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Updated: June 4, 2025
On the other hand, in the civilities of those who, while they courted a rising celebrity, still held their habitual existence apart from the artistic world, there was a certain air of condescension, of patronage, towards the young stranger with no other protector but Signora Venosta, the ci-devant public singer, and who had made her debut in a journal edited by M. Gustave Rameau, which, however disguised by exaggerated terms of praise, wounded her pride of woman in flattering her vanity as author.
For though France has a very definite musical feeling, a thing that varies little with the passing centuries and makes for the surprising similarities between the work of Claude Le Jeune in the sixteenth century, Rameau in the eighteenth and Debussy in the twentieth, she has, during her thousand years of culture, and while producing a flood of illustrious authors, and painters and sculptors, borne not more than four or five composers of indisputably first rank.
The same strong hand quitting its hold on Monnier, then seized Rameau by the wrist, and the same deep voice said, "Come with me." Rameau, turning in amaze, not unmixed with anger, saw beside him a tall man with sombrero hat pressed close over his head, and in the blouse of a labourer, but through such disguise he recognized the pale grey whiskers and green spectacles of Lebeau.
Then he said in a whisper, "Come back into the salon. Let us talk frankly." "M. Rameau," said De Mauleon, when the two men had reseated themselves in the salon, "I will honestly say that my desire is to rid myself as soon as I can of the trust of guardian to this young lady. Playing as I do with fortune, my only stake against her favours is my life.
His eye, passing rapidly over the figure of Savarin reading in the window-niche, rested upon Rameau and Isaura seated on the same divan, he with her hand clasped in both his own, and bending his face towards hers so closely that a loose tress of her hair seemed to touch his forehead.
Still more, how constitute himself her guardian, so as to secure it to herself, independently of her husband? Perhaps Isaura was too infatuated with Rameau, or too romantically unselfish, to permit the fortune so mysteriously conveyed being exclusively appropriated to herself.
A few days after he had thus proclaimed himself, Victor de Mauleon who had before kept aloof from Rameau, and from salons at which he was likely to meet that distinguished minstrel solicited his personal acquaintance, and asked him to breakfast. Rameau joyfully went. He had a very natural curiosity to see the contributor whose articles had so mainly insured the sale of the Sens Commun.
The number of patients in this set who at the age of thirty are more worn out than septuagenarians increases so rapidly as to make one dread to think what will be the next race of Frenchmen. To the predilection for absinthe young Rameau and the writers of his set add the imitation of Heine, after, indeed, the manner of caricaturists, who effect a likeness striking in proportion as it is ugly.
"Sombre and unsociable he fled the world, and kept, even amid his family, a silence almost absolute." I do not know whether or not Rameau's wife survived him. In his old age Rameau said that if he were twenty years younger, he would go to Italy and take Pergolesi for his master in harmony. This brilliant genius, Pergolesi, died in 1736, at the age of twenty-six.
Envy is said by a great French writer to be the vice of Democracies. Envy certainly had made Rameau a democrat. He could talk and write glibly enough upon the themes of equality and fraternity, and was so far an ultra-democrat that he thought moderation the sign of a mediocre understanding. De Mauleon's talk, therefore, terribly perplexed him. It was unlike anything he had heard before.
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