general's courage; the extent of his information about all manner of things, concerning which he talks equally well; the quickness of his intelligence, which makes him catch the thought of another even before it is expressed: but I confess I am afraid of the power he seems anxious to wield over all about him. His piercing scrutiny has in it something strange and inexplicable that awes even our directors; think, then, how it frightens a woman." The writer is also terrified by the very ardor of her suitor's passion. Past her first youth, how can she hope to keep for herself that " violent tenderness" which is almost a frenzy? Would he not soon cease to love her, and regret the marriage? If so, her only resource would be tears - -a sorry one, indeed, but still the only one. "Barras declares that if I marry the general he will secure for him the chief command of the Army of Italy. Yesterday Bonaparte, speaking of this favor, which, although not yet granted, already has set his colleagues in arms to murmuring, said: Do they think I need protection to succeed? Some day they will be only too happy if I give them mine. My sword is at my side, and with it I shall go far.' What do you think of this assurance of success? Is it not a proof of confidence arising from excessive self-esteem? A brigadier-general protecting the heads of the government! I don't know; but sometimes this ridiculous self-reliance leads me to the point of believing everything possible which this strange man would have me do; and with his imagination, who can reckon what he would undertake?" This letter, though often quoted, is so remarkable that, as some think, it may be a later invention. If actually written later, it was probably the invention of Josephine herself. The divinity who could awaken such ardor in a Napoleon was in reality six years older than her suitor, and Lucien proves by his exaggeration of four years that she certainly looked more than her real age. She had no fortune, though by the subterfuges of which a clever woman could make use she led Buonaparte to think her in affluent circumstances. She had no social station; for her drawing-room, though frequented by men of ancient name and exalted position, was not graced by the presence of their wives. The very house she occupied had a doubtful reputation, having been a gift to the wife of Talma the actor from one of her lovers, and being a loan to Mme. Beauharnais from Barras. She had thin brown hair, a complexion neither fresh nor faded, expressive eyes, a small, retroussé nose, a pretty mouth, and a voice that charmed all listeners. She was rather undersized, but her figure was so perfectly proportioned as to give the impression of height and suppleness. Its charms were scarcely concealed by the clothing she wore, made as it was in the suggestive fashion of the day, with no support to the form but a belt, and as scanty about her shoulders as it was about her shapely feet. It appears to have been her elegance and her manners, as well as her sensuality, which overpowered Buonaparte; for he described her as having "the calm and dignified demeanor which belongs to the old régime." What motives may have combined to overcome her scruples we cannot tell: perhaps a love of adventure, probably an awakened ambition for a success in other domains than the one which advancing years would soon compel her to abandon. She knew that Buonaparte had no fortune whatever; she must have known likewise, on the highest authority, that both favor and fortune would by her assistance soon be his. At all events, his suit made swift advance, and by the end of January he was secure of his prize. His love-letters, to judge from one of the time which has been preserved, were as fine as the despatches with which he soon began to electrify his soldiers and all France. “I awaken full of thee," he wrote; "thy portrait and yester eve's intoxicating charm have left my senses no repose. Sweet and matchless Josephine, how strange your influence upon my heart! Are you angry, do I see you sad, are you uneasy, . . . my soul is moved with grief, and there is no rest for your friend; but is there then more when, yielding to an overmastering desire, I draw from your lips, your heart, a flame which consumes me? Ah, this very night, I knew your portrait was not you! Thou leavest at noon; three hours more, and I shall see thee again. Meantime, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses; but give me none, for they set me all afire." What genuine and reckless passion! The "thou" and "you" may be strangely jumbled, as they are; the grammar may be mixed and bad: but the meaning would be strong enough incense for the most exacting woman. On February 9, 1796, their bans were proclaimed; on March 2 the bridegroom received his bride's dowry in his own appointment, on Carnot's motion, not on that of Barras, as chief of the Army of Italy, still under the name of Buonaparte; on the seventh he was handed his commission; on the ninth the marriage ceremony was performed by the civil magistrate; and on the eleventh the husband started for his post. In the marriage certificate at Paris the groom gives his age as twenty-eight, but in reality he was twenty-seven; the bride, who was thirty-three, gives hers as not quite twenty-nine. Her name is spelled Detascher, his Bonaparte. A new birth, a new baptism, a new career, a new start in a new sphere, Corsica forgotten, Jacobinism renounced, General and