Whatever of heart or conscience—pity, love, tenderness, manliness, courage, reverence, charity—endowed him at his birth had been swallowed up by this one faculty, and nothing of them was left for the common uses of life. He poured them all into his little flexible flageolet.
Svengali playing Chopin on the pianoforte, even (or especially) Svengali playing “Ben Bolt” on that penny whistle of his, was as one of the heavenly host.
Svengali walking up and down the earth seeking whom he might cheat, betray, exploit, borrow money from, make brutal fun of, bully if he dared, cringe to if he must—man, woman, child, or dog—was about as bad as they make ’em.
To earn a few pence when he couldn’t borrow them he played accompaniments at café concerts, and even then he gave offence; for in his contempt for the singer he would play too loud, and embroider his accompaniments with brilliant improvisations of his own, and lift his hands on high and bring them down with a bang in the sentimental parts, and shake his dirty mane and shrug his shoulders, and smile and leer at the audience, and do all he could to attract their attention to himself. He also gave a few music lessons (not at ladies’ schools, let us hope), for which he was not well paid, presumably, since he was always without the sou, always borrowing money, that he never paid back, and exhausting the pockets and the patience of one acquaintance after another.
He had but two friends. There was Gecko, who lived in a little garret close by in the Impasse des Ramoneurs, and who was second violin in the orchestra of the Gymnase, and shared his humble earnings with his master, to whom, indeed, he owed his great talent, not yet revealed to the world.
Svengali’s other friend and pupil was (or rather had been) the mysterious Honorine, of whose conquest he was much given to boast, hinting that she was “une jeune femme du monde.” This was not the case. Mademoiselle Honorine Cahen (better known in the quartier latin as Mimi la Salope) was a dirty, drabby little dolly-mop of a Jewess, a model for the figure—a very humble person indeed, socially.
She was, however, of a very lively disposition, and had a charming voice, and a natural gift of singing so sweetly that you forgot her accent, which was that of the “tout ce qu’il y a de plus canaille.”
She used to sit at Carrel’s, and during the pose she would sing. When Little Billee first heard her he was so fascinated that “it made him sick to think she sat for the figure”—an effect, by-the-way, that was always produced upon him by all specially attractive figure models of the gentler sex, for he had a reverence for woman. And before everything else, he had for the singing woman an absolute worship. He was especially thrall to the contralto—the deep low voice that breaks and changes in the middle and soars all at once into a magnified angelic boy treble. It pierced through his ears to his heart, and stirred his very vitals.
He had once heard Madame Alboni, and it had been an epoch in his life; he would have been an easy prey to the sirens! Even beauty paled before the lovely female voice singing in the middle of the note—the nightingale killed the bird-of-paradise.
I need hardly say that poor Mimi la Salope had not the voice of Madame Alboni, nor the art; but it was a beautiful voice of its little kind, always in the very middle of the note, and her artless art had its quick seduction.
She sang little songs of Béranger’s—“Grand’mère, parlez-nous de lui!” or “T’en souviens-tu? disait un capitaine—” or “Enfants, c’est moi qui suis Lisette!” and suchlike pretty things, that almost brought the tears to Little Billee’s easily moistened eyes.
But soon she would sing little songs that were not by Béranger—little songs with slang words Little Billee hadn’t French enough to understand; but from the kind of laughter with which the points were received by the rapins in Carrel’s studio he guessed these little songs were vile, though the touching little voice was as that of the seraphim still; and he knew the pang of disenchantment and vicarious shame.
Svengali had heard her sing at the Brasserie des Porcherons in the Rue du Crapaud-volant, and had volunteered to teach her; and she went to see him in his garret, and he played to her, and leered and ogled, and flashed his bold, black, beady Jew’s eyes into hers, and she straightway mentally prostrated herself in reverence and adoration before this dazzling specimen of her race.
So that her sordid, mercenary little gutter-draggled soul was filled with the sight and the sound of him, as of a lordly, godlike, shawm-playing, cymbal-banging hero and prophet of the Lord God of Israel—David and Saul in one!
And then he set himself to teach her—kindly and patiently at first, calling her sweet little pet names—his “Rose of Sharon,” his “pearl of Pabylon,” his “cazelle-eyed liddle Cherusalem skylark”—and promised her that she should be the queen of the nightingales.
But before he could teach her anything he had to unteach her all she knew; her breathing, the production of her voice, its emission—everything was wrong. She worked indefatigably to please him, and soon succeeded in forgetting all the pretty little sympathetic tricks of voice and phrasing Mother Nature had taught her.
But though she had an exquisite ear, she had no real musical intelligence—no intelligence of any kind except about sous and centimes; she was as stupid as a little downy owl, and her voice was just a light native warble, a throstle’s pipe, all in the head and nose and throat (a voice he didn’t understand, for once), a thing of mere youth and health and bloom and high spirits—like her beauty, such as it
