“I despair of him,” Andrea said, blushing.
“Ah! You reassure my conscience,” exclaimed Marianna. “I dared not question it further. My friend! My friend! It is no fault of ours, he does not want to be cured.”
Six years later, in January 1837, many musicians unlucky enough to have damaged their wind or string instruments would bring them to a dilapidated and disreputable house in the rue Froidmanteau, on the fifth floor of which lived an old Italian named Gambara. For the last five years, this artist had lived alone, abandoned by his wife and subject to many misfortunes. A musical instrument which he had counted on to make his fortune, and which he called the panharmonicon, had been sold by the bailiffs at public auction on the Place du Châtelet, together with great quantities of ruled paper covered with musical notations. The day after the sale these scores had been used in Les Halles to wrap butter, fish, and fruit. In this way three grand operas, of which this poor man used to speak but which a former Neapolitan cook (now a huckster of questionable groceries) declared to be a heap of rubbish, had been scattered throughout Paris and used to line the wicker baskets of secondhand peddlers. In any case, the landlord had received his rent and the bailiff’s men their pay. According to the old Neapolitan huckster, who sold the whores of the rue Froidmanteau the leftovers of the most sumptuous dinners given in town the night before, Signora Gambara had followed a Milanese count to Italy, and no one could say what had become of her. Weary of fifteen years of poverty, perhaps she had ruined this count by her extravagance, for they were so much in love with each other that in all his life the Neapolitan had never seen an example of such a passion.
One evening toward the end of that same month of January, when Giardini the huckster was telling a whore who had come to find something for her supper about this divine Marianna, so pure, so lovely, so nobly devoted, and who nevertheless had ended up like all the others, the whore and the huckster and Signora Giardini noticed in the street a tall woman with a dusty, blackened face, a walking skeleton peering at the street numbers as she passed, evidently trying to recognize a house.
“Ecco la Marianna!” said the huckster in Italian.
In the wretched huckster, Marianna recognized the Neapolitan Giardini. Showing no concern for whatever misfortunes had brought him to this wretched state, she entered the place and sat down, for she had walked from Fontainebleau; indeed the poor woman had walked fourteen leagues that day, and had begged her bread from Turin all the way to Paris. The sight of her dismayed this wretched trio. Of her marvelous beauty nothing was left but her lovely eyes, now sick and lusterless. The only thing that had remained faithful to her was misfortune. She was warmly welcomed by the old instrument mender, who saw her enter his room with inexpressible pleasure.
“Here you are then, my poor Marianna!” he said kindly. “While you were gone, they sold my instrument and my operas, too!”
It was difficult to kill the fatted calf for the prodigal’s return, but Giardini produced some leftover salmon, the whore paid for the wine, Gambara offered his bread, Signora Giardini laid the cloth, and in this fashion these poor wretches supped together in the composer’s attic. When questioned about her adventures, Marianna refused to answer and merely raised her fine eyes to heaven, murmuring to Giardini: “...married to a dancing girl!”
“How are you going to live?” asked the whore. “The journey has done you in, and...”
“Made me an old woman,” said Marianna. “No, it’s not exhaustion, and it’s not poverty either. It’s grief.”
“Now then, what’s that?” asked the whore. “And why didn’t you send anything to your man here?”
Marianna replied with no more than a look, but it was a look that went straight to the poor girl’s heart.
“And proud into the bargain!” the whore exclaimed. “Excuse me! What good will that do her?” she murmured to Giardini.
That year, musicians must have taken exceptional care of their instruments, for repairs did not suffice to pay the expenses of this wretched household; Marianna earned little enough by her needle, and the couple was reduced to employing their talents in the lowest of all spheres. They left the rue Froidmanteau at dusk and walked to the Champs-Elysées in order to sing duets which poor Gambara accompanied on an even poorer guitar. On the way, his wife, who on these expeditions covered her head with a muslin rag, led her husband to a wineshop in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and made him drink several little glasses of brandy, enough to intoxicate him—otherwise his music would have been intolerable. Then they took up their positions in front of the gay world sitting on iron chairs along the promenade, where one of the great geniuses of the age, the unknown Orpheus of modern music, performed fragments of his scores, and these fragments were so remarkable that they won the favor of a few coins from the Parisian idlers. When an amateur of the Théâtre des Bouffons who happened to be sitting there failed to recognize the opera from which these pieces were taken, he questioned the woman dressed like a Grecian priestess who was making the rounds with an old tin plate in which she collected alms.
“My dear, where does that music come from?”
“From the opera Mohammed,” replied Marianna.
Since Rossini had composed an opera called Mohammed II, the amateur then observed to the woman standing beside him: “What a pity they don’t put on some of those operas of Rossini at the Italiens—the ones nobody knows. It certainly is glorious music!”
Gambara smiled.
A few days ago, the wretched sum of thirty-six francs was required for the rent of the attic where the poor couple lived. The wineshop would advance no credit for the brandy with which the wife intoxicated her husband to make him play properly. Gambara’s music then became so insufferable that the ears of the rich were offended, and the tin plate came back empty. It was nine in the evening when a lovely Italian woman, the Principessa Massimilla di Varese, took pity on these poor wretches. She gave them forty francs and asked them questions when she discovered from the wife’s thanks that she was Venetian. Prince Emilio, who accompanied his wife, asked for the story of their misfortunes, which Marianna told without complaint against man or God.
“Madame,” said Gambara, who was not the least bit drunk, “we are the victims of our own superiority. My music is beautiful, but when music passes from sensation to idea, it can have listeners only among people of genius, for they alone have the power to develop its meaning. My misfortune comes from listening to the music of angels and from believing that human beings could understand it. The same is true of women when their love assumes divine forms—men no longer understand them.”
These words were worth at least the forty francs the princess had just bestowed, and she drew from her purse another gold piece, saying as she gave it to Marianna that she would write to Andrea Marcosini.
“Do not write to him, madame,” Marianna said, “and may God keep you beautiful forever.”
“We must look after them,” the princess murmured to her husband, “for this man has remained faithful to the ideal we have killed.”
At the sight of the gold piece, old Gambara wept; then a memory of his former scientific labors returned, and as he wiped away his tears, the poor composer uttered a sentence which the occasion made quite touching: “Water,” he said, “is a burnt substance.”
—Paris, June 1837
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
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Translation copyright © 2001 by Richard Howard
Introduction copyright © 2001 by Arthur C. Danto
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Odalisque with Slave (detail), 1842
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Balzac, Honoré de, 1799–1850.
[Chef d’œuvre inconnu. English]
The unknown masterpiece ; and, Ga
mbara / by Honoré de Balzac ;
translated by Richard Howard ; introduction by Arthur C. Danto.
p. cm.
I. Title: Unknown masterpiece ; and, Gambara. II. Howard, Richard,
1929– III. Balzac, Honoré de, 1799–1850. Gambara. English. IV. Title:
Gambara. V. Title.
PQ2163.C4 E5 2001
843'.7—dc21
2001000399
eISBN 978-1-59017-415-9
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
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The Unknown Masterpiece Page 12