Mme. Bonaparte made their bow to the world. The ceremony attracted no public attention, and was most unceremonious, no member of the family from either side being present. Madame Mère, in fact, was very angry, and foretold that with such a difference in age the union would be barren. There was one weird omen which, read aright, distinguishes the otherwise commonplace occurrence. In the wedding-ring were two words -"To destiny (Au destin)." The words were ominous, for they were indicative of a policy never afterward concealed, being a pretense to deceive Josephine as well as the rest of the world: the giver was about to assume a new rôle, that of the "man of destiny,"-to work for a time on the imagination and superstition of his age. Sometimes he forgot his part, and displayed the shrewd, calculating, hard-working man behind the mask, who was less a fatalist than a personified fate, less a child of fortune than its maker. "Great events," he wrote a very short time later from Italy," ever depend but upon a single hair. The adroit [habile] man profits by everything, neglects nothing which can increase his chances; the less adroit, by sometimes disregarding a single chance, fails in everything." Here is the whole philosophy of Bonaparte's life. He may have been sincere at times in the other profession; if so, it was because he could find no other expression for what in his nature corresponded to romance in others. The general and his adjutant reached Marseilles in due season. The good news of Napoleon's successes having long preceded them, the home of the Buonapartes had become the resort of many among the best and most ambitious men in the Southern land. Élise was now twenty, and though much sought after, was showing a marked preference for Pasquale Bacciocchi, the poor young Corsican whom she afterward married. Pauline was sixteen, a great beauty, and deep in a serious flirtation with Fréron, who, not having been elected to the Five Hundred, had been appointed to a lucrative but uninfluential office in the great provincial town-that of commissioner for the department. Caroline, the youngest sister, was blossoming with greater promise even than Pauline. Napoleon stopped a few days under his mother's roof to regulate these matrimonial proceedings as he thought most advantageous. On March 22 he reached the headquarters of the Army of Italy. The command was assumed with simple and appropriate ceremonial. The short despatch to the Directory announcing this momentous event was signed" Bonaparte." The Corsican nobleman di Buonaparte was now entirely transformed into the French general Bonaparte. The process had been long and difficult: loyal Corsican; mercenary cosmopolitan, ready as an expert artillery officer for service in any land or under any banner; lastly, Frenchman, liberal, and revolutionary. So far he had been consistent in each character; for years to come he remained stationary as a sincere French patriot, always of course with an eye to the main chance. As events unfolded, the transformation began again; and the "adroit" man, taking advantage of every chance, became once more a cosmopolitan- this time not as a soldier, but as a statesman; not as a servant, but as the imperator universalis, too large for a single land, determined to reunite once more all Western Christendom, and, like the great German Charles a thousand years before, make the imperial limits conterminous with those of orthodox Christianity. The power of this empire was, however, to rest on a Latin, not on a Teuton; not on Germany, but on France. Its splendor was not to be embodied in the Eternal City, but in Paris; and its destiny was not to bring in a Christian millennium for the glory of God, but a scientific equilibrium of social states to the glory of Napoleon's dynasty, permanent because universally beneficent. (To be continued.) William M. Sloane. [ERRATUM: On page 498 of the February part of this "Life," by inadvertence Charles Emmanuel is given as the name of the King of Sardinia, instead of Victor Amadeus.-W. M. S.] For mortal ear? Song wilder than the tune The Arctic utters when its waters croon Their angry chorus on the Norway strand, Or where Nile thunders to a thirsty land With welcome sound from Mountains of the Moon, Or lone Lualaba from his lagoon Draws down his murmurous wave? Then shouldst thou stand To meet the winter storm, and lend thine ear William Prescott Foster. U EUGÈNE YSAŸE. NKNOWN yesterday, celebrated to-day!" said the Parisians, in 1867, when Wilhelmj, playing in their city for the first time, was discovered by them to be a man of genius. Possibly the Germans were constrained to smile when they reflected that the st had been compelling admiration and r five years throughout the length and Germany, Switzerland, and Great in the Parisians found him; but they were none the less gratified at the triumph of their countryman in the then artistic capital of Europe; and after all, the sentiment embodied in the remark was natural enoughin Paris. When newspaper writers are eaten up with the conviction that nothing outside their own city is worth writing about, unless it be politics, it is not strange that they should look upon themselves as discoverers of a new phenomenon every time a flash of lightning comes to them out of the gloom of barbarism by which they think their city surrounded. of tradition back to Charles de Bériot, and it is the French school of violin-playing that Ysaÿe