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Updated: June 18, 2025
Visitors crowded the foyers. Financiers, artists, deputies met in the anteroom adjoining the box. They surrounded M. Martin-Belleme, murmured polite congratulations, made graceful gestures to him, and crowded one another in order to shake his hand. Joseph Schmoll, coughing, complaining, blind and deaf, made his way through the throng and reached Madame Martin.
In veiled words he announced catastrophes. His timorous phrases came through the flowers, and irritated M. Schmoll, who began to grumble and to prophesy. He explained that Christian nations were incapable, alone and by themselves, of throwing off barbarism, and that without the Jews and the Arabs Europe would be to-day, as in the time of the Crusades, sunk in ignorance, misery, and cruelty.
And Madame Martin enjoyed his affable phrases, heavy and rusty like the iron-work of brica-brac shops, among which fell dried leaves of anthology. M. Schmoll liked poets and women, and had wit. Madame Marmet feigned not to know him, and went out without returning his bow. When he had exhausted his pretty madrigals, M. Schmoll became sombre and pitiful. He complained piteously.
Schmoll said continually to Marmet: 'You do not know Etruscan, my dear colleague; that is the reason why you are an honorable savant and a fair-minded man. Piqued by his ironic praise, Marmet thought of learning a little Etruscan. He read to his colleague a memoir on the part played by flexions in the idiom of the ancient Tuscans." Madame Martin asked what a flexion was.
He was not decorated enough, not provided with sinecures enough, nor well fed enough by the State he, Madame Schmoll, and their five daughters. His lamentations had some grandeur. Something of the soul of Ezekiel and of Jeremiah was in them. Unfortunately, turning his golden-spectacled eyes toward the table, he discovered Vivian Bell's book. "Oh, 'Yseult La Blonde'," he exclaimed, bitterly.
It was not long before Carl Maria's genius began definitely to show itself, for he started to write for the lyric stage. Two comic operas appeared, "The Dumb Girl of the Forest," and "Peter Schmoll and his Neighbors." They were both performed, but neither made a hit. When Carl was seventeen, the father decided he should go to Vienna, for there he would meet all the great musicians of the time.
In the morning, at the Ricardi Palace, on the frescoes of Gozzoli, she had recognized M. Gamin, M. Lagrange, M. Schmoll, the Princess Seniavine as a page, and M. Renan on horseback. She was terrified at finding M. Renan everywhere. She led all her ideas back to her little circle of academicians and fashionable people, by an easy turn, which irritated her friend.
Schmoll said continually to Marmet: 'You do not know Etruscan, my dear colleague; that is the reason why you are an honorable savant and a fair-minded man. Piqued by his ironic praise, Marmet thought of learning a little Etruscan. He read to his colleague a memoir on the part played by flexions in the idiom of the ancient Tuscans." Madame Martin asked what a flexion was.
We were wet and frozen to the bones. At the grave, in the wind, in the mud, Schmoll read under his umbrella a speech full of jovial cruelty and triumphant pity, which he took afterward to the newspapers in a mourning carriage. An indiscreet friend let Madame Marmet hear of it, and she fainted. Is it possible, Madame, that you have not heard of this learned and ferocious quarrel?
Countess Martin would have wished Dechartre to give his opinion. But he excused himself with a sort of fright. "Do you know," said Schmoll again, "the parable of the three rings, sublime inspiration of a Portuguese Jew." Garain, while complimenting Paul Vence on his brilliant paradox, regretted that wit should be exercised at the expense of morality and justice.
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