Chapter II: A Note on Mimi Aguglia 298 (4)

There is a newcomer tonight. (I am talking to the _agent de service_.) She is of a youth and she is certainly from Brittany. I see her sitting in a corner, waiting for something, trying to know. "She will learn," says my friend, "She will learn to pay like the others." That is the _gros_ Pierre who regards her. He twirls his moustache and considers, and in the end he lumbers to her and asks her to dance. She is willing to do so, but the intensity of Pierre frightens her, frightens and intrigues.... There is a sign on the wall that one must not stamp one's feet, but no other prohibition.... He twists her finger purposely as they whirl ... and whirl. She cowers. _Gros_ Pierre is very big and strong. "_T'es bath, mome_," I hear him say, as they pass me by.... The dance over, he towers above her for a brief second before he swaggers out.... Estelle smiles. Her lips move and she speaks quickly to Edouard, _le petit_.... He does not listen. Why should he listen to his _gigolette_? She is wasting her time here anyway. He becomes impatient.... Carmella smiles across the room in a brief second of chance and Estelle answers the smile. Carmella holds up three fingers (it is now 1.30). Estelle nods her head quickly. The musicians are always playing, except in the middle of the dance when _madame, la patronne_, gathers in the _sous_.... Only from one she takes nothing.... He is twenty and very blonde and he is dancing with _Madame_.... Between dances she pays his _consommations_.... Estelle rises slowly and walks out while Carmella, _l'Arabe_, follows her with his eyes. Edouard, _le petit_, lights a _Maryland_ and poises a _louis_ between his thumb and fore-finger, the nails of which are long and dirty.... The music is always playing.... The little girl from Brittany is again alone in the corner. There is fear in her face. She is beginning to know. She summons her courage and walks to the door, on through.... The _agent de service_ twirls his moustache and points after her. "She soon will know." I follow. She hesitates for a second at the street door and then starts towards the corner.... She reaches the corner and passes around it.... I hear a scream ... the sound of running footsteps ... the beat of a horse's hoofs ... the rolling of wheels on the cobble stones....

_November 11, 1915._

Music and Cooking

_"Give me some music,--music, moody food
Of us that trade in love."_

Shakespeare's _Cleopatra_.