exemplifies, though the style has been modified by the greater breadth and warmer, more romantic feeling which came in through Wieniawski, the full-blooded Pole. In consequence of this modification, Ysaÿe stands now as leader of the new and rising Belgian school, and as such he has been first professor of violin-playing at the Conservatory of Brussels since 1886, as Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski were before him. When it is added that he is the husband of a wife of rare loveliness; father of four beautiful children; lives happily and luxuriously in Brussels; is an officer of public instruction; and has harvested a full quota of those baubles which are the signs of royal approbation, enough has been told to introduce the man Ysaÿe to those curious about his personality. Moreover, though American newspaper writers sented by Ferdinand David and Joseph Joapractise a wider range of vision, and American chim. Vieuxtemps, his model, carries the line newspaper readers revel in an ostrich-like appetite (which the Parisians do not know, happy people!), there have been similar eruptions of feeling here. It is, in good sooth, a little startling to be confronted by a genius of the first rank in a field upon which the sun of publicity beats so fiercely as it does upon the stage and concert platform, and then to find that the name of the genius has not got into the cyclopedias, which nowadays are kept so painfully up to date. Naturally, the first impulse is to forget that art is long, and its great exemplars creatures of slow and laborious growth, and to believe that the new genius has sprung up, overnight, full-blown like a mushroom, or been precipitated mysteriously into the midst of us like a letter from the mahatmas. Eugène Ysaÿe, the violinist, is the latest case in point. The persistence of his managers, the good nature of newspaper editors, and the uncomplaining patience of paper and printer's ink, had kept the good people wondering for a month what manner of man he might be who could bear the burden of so unpronounceable a name; but from an artistic point of view he was a revelation when he effected his first American appearance at a concert of the Philharmonic Society, under Anton Seidl, November 16 of last year. Is he, then, one of those products of hasty growth which seem to fit the spirit of modern times? By no means. Despite his youthfulness, he is barely thirty-six years old,-Ysaÿe is more the bearer of the traditions of past decades than a prodigy of to-day. He stands in manner and accomplishment as a link between us and the last great masters of the French school. Vieuxtemps died in 1881, and for some years before that time Ysaÿe had enjoyed his friendship and artistic guardianship. In Brussels, after studying with his father (who once visited this country, and conducted the performances of a French opera company in New Orleans), and at the Conservatory of Liège, his native town, Ysaÿe was the pupil of Wieniawski, then at the head of the violin department for a space, while Vieuxtemps was recovering his ability to resume the functions which illness had compelled him to lay down. In 1876 Vieuxtemps heard him at a concert in Antwerp, and persuaded the municipality of Liège and the government of Belgium to grant him a stipend, that he might pursue his studies in Paris. There he was a pupil of Massart, who had been the teacher of Wieniawski. Thus from the beginning, and on all hands, he came under the influence of the French school, which had wrested supremacy from the Italian after the death of Paganini, and was contending with the German, repre And the artist? His is a potentiality that can be discussed without calling in the aid of makeshift comparison. From first to last a puissant figure; a man of extraordinary physical attributes; a large, sound man; a normal man in appearance, yet singularly engaging because of the expressive mobility of his face, and the freedom from affectation which marks his bearing- he is sanity of body, mind, and soul personified. He sways to and fro while playing, but the movement seems unconscious, and does not disturb the feeling of reposefulness in the spectators which his conscious but modest strength inspires. Like no other player that I can recall, he illustrates the intimacy which exists between a violinist and his instrument which must exist if we are to be told what violin music is. A wonderful instrument, closer than any but the human voice to him who excites it to speech, more tightly interknit with his being. Mark how it nestles under his chin, and throbs synchronously with his soul. Not a twitch, not a tension, not a relaxation of the muscles of either hand or arm, acting under the stimulus of emotion, but will speak itself out in the voice of this thing of wood and hair and strings. Almost as unvolitionally as the human voice takes changing color and pitch and dynamic intensity from variations of feeling, does the voice of this marvelous instrument respond to emotional stimuli. Therein lies the mystery of Ysaÿe's playing, the miracle of his expressive tone. He feels much, and the violin is his vehicle of expression. He sets his bow to the strings; the hairs seem to bite them with human purpose; the tone, as faint as a ghostly whisper, or ringing like a martial shout, fills the room, and is saturated with feeling. There is an answering throb from the listeners; the chords of their hearts are swinging in unison. |