Their mother’s friends, far from providing intellectual stimulus or calling forth their sympathies, only deepened the surrounding gloom. They were stiff-backed old ladies, dry and rigid, whose conversation turned on their ailments, on the shades of difference between preachers or confessors, or on the most trifling events in the religious world, which might be found in the pages of La Quotidienne or L’Ami de la Religion. The men again might have served as extinguishers to the torch of love, so cold and mournfully impassive were their faces. They had all reached the age when a man becomes churlish and irritable, when his tastes are blunted except at table, and are directed only to procuring the comforts of life. Religious egotism had dried up hearts devoted to task work and entrenched behind routine. They spent the greater part of the evening over silent card-parties. At times the two poor little girls, placed under the ban of this sanhedrim, who abetted the maternal severity, would suddenly feel that they could bear no longer the sight of these wearisome persons with their sunken eyes and frowning faces.
Against the dull background of this life stood out in bold relief the single figure of a man, that of their music-master. The confessors had ruled that music was a Christian art, having its source in the Catholic church and developed by it, and therefore the two little girls were allowed to learn music. A spectacled lady, who professed sol-fa and the piano at a neighboring convent, bored them for a time with exercises. But, when the elder of the girls was ten years old, the Comte de Granville pointed out the necessity of finding a master.
Mme. de Granville, who could not deny it, gave to her concession all the merit of wifely submissiveness. A pious woman never loses an opportunity of taking credit for doing her duty.
The master was a Catholic German, one of those men who are born old and will always remain fifty, even if they live to be eighty. His hollowed, wrinkled, swarthy face had kept something childlike and simple in its darkest folds. The blue of innocence sparkled in his eyes, and the gay smile of spring dwelt on his lips. His gray old hair, which fell in natural curls, like those of Jesus Christ, added to his ecstatic air a vague solemnity which was highly misleading, for he was a man to make a fool of himself with the most exemplar gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope to which he paid no attention, for his gaze soared too high in the clouds to come in contact with material things. And so this great unrecognized artist belonged to that generous race of the absentminded, who give their time and their hearts to others, just as they drop their gloves on every table, their umbrellas at every door. His hands were of the kind which look dirty after washing. Finally, his aged frame, badly set up on tottering, knotty limbs, gave ocular proof how far a man’s body can become a mere accessory to his mind. It was one of those strange freaks of nature which no one has ever properly described except Hoffmann, a German, who has made himself the poet of all which appears lifeless and yet lives. Such was Schmucke, formerly choirmaster to the Margrave of Anspach, a learned man who underwent inspection from a council of piety. They asked him whether he fasted. The master was tempted to reply, “Look at me!” but it is ill work jesting with saints and Jansenist confessors.
This apocryphal old man held so large a place in the life of the two Maries—they became so much attached to the great simple-minded artist whose sole interest was in his art—that, after they were married, each bestowed on him an annuity of three hundred francs, a sum which sufficed for his lodging, his beer, his pipe, and his clothes. Six hundred francs a year and his lessons were a Paradise for Schmucke. He had not ventured to confide his poverty and his hopes to anyone except these two charming children, whose hearts had blossomed under the snow of maternal rigor and the frost of devotion, and this fact by itself sums up the character of Schmucke and the childhood of the two Maries.
No one could tell afterwards what abbé, what devout old lady, had unearthed this German, lost in Paris. No sooner did mothers of a family learn that the Comtesse de Granville had found a music-master for her daughters than they all asked for his name and address. Schmucke had thirty houses in the Marais. This tardy success displayed itself in slippers with bronze steel buckles and lined with horsehair soles, and in a more frequent change of shirt. His childlike gaiety, long repressed by an honorable and seemly poverty, bubbled forth afresh. He let fall little jokes such as:—“Young ladies, the cats supped off the dirt of Paris last night,” when a frost had dried the muddy streets overnight, only they were spoken in a Germano-Gallic lingo:—“Younc ladies, de gads subbed off de dirt off Barees.” Gratified at having brought his adorable ladies this species of Vergiss mein nicht, culled from the flowers of his fancy, he put on an air of such ineffable roguishness in presenting it that mockery was disarmed. It made him so happy to call a smile to the lips of his pupils, the sadness of whose life was no mystery to him, that he would have