Music and Cooking

It is my firm belief that there is an intimate relationship between the stomach and the ear, the saucepan and the crotchet, the mysteries of Mrs. Rorer and the mysteries of Mme. Marchesi. It has even occurred to me that one of the reasons our American composers are so barren in ideas is because as a race we are not interested in cooking and eating. Those countries in which music plays the greater part in the national life are precisely those which are the most interested in the culinary art. The food of Italy, the cooking, is celebrated; every peasant in that sunny land sings, and the voices of some Italians have reverberated around the world. The very melodies of Verdi and Rossini are inextricably twined in our minds around memories of _ravioli_ and _zabaglione_. _Vesti la Giubba_ is _spaghetti_. The composers of these melodies and their interpreters alike cooked, ate, and drank with joy, and so they composed and sang with joy too. Men with indigestion may be able to write novels, but they cannot compose great music.... The Germans spend more time eating than the people of any other country (at least they did once). It is small occasion for wonder, therefore, that they produce so many musicians. They are always eating, mammoth plates heaped high with Bavarian cabbage, _Koenigsberger Klopps_, _Hasenpfeffer_, noodles, sauerkraut, _Wiener Schnitzel_ ... drinking seidels of beer. They escort sausages with them to the opera. All the women have their skirts honeycombed with capacious pockets, in which they carry substantial lunches to eat while Isolde is deceiving King Mark. Why, the very principle of German music is based on a theory of well-fed auditors. The voluptuous scores of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Max Schillings and Co. were not written for skinny, ill-nourished wights. Even Beethoven demands flesh and bone of his hearers. The music of Bach is directly aimed against the doctrine of asceticism. "The German capacity for feeling emotion in music has developed to the same extent as the capacity of the German stomach for containing food," writes Ernest Newman, "but in neither the one case nor the other has there been a corresponding development in refinement of perceptions. German sentimental music is not quite as gross as German food and German feeding, but it comes very near to it sometimes.... 'The Germans do not taste,' said Montaigne, 'they gulp.' As with their food, so with the emotions of their music. So long as they get them in sufficient mass, of the traditional quality, and with the traditional pungent seasoning, they are content to leave piquancy and variety of effect to others."... Once in Munich in a second storey window of the Bayerischebank I saw a small boy, about ten years old, sitting outside on the sill, washing the panes of glass. Opposite him on the same sill a dachshund reposed on her paws, regarding her master affectionately. Between the two stood a half-filled toby of foaming Lowenbrau, which, from time to time, the lad raised to his lips, quaffing deep draughts. And when he set the pot down he whistled the first subject of Beethoven's _Fifth Symphony_. On Sunday afternoons, in the gardens which invariably surround the Munich breweries, the happy mothers, who gather to listen to the band play while they drink beer, frequently replenish the empty nursing bottles of their offspring at the taps from which flows the deep brown beverage.... The food of the French is highly artificial, delicately prepared and served, and flavoured with infinite art: _vol au vent a la reine_ and Massenet, _petits pois a l'etuvee_ and Gounod, _oeuf Ste. Clotilde_ and Cesar Franck, all strike the tongue and the ear quite pleasantly. Des Esseintes and his liqueur symphony were the inventions of a Frenchman.... Hungarian goulash and Hungarian rhapsodies are certainly designed to be taken in conjunction.... Russian music tastes of _kascha_ and _bortsch_ and vodka. The happy, hearty eaters of Russia, the drunken, sodden drinkers of Russia are reflected in the scores of _Boris Godunow_ and _Petrouchka_.... In England we find that the great English meat pasties and puddings appeared in the same century with the immortal Purcell.... But in America we import our cooks ... and our music. As a race we do not like to cook. We scarcely like to eat. We certainly do not enjoy eating. We will never have a national music until we have national dishes and national drinks and until we like good food. It is significant that our national drinks at present are mixed drinks, the ingredients of which are foreign. It is doubly significant that that section of the country which produces chicken _a la Maryland_, corn bread, beaten biscuit, mint juleps, and New Orleans fizzes has furnished us with the best of such music as we can boast. Maine has offered us no _Suwanee River_; we owe no _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_ to Nebraska. The best of our ragtime composers are Jews, a race which regards eating and cooking of sufficient importance to include rules for the preparation and disposition of food in its religious tenets.

Most musicians and those who enjoy listening to music, like to eat (this does not mean that people who like to eat always desire to listen to music at the same time, but nowadays one has little choice in the matter); what is more pregnant, most of them like to cook. We may include even the music critics, one of whom (Henry T. Finck) has written a book about such matters. The others eat ... and expand. James Huneker devotes sixteen pages of "The New Cosmopolis" to the "maw of the monster." And as H. L. Mencken has pointed out, "The Pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover." Dinners are constantly being given for the musicians and critics to meet and talk over thirteen courses with wine. You may read Mr. Krehbiel's glowing accounts of the dinner given to Adelina Patti (a dinner referred to in Joseph Hergesheimer's lyric novel, "The Three Black Pennys") on the occasion of her twenty-fifth anniversary as a singer, of the dinner to Marcella Sembrich to mark her retirement from the opera stage, and of a dinner to Teresa Carreno when she proposed a toast to her three husbands.... Go to the opera house and observe the lady singers, with their ample bosoms and their broad hips, the men with their expansive paunches ... and use your imagination. Why is it, when a singer is interviewed for a newspaper, that she invariably finds herself tired of hotel food and wants an apartment of her own, where she can cook to her stomach's content? Why are the musical journals and the Sunday supplements of the newspapers always publishing pictures of contralti with their sleeves rolled back to the elbows, their Poiret gowns (cunningly and carefully exhibited nevertheless) covered with aprons, baking bread, turning omelettes, or preparing clam broth Uncle Sam? You, my reader, have surely seen these pictures, but it has perhaps not occurred to you to conjure up a reason for them.

