MADAME PATTI AT EIGHTEEN.
This letter very naturally gave our conversation a reminiscent turn, and, after some talk of great folk she has known, I asked Madame Patti what had been the proudest experience in her career. “For a great and unexpected honor most gracefully tendered, nothing that has touched me deeper than a compliment paid by the Prince of Wales and a distinguished company, at a dinner given in honor of the Duke of York and the Princess May, a little while before their wedding. The dinner was given by Mr. Alfred Rothschild, one of my oldest and best friends. There were many royalties present, and more dukes and duchesses than I can easily remember. During the ceremonies the Prince of Wales arose, and to my great astonishment, proposed the health of his ‘old and valued friend Madame Patti.’ He made such a pretty speech, and in the course of it said that he had first seen and heard me in Philadelphia in 1860, when I sang in ‘Martha,’ and that since then his own attendance at what he was good enough to call my ‘victories in the realm of song’ had been among his most pleasant recollections. He recalled the fact that on one of the occasions when the princess and himself had invited me to Marlborough House, his wife had held up little Prince George, in whose honor we were this night assembled, and bade him kiss me, so that in after life he might say that he had ‘kissed the famous Madame Patti.’ And then, do you know, that whole company of royalty, nobility, and men of genius rose and cheered me and drank my health. Don’t you think that any little woman would be proud, and ought to be proud, of a spontaneous tribute like that?”
It is difficult, when repeating thus in print such snatches of autobiography, to suggest the modest tone and manner of the person whose words may be recorded. It is particularly difficult in the case of Madame Patti, who is as absolutely unspoiled as the freshest ingénue. Autobiography such as hers must read a little fanciful to most folk; it is so far removed from the common experiences of us all, and even from the extraordinary experiences of the renowned persons we usually hear about. But there is not a patch of vanity in Patti’s sunny nature. Her life has been a long, unbroken record of success—success of a degree attained by no other woman; no one else has won and held such homage; no one else has been so wondrously endowed with beauty and genius and sweet simplicity of nature—a nature unspoiled by flattery, by applause, by wealth, by the possession and exercise of power. Patti at fifty is like a girl in her ways, in her thoughts, in her spirit, in her disinterestedness, in her enjoyments. Time has dimmed none of her charms, it has lessened none of her superb gifts. She said to me one day: “They tell me I am getting to be an old woman, but I don’t believe it. I don’t feel old. I feel young. I am the youngest person of my acquaintance.” That is true enough, as they know who see Patti from day to day. She has all the enthusiasms and none of the affectations of a young girl. When she speaks of herself it is with the most delicious frankness and lack of self-consciousness. She is perfectly natural.
MADAME PATTI IN 1869 AND IN 1877.
She promised to show me the programme of that Philadelphia performance before the Prince of Wales so long ago, and the next day she put it before me. It is a satin programme with gilt fringe, and its announcement is surmounted by the Prince of Wales’s feathers. At that Philadelphia performance Adelina Patti made her first appearance before royalty. In the next year she made her London début. It was at Covent Garden, as Amina in “La Sonnambula.” The next morning Europe rang with the fame of the new prima donna from America. “I tried to show them that the young lady from America was entitled to a hearing,” said she, as we looked over the old programmes.
THE DINING-ROOM.
“And has the ‘young lady from America’ retained that spirit of national pride, or has she become so much a citizen of the world that no corner of it has any greater claim than another upon her affections?”