It was the cross-roads of a wood, with a fountain shaded by an oak to

the left. Peasants and lords with plaids on their shoulders were singing

a hunting-song together; then a captain suddenly came on, who evoked

the spirit of evil by lifting both his arms to heaven. Another appeared;

they went away, and the hunters started afresh. She felt herself

transported to the reading of her youth, into the midst of Walter Scott.

She seemed to hear through the mist the sound of the Scotch bagpipes

re-echoing over the heather. Then her remembrance of the novel helping

her to understand the libretto, she followed the story phrase by phrase,

while vague thoughts that came back to her dispersed at once again with

the bursts of music. She gave herself up to the lullaby of the melodies,

and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her

nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the scenery,

the actors, the painted trees that shook when anyone walked, and the

velvet caps, cloaks, swords--all those imaginary things that floated

amid the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young

woman stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was

left alone, and the flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the

warbling of birds. Lucie attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She

plained of love; she longed for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from life,

would have liked to fly away in an embrace. Suddenly Edgar-Lagardy

appeared.

He had that splendid pallor that gives something of the majesty of

marble to the ardent races of the South. His vigorous form was tightly

clad in a brown-coloured doublet; a small chiselled poniard hung against

his left thigh, and he cast round laughing looks showing his white

teeth. They said that a Polish princess having heard him sing one night

on the beach at Biarritz, where he mended boats, had fallen in love

with him. She had ruined herself for him. He had deserted her for

other women, and this sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his

artistic reputation. The diplomatic mummer took care always to slip into

his advertisements some poetic phrase on the fascination of his

person and the susceptibility of his soul. A fine organ, imperturbable

coolness, more temperament than intelligence, more power of emphasis

than of real singing, made up the charm of this admirable charlatan

nature, in which there was something of the hairdresser and the

toreador.

From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm. He pressed Lucy in his arms,

he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of

rage, then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and the notes

escaped from his bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward

to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She was

filling her heart with these melodious lamentations that were drawn

out to the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the

drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She recognised all the intoxication

and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna

seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that

charmed her as some very thing of her own life. But no one on earth had

loved her with such love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit

night when they said, "To-morrow! to-morrow!" The theatre rang with

cheers; they recommenced the entire movement; the lovers spoke of

the flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they

uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the

vibrations of the last chords.




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