Edgar Saltus says: "A perfect dinner should resemble a concert. As the _morceaux_ succeed each other, so, too, should the names of the composers." Few dinners in New York may be regarded as concerts and still fewer restaurants may be looked upon as concert halls, except, unfortunately, in the literal sense. However, if you can find a restaurant where opera singers and conductors eat you may be sure it is a good one. Huneker describes the old Lienau's, where William Steinway, Anton Seidl, Theodore Thomas, Scharwenka, Joseffy, Lilli Lehmann, Max Heinrich, and Victor Herbert used to gather. Follow Alfred Hertz and you will be in excellent company in a double sense. Then watch him consume a plateful of Viennese pastry. If you have ever seen Emmy Destinn or Feodor Chaliapine eat you will feel that justice has been done to a meal. I once sat with the Russian bass for twelve hours, all of which time he was eating or drinking. He began with six plates of steaming onion soup (cooked with cheese and toast). The old New Year's eve festivities at the Gadski-Tauschers' resembled the storied banquets of the middle ages.... Boars' heads, meat pies, _salade macedoine_, _coeur de palmier_, _hollandaise_ were washed down with magnums and quarts of Irroy brut, 1900, Pol Roger, Chambertin, graceful Bohemian crystal goblets of Liebfraumilch and Johannisberger Schloss-Auslese. Mary Garden once sent a jewelled gift to the _chef_ at the Ritz-Carlton in return for a superb fish sauce which he had contrived for her. H. E. Krehbiel says that Brignoli "probably ate as no tenor ever ate before or since--ravenously as a Prussian dragoon after a fast." _Peche Melba_ has become a stable article on many menus in many cities in many lands. Agnes G. Murphy, in her biography of Mme. Melba, says that one day the singer, Joachim, and a party of friends stopped at a peasant's cottage near Bergamo, where they were regaled with such delicious macaroni that Melba persuaded her friends to return another day and wait while the peasant taught her the exact method of preparing the dish. In at least one New York restaurant _oeuf Toscanini_ is to be found on the bill. I have heard Olive Fremstad complain of the cooking in this hotel in Paris, or that hotel in New York, or the other hotel in Munich, and when she found herself in an apartment of her own she immediately set about to cook a few special dishes for herself.

Two musicians I know not only keep restaurants in New York, but actually prepare the dinners themselves. One of them is at the same time a singer in the Metropolitan Opera Company. Have you seen Bernard Begue standing before his cook stove preparing food for his patrons? His huge form, clad in white, viewed through the open doorway connecting the dining room with the kitchen, almost conceals the great stove, but occasionally you can catch sight of the pots and pans, the _casseroles_ of _pot-au-feu_, the roasting chicken, the filets of sole, all the ingredients of a dinner, _cuisine bourgeoise_ ... and after dining, you can hear Begue sing the Uncle-priest in _Madama Butterfly_ at the Opera House.

Or have you seen Giacomo (and have not Meyerbeer and Puccini been bearers of this name?) Pogliani turning from the _spaghetti_ theme chromatically to that of the _risotto_, the most succulent and appetizing _risotto_ to be tasted this side of Bonvecchiati's in Venice ... or the _polenta_ with _funghi_.... But, best of all, the roasts, and were it not that the Prince Troubetskoy is a vegetarian you would fancy that he came to Pogliani's for these viands. And it must not be forgotten that this supreme cook is--or was--a bassoon player of the first rank, that he is a graduate of the Milan Conservatory. The bassoon is a difficult instrument. It is sometimes called the "comedian of the orchestra," but there are few who can play it at all, still fewer who can play it well. Bassoonists are highly paid and they are in demand. Walter Damrosch used to say that when he was engaging a bassoon player he would ask him to play a passage from the bassoon part in _Scheherazade_. If he could play that, he could play anything else written for his instrument. Pogliani gave up the bassoon for the fork, spoon, and saucepan. Like Prospero he buried his magic wand and in Viafora's cartoon the instrument lies idle in the cobwebs.

