A Daughter of Eve | Page 6

genius, who was now examined by a council of
devotes, and asked if he kept the fasts. The master was much inclined
to answer, "Look at me!" but how could he venture to joke with pious
dowagers and Jansenist confessors? This apocryphal old fellow held
such a place in the lives of the two Maries, they felt such friendship for
the grand and simple-minded artist, who was happy and contented in
the mere comprehension of his art, that after their marriage, they each
gave him an annuity of three hundred francs a year,--a sum which
sufficed to pay for his lodging, beer, pipes, and clothes. Six hundred
francs a year and his lessons put him in Eden. Schmucke had never
found courage to confide his poverty and his aspirations to any but
these two adorable young girls, whose hearts were blooming beneath

the snow of maternal rigor and the ice of devotion. This fact explains
Schmucke and the girlhood of the two Maries.
No one knew then, or later, what abbe or pious spinster had discovered
the old German then vaguely wandering about Paris, but as soon as
mothers of families learned that the Comtesse de Granville had found a
music-master for her daughters, they all inquired for his name and
address. Before long, Schmucke had thirty pupils in the Marais. This
tardy success was manifested by steel buckles to his shoes, which were
lined with horse-hair soles, and by a more frequent change of linen. His
artless gaiety, long suppressed by noble and decent poverty, reappeared.
He gave vent to witty little remarks and flowery speeches in his
German-Gallic patois, very observing and very quaint and said with an
air which disarmed ridicule. But he was so pleased to bring a laugh to
the lips of his two pupils, whose dismal life his sympathy had
penetrated, that he would gladly have made himself wilfully ridiculous
had he failed in being so by nature.
According to one of the nobler ideas of religious education, the young
girls always accompanied their master respectfully to the door. There
they would make him a few kind speeches, glad to do anything to give
him pleasure. Poor things! all they could do was to show him their
womanhood. Until their marriage, music was to them another life
within their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams
for reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct of
protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to overwhelm
them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home, they flung
themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and spent themselves
upon it. Melody, harmony, and composition, three daughters of heaven,
whose choir was led by an old Catholic faun drunk with music, were to
these poor girls the compensation of their trials; they made them, as it
were, a rampart against their daily lives. Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck,
Paesiello, Cimarosa, Haydn, and certain secondary geniuses, developed
in their souls a passionate emotion which never passed beyond the
chaste enclosure of their breasts, though it permeated that other creation
through which, in spirit, they winged their flight. When they had
executed some great work in a manner that their master declared was

almost faultless, they embraced each other in ecstasy and the old man
called them his Saint Cecilias.
The two Maries were not taken to a ball until they were sixteen years of
age, and then only four times a year in special houses. They were not
allowed to leave their mother's side without instructions as to their
behavior with their partners; and so severe were those instructions that
they dared say only yes or no during a dance. The eye of the countess
never left them, and she seemed to know from the mere movement of
their lips the words they uttered. Even the ball- dresses of these poor
little things were piously irreproachable; their muslin gowns came up to
their chins with an endless number of thick ruches, and the sleeves
came down to their wrists. Swathing in this way their natural charms,
this costume gave them a vague resemblance to Egyptian hermae;
though from these blocks of muslin rose enchanting little heads of
tender melancholy. They felt themselves the objects of pity, and
inwardly resented it. What woman, however innocent, does not desire
to excite envy?
No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp of
their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly red,
and they glowed with health. Eve did not issue more innocent from the
hands of God than these two girls from their mother's home when they
went to the mayor's office and the church to be married, after receiving
the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two