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Updated: May 1, 2025
I had heard tales to chill the blood, of whole ships' crews stricken and dying like flies. Yet I dare not hesitate, or permit those under my command to flee in terror. Charnal ship though this might be, the danger to us was not so great, if we only remained in the open air, and used proper precaution in putting the dead overboard.
At that time Paris was the centre of the hermetic science in France. The alchemists gathered under the vaults of Notre Dame and studied the hieroglyphics which Nicolas Flamel, before he died, had written on the walls of the charnal Des Innocents and on the portal of Saint Jacques de la Boucherie, describing cabalistically the preparation of the famous stone.
While the house was being prepared, I tried to get my bearings as to what could be extracted for my future existence out of the popularity of my artistic works. The first thing I did was to look up M. de Charnal and to get information from him about the translation of the libretto of my Rienzi with which he had been entrusted.
He declared that he was most certainly inclined to produce one of my operas, only it must be Tannhauser, because, as he explained, this opera was identified with me among the Parisians, who would think it ridiculous to produce any other work under the name of 'Wagner. As to my choice of a translator for the poem of this opera he seemed to entertain grave doubts: he asked whether I had not made a mistake, whereupon I tried to get more definite information about the capabilities of M. de Charnal, and discovered to my horror that this charming young man, who boasted that he had collaborated in a melodrama called Schinderhannes, which he thought was a German romantic subject, had not had the slightest conception of the character of the work he was handling.
Soon afterwards a M. de Charnal, a young litterateur without reputation, applied to me, asking me for permission to publish a good translation in verse of the poem of "Tannhauser," in one of the first Revues de Paris. That permission I granted him, on condition that the publication in the review should not imply any further copyright.
As I have already said, I had found M. de Charnal altogether incompetent, Roger had permanently disappeared from my sight, and Gasperini showed no real desire for the work. At last a certain Herr Lindau came to see me, who protested that with the aid of young Edmond Roche he could produce a faithful translation of Tannhauser.
Thank God I was not doomed to be a resident of this charnal house, where out of eighty-five of my brave comrades who belonged to our detachment of cavalry, and who were destined to suffer its blood-curdling horrors, only eighteen ever lived to relate the tales of fiendish cruelty to which they were obliged to submit.
In Jean Paul's cry "How lonely is everyone in this wide charnal of the universe!" is the explanation of much. We are as we are. And Allah is great. And because we are as we are, it is fallacy to think that the good women, in the accepted sense of the term, are the only virtuous ones. Women of the stage and of the world ponder little on Moses and the prophets.
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