Charles Santley's "Reminiscences" and "Student and Singer" are full of references to food: "ox-hearts, stuffed with onions," "a joint of meat, well cooked, with a bright brown crust which prevented the juices escaping," "a splendid shoulder of mutton, a picture to behold, and a _peas pudding_," and "whaffles" are a few of the dishes referred to with enthusiasm. In America a newspaper gravely informed its readers that "Santley says squash pie is the best thing to sing on he knows!" Santley was a true pantophagist, but he was worsted in his first encounter with the American oyster: "I had often heard of the celebrated American oyster, which half a dozen people had tried to swallow without success, and was anxious to learn if the story were founded on fact. Cummings conducted me to a cellar in Broadway, where, upon his order, a waiter produced two plates, on which were half a dozen objects, about the size and shape of the sole of an ordinary lady's shoe, on each of which lay what appeared to me to be a very bilious tongue, accompanied by smaller plates containing shredded white cabbage raw. I did not admire the look of the repast, but I never discard food on account of looks. I took up an oyster and tried to get it into my mouth, but it was of no use; I tried to ram it in with the butt-end of the fork, but all to no purpose, and I had to drop it, and, to the great indignation of the waiter, paid and left the oysters for him to dispose of as he might like best. I presume those oysters are eaten, but I cannot imagine by whom; I have rarely seen a mouth capable of the necessary expansion. I soon found out that there were plenty of delicious oysters in the States within the compass of ordinary jaws."

J. H. Mapleson says in his "Memoirs" that at the Opera at Lodi, where he made his debut as a tenor, refreshments of all kinds were served to the audience between the acts and every box was furnished with a little kitchen for cooking macaroni and baking or frying pastry. The wine of the country was drunk freely, not out of glasses, but "in classical fashion--from bowls." Mapleson also tells us that Del Puente was a "very tolerable cook." On one trying occasion he prepared macaroni for his impressario. Michael Kelly declares that the sight of Signor St. Giorgio entering a fruit shop to eat peaches, nectarines, and a pineapple, was really what stimulated him to study for a career on the stage. "While my mouth watered, I asked myself why, if I assiduously studied music, I should not be able to earn money enough to lounge about in fruit-shops, and eat peaches and pineapples as well as Signor St. Giorgio...."

