I had not heard the fatal news. Bellini! the glorious composer of the noble work that had so delighted me a few hours before! So admirable an artist—so young—so much honored and beloved! I could have wept with Francilla.
After a few moments' silence, she wiped her eyes, then rose, and took a volume from the table. It was her album, for which I had sent her a drawing—a sketch of her fair self as Romeo, at the moment when Juliet calls on his name in the tomb, while he thinks it the voice of an angel from the skies.
We turned over the leaves of the album, lingering as we came to the different autographs. Francilla's soft, languishing eyes kindled with haughty fire as we noted the bold, rude characters traced by the hand of Judith Pasta; and when we came to the signature of Countess Rossi, her expressive features were lighted with a tender smile.
One letter was written by her Uncle Pixis in Prague. She stopped to give me an account of his family. Turning the leaves and talking rapidly, she paused of a sudden, and I saw two names recorded opposite each other—those of Vincenzo Bellini and Maria Malibran. Bellini had written a passage from the Capuletti.
Francilla signed for me to give her my pencil—it was one she had given me—and drew a large cross under Bellini's signature. Her look was intensely significant. Her silence was strangely prolonged. At last I asked, merely to say something: "Why is it, Francilla, that, in the last act of the Capuletti, you use Vaccai's music instead of Bellini's? Bellini's composition, as a whole, is superior, and the close far more touching. I never could understand why a celebrated vocalist like yourself should prefer the tamer close of Vaccai."
Francilla looked earnestly in my face, but did not answer for some time. At length, fixing her eyes on the cross she had pencilled, she said, in a tone of deepest solemnity: "I will tell you a story, my friend, and you will see then how much our poor friend suffered. Neither Maria nor I could sing his last act; you shall know why."
"Madame Malibran, too?" I exclaimed.
She interrupted me with a gesture enjoining silence. "You know," she said, "though of fair complexion and blue eyes, Bellini was born at the foot of Etna. You have yourself described him to me as effeminate and a little foppish; but he was a genuine son of Sicily, and he glowed with the warmth of the south, notwithstanding his gentleness and weakness. That was a wonderful nature of his! It was not, like Sicily's volcano, spread over luxuriant meadows, through woods and snow-fields, across a lava waste to the brink of the fiery abyss; nor was it like the Hecla of your own land, where eternal fire burns under eternal ice. He reminded me of an English garden tastefully laid out, with smooth walks and quiet streams, delicate flowers and quaint shrubbery, fountains and fluted shafts; beneath which glowed an abyss of fire! That was Bellini; under his sentimental culture burned a quenchless flame—the love of art, fed by another love—for Malibran!"
"You amaze me, Francilla," I exclaimed. "His passion for art was one for Maria, too. How could he help it? Was it not she who inspired his wondrous creations with their irresistible charm? Was she not his soul of all other performers in the operas? 'What will Malibran say to it?' was Bellini's question concerning everything he composed. She was his queen of art, his muse, his ideal! Life without her was gloom. How can Malibran survive him? Your own imagination, Francilla," I said, "weaves this pretty romance. You know Malibran married M. Beriot."
"Do I not remember how the news of that marriage affected Vincenzo?" she retorted. "How pale he grew, how he trembled, and left the company in silence! Yet he could not have hoped to win Malibran; for she always treated him as a boy, though he was a year older than herself. But he could not have dreamed she would marry M. Beriot, who was at one time distracted for Madame Sontag."