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Updated: May 24, 2025
He watched, and he coveted; and presently he fell to thinking of the wonderful things which money can do, when it is skilfully used; and he fell to scheming and plotting, and laying deep plans; and moreover he recalled the days when Margaret had first appeared to him as an animated work of art, and he remembered why he had persuaded Schreiermeyer to change the opera from Faust to Rigoletto.
This hall was ubiquitous, whether the action of the piece lay in Germany, Italy, France, or England, Mary Queen of Scots sobbed in this hall; Wallenstein in Schiller's tragedy ranted in it; Rigoletto reproved his flighty daughter in it. It seemed curious that personages so widely different should all have selected the same firm of upholsterers to fit up their sanctums.
Wagner knew the theatre and every stagey device by heart, and in none of his dramas is there anything half so hard to follow as the plots, say, of Rigoletto and Aïda and most Italian operas. Nor, again, does the music present any difficulty. In spite of the use of the leit-motif which I shall discuss presently, the separate numbers are as clean cut as those of any Mozart opera.
When the curtain went up after the quartette of "Rigoletto," Esperance and Albert were seated on the long piano stool. Loud applause greeted them. The Duke was talking to Maurice in the wings and seemed a little nervous. He envied Albert at that moment for his superiority as a musician. When they finished, a great tumult demanded an encore, but Esperance had come to the end of her strength.
At last a way was found out of the difficulty by the chief of police himself, who was a great lover of art. He suggested to the librettist that the King should be changed to a duke of Mantua, and the title of the work to "Rigoletto," the name of the buffoon who figures in the place of the original Triboulet.
Archie brushed some papers off the desk with a careless gesture, and seated himself on the vacant spot. "Absolutely! I spoke to him as one old friend to another, sprayed the bills all over the place; and he sang a few bars from 'Rigoletto, and signed on the dotted line." "You're not such a fool as you look," owned Mr. Brewster. Archie scratched a match on the desk and lit a cigarette.
If he could feel so much for a piece of marble, it was not likely that he should feel less keenly where the woman he loved was concerned; and circumstance for circumstance, point for point, it was much worse that Margaret Donne should stand and sing behind the footlights, for money, and disguise herself as a man in the last act of Rigoletto, than that the Aphrodite should go to the Louvre and take her place with the Borghese Gladiator, the Venus of Milo and the Victory of Samothrace.
Rigoletto, gloating over his revenge, is about to throw the sack into the river near by, when he suddenly hears the voice of the Duke. He tears open the sack to see whose body it contains, and by the glare of the lightning is horrified to find that it is his own daughter, and realizes that the malediction of Monterone has been accomplished.
A moment later I heard, through the deepening shadows of the wood into which he had disappeared, a rich, strong, baritone voice singing "La donna e mobile," from "Rigoletto." It was rough on Gilson. Such was the terse, cold, but not altogether unsympathetic judgment of the better public opinion at Mammon Hill the dictum of respectability.
"Isn't he a great cat?" she whispered; and the sharp click of the billiard-balls rose, as if Jack Cardigan had capped the cat, the moon, caprice, and tragedy with: "In off the red!" Monsieur Profond had resumed his stroll, to a teasing little tune in his beard. What was it? Oh! yes, from "Rigoletto": "Donna a mobile." Just what he would think! She squeezed her father's arm.
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