Lillian Russell is a good cook. I can recommend her recipe for the preparation of mushrooms: "Put a lump of butter in a chafing dish (or a saucepan) and a slice of Spanish onion and the mushrooms minus the stems; let them simmer until they are all deliciously tender and the juice has run from them--about twenty minutes should be enough--then add a cupful of cream and let this boil. As a last touch squeeze in the juice of a lemon." When Luisa Tetrazzini was going mad with a flute in our vicinity she varied the monotony of her life by sending pages of her favourite recipes to the Sunday yellow press. Unfortunately, I neglected to make a collection of this series. A passion for cooking caused the death of Naldi, a buffo singer of the early Nineteenth Century. Michael Kelly tells the story: "His ill stars took him to Paris, where, one day, just before dinner, at his friend Garcia's house, in the year 1821, he was showing the method of cooking by steam, with a portable apparatus for that purpose; unfortunately, in consequence of some derangement of the machinery, an explosion took place, by which he was instantaneously killed." Almost everybody knows some story or other about a _virtuoso_, trapped into dining and asked to perform after dinner by his host. Kelly relates one of the first: "Fischer, the great oboe player, whose minuet was then all the rage ... being very much pressed by a nobleman to sup with him after the opera, declined the invitation, saying that he was usually much fatigued, and made it a rule never to go out after the evening's performance. The noble lord would, however, take no denial, and assured Fischer that he did not ask him professionally, but merely for the gratification of his society and conversation. Thus urged and encouraged, he went; he had not, however, been many minutes in the house of the consistent nobleman, before his lordship approached him, and said, 'I hope, Mr. Fischer, you have brought your oboe in your pocket.'--'No, my Lord,' said Fischer, 'my oboe never sups.' He turned on his heel, and instantly left the house, and no persuasion could ever induce him to return to it." You perhaps have heard rumours that Giuseppe Campanari prefers _spaghetti_ to Mozart, especially when he cooks it himself. When this baritone was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company his paraphernalia for preparing his favourite food went everywhere with him on tour. Heinrich Conried (or was it Maurice Grau?) once tried to take advantage of this weakness, according to a story often related by the late Algernon St. John Brenon. Campanari was to appear as Kothner in _Die Meistersinger_, a character with no singing to do after the first act, although he appears in the procession in the third act. The singer told his impressario that he saw no reason why he should remain to the end and explained that he would leave his costume for a chorus man to don to represent him in the final episode. "What would the Master say?" demanded Conried, wringing his hands. "Would he approve of such a proceeding? No. That would not be truth! That would not be art!" Campanari was obdurate. The Herr Direktor became reflective. He was silent for a moment and then he continued: "If you will stay for the last act you will find in your room a little supper, a bottle of wine, and a box of cigars, which you may consume while you are waiting." In sooth when Campanari entered his dressing room after the first act of Wagner's comic opera he found that his director had kept his word.... The baritone ate the supper, drank the wine, put the cigars in his pocket ... and went home!

If some singers are good cooks it does not follow that all good cooks are singers. Benjamin Lumley, in his "Reminiscences of the Opera," tells the sad story of the Countess of Cannazaro's cook, which should serve as a lesson to housemaids who are desirous of becoming moving picture stars. "This worthy man, excellent no doubt as a _chef_, took it into his head that he was a vocalist of the highest order, and that he only wanted opportunity to earn musical distinction. His strange fancy came to the knowledge of Rubini, and it was arranged that a performance should take place in the morning, in which the cook's talent should be fairly tested. Certainly every chance was afforded him. Not only was he encouraged by Rubini and Lablache (whose gravity on the occasion was wonderful), but by a few others, Costa included, as instrumentalists. The failure was miserable, ridiculous, as everybody expected." Frederick Crowest describes a certain Count Castel de Maria who had a spit that played tunes, "and so regulated and indicated the condition of whatever was hung upon it to roast. By a singular mechanical contrivance this wonderful spit would strike up an appropriate tune whenever a joint had hung sufficiently long on its particular roast. Thus, _Oh! the roast beef of Old England_, when a sirloin had turned and hung its appointed time. At another air, a leg of mutton, _a l'Anglaise_ would be found excellent; while some other tune would indicate that a fowl _a la Flamande_ was cooked to a nicety and needed removal from the fowl roast."

