"
No colored church windows glimmer changefully here, amidst misery and depravity. The old Montmartre church is broken up,--they are building on the new one!
In a temporary wooden tower on the Buttes Montmartre, hangs a shrill bell that sounds like the bell of a railroad or a factory, and at certain hours of the day, it tinkles a little despairing Catholicism down into the empty republican clatter below.
One junk shop crowds another here, and wooden booths full of second-hand rubbish and guarded mostly by poodle dogs stand in the wind.