To Crowest, too, I am indebted for a list of beverages and eatables which certain singers held in superstitious awe as capable of refreshing their voices. Formes swore by a pot of good porter and Wachtel is said to have trusted to the yolk of an egg beaten up with sugar to make sure of his high Cs. The Swedish tenor, Labatt, declared that two salted cucumbers gave the voice the true metallic ring. Walter drank cold black coffee during a performance; Southeim took snuff and cold lemonade; Steger, beer; Niemann, champagne, slightly warmed, (Huneker once saw Niemann drinking cocktails from a beer glass; he sang Siegmund at the opera the next night); Tichatschek, mulled claret; Rubgam drank mead; Nachbaur ate bonbons; Arabanek believed in Gampoldskirchner wine. Mlle. Brann-Brini took beer and _cafe au lait_, but she also firmly believed in champagne and would never dare venture the great duet in the fourth act of _Les Huguenots_ without a bottle of Moet Cremant Rose. Giardini being asked his opinion of Banti, previous to her arrival in England, said: "She is the first singer in Italy and drinks a bottle of wine every day." Malibran believed in the efficacy of porter. She made her last appearances in opera in Balfe's _Maid of Artois_ during the fall of 1836 in London. On the first night she was in anything but good physical condition and the author of "Musical Recollections of the Last Half-Century" tells how she pulled herself through: "She remembered that an immense trial awaited her in the finale of the third act; and finding her strength giving way, she sent for Mr. Balfe and Mr. Bunn, and told them that unless they did as they were bid, after all the previous success, the end might result in failure; but she said, 'Manage to let me have a pot of porter somehow or other before I have to sing, and I will get you an encore which will bring down the house.' How to manage this was difficult; for the scene was so set that it seemed scarcely possible to hand her up 'the pewter' without its being witnessed by the audience. After much consultation, Malibran having been assured that her wish should be fulfilled, it was arranged that the pot of porter should be handed up to her through a trap in the stage at the moment when Jules had thrown himself on her body, supposing that life had fled; and Mr. Templeton was drilled into the manner in which he should so manage to conceal the necessary arrangement, that the audience would never suspect what was going on. At the right moment a friendly hand put the foaming pewter through the stage, to be swallowed at a draught, and success was won!... Malibran, however, had not overestimated her own strength. She knew that it wanted but this fillip to carry her through. She had resolved to have an encore, and she had it, in such a fashion as made the roof of 'Old Drury' ring as it had never rung before. On the repetition of the opera and afterwards, a different arrangement of the stage was made, and a property calabash containing a pot of porter was used; but although the same result was constantly won, Malibran always said it was not half so 'nice,' nor did her anything like the good it would have done if she could only have had it out of the pewter." Clara Louise Kellogg in her very lively "Memoirs" publishes a similar tale of another singer: "It was told of Grisi that when she was growing old and severe exertion told on her she always, after her fall as Lucrezia Borgia, drank a glass of beer sent up to her through the floor, lying with her back half turned to the audience." Miss Kellogg complains of the breaths of the tenors she sang with: "Stigelli usually exhaled an aroma of lager beer; while the good Mazzoleni invariably ate from one to two pounds of cheese the day he was to sing. He said it strengthened his voice. Many of them affected garlic." It is necessary, of course, that a singer should know what foods agree with him. He must keep himself in excellent physical condition: small wonder that many artists are superstitious in this regard.

Charles Santley, who was so fond of eating and drinking himself, offers some excellent advice on the subject in "Student and Singer": "How the voice is produced or where, except that it is through the passage of the throat, is unimportant; it is reasonable to say that the passage must be kept clear, otherwise the sound proceeding from it will not be clear. I have known many instances of singers undergoing very disagreeable operations on their throats for chronic diseases of various descriptions; now, my observation and experience assure me that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the root of the evil is chronic inattention to food and raiment. It is a common thing to hear a singer say, 'I never touch such-and-such food on the days I sing.' My dear young friend, unless you are an absolute idiot, you would not partake of anything on the days you sing which might disagree with you, or over-tax your digestive powers; it is on the days you do not sing you ought more particularly to exercise your judgment and self-denial. I do not offer the pinched-up pilgarlic who dines off a wizened apple and a crust of bread as a model for imitation; at the same time, I warn you seriously against following the example of the gobbling glutton who swallows every dish that tempts his palate."

Rossini, after he had composed _Guillaume Tell_, retired. He was thirty-seven, a man in perfect health, and he lived thirty-nine years longer, to the age of seventy-six, yet he never wrote another opera, hardly indeed did he dip his pen in ink at all. These facts have seriously disconcerted his biographers, who are at a loss to assign reasons for his actions. W. F. Apthorp gives us an ingenious explanation in "The Opera Past and Present." He says that after _Tell_ Rossini's pride would not allow him to return to his earlier Italian manner, while the hard work needed to produce more _Tells_ was more than his laziness could stomach.... Perhaps, but it must be remembered that Rossini did not retire to his library or his music room, but to his kitchen. The simple explanation is that he preferred cooking to composing, a fact easy to believe (I myself vastly prefer cooking to writing). He could cook _risotto_ better than any one else he knew. He was dubbed a "hippopotamus in trousers," and for six years before he died he could not see his toes, he was so fat. Sir Arthur Sullivan relates an anecdote which shows that Rossini was conscious of his grossness. Once in Paris Sullivan introduced Chorley to Rossini, when the Italian said, "_Je vois, avec plaisir, que monsieur n'a pas de ventre_." Chorley indeed was noticeably slender. Rossini could write more easily, so his biographers tell us, when he was under the influence of champagne or some light wine. His provision merchant once begged him for an autographed portrait. The composer gave it to him with the inscription, "To my stomach's best friend." The tradesman used this souvenir as an advertisement and largely increased his business thereby, as such a testimonial from such an acknowledged epicure had a very definite value. J. B. Weckerlin asserts that when Rossini dined at the Rothschild's he first went to the kitchen to pay his respects to the _chef_, to look over the menu, and even to discuss the various dishes, after which he ascended to the drawing room to greet the family of the rich banker. Mme. Alboni told Weckerlin that Rossini had dedicated a piece of music to the Rothschild's _chef_.

Anfossi, we are informed, could compose only when he was surrounded by smoking fowls and Bologna sausages; their fumes seemed to inflame his imagination, to feed his muse; his brain was stimulated first through his nose and then through his stomach. When Gluck wrote music he betook himself to the open fields, accompanied by at least two bottles of champagne. Salieri told Michael Kelly that a comic opera of Gluck's being performed at the Elector Palatine's theatre, at Schwetzingen, his Electoral Highness was struck with the music, and inquired who had composed it; on being informed that he was an honest German who loved _old wine_, his Highness immediately ordered him a tun of Hock. Beethoven, on the contrary, seems to have fed on his thoughts occasionally, although there is evidence that he was not only a good eater but also a good cook (the mothers of both Beethoven and Schubert were cooks in domestic service). There is a story related of him that about the time he was composing the _Sixth Symphony_ he walked into a Viennese restaurant and ordered dinner. While it was being prepared, he became involved in thought, and when the waiter returned to serve him, he said: "Thank you, I have dined!" laid the price of the dinner on the table, and took his departure. Gretry, too, lost his appetite when he was composing. There are numerous references to eating and drinking in Mendelssohn's letters. His particular preferences, according to Sir George Grove, were for rice milk and cherry pie. Dussek was a famous eater, and it is said that his ruling passion eventually killed him. His patron, the Prince of Benevento, paid the composer eight hundred napoleons a year, with a free table for three persons, at which, as a matter of fact, one person usually presided. A musical historian tells us that in the summer of 1797 he was dining with three friends at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich, when the waiter came and laid a cloth for one person at the next table, placing thereon a dish of boiled eels, one of fried flounders, a bowled fowl, a dish of veal cutlets, and a couple of tarts. Then Dussek entered and made away with the lot, leaving but the bones! In W. T. Parke's "Musical Memoirs" justice is done to the appetite of one C. F. Baumgarten, for many years leader of the band and composer at Covent Garden Theatre. Once at supper after the play he and a friend ate a full-grown hare between them. He would never condescend to drink out of anything but a quart pot. On one occasion, at the request of his friends, Baumgarten was weighed before and after dinner. There was eight pounds difference! William Shield, the composer who wrote many operas for Covent Garden Theatre, beginning aptly enough with one called _The Flitch of Bacon_, was something of an eater. Parke tells how at a dinner one evening there was a brace of partridges. The hostess handed Shield one of these to carve and absent-mindedly he set to and finished it, while the other guests were forced to make shift with the other partridge. Handel was a great eater. He was called the "Saxon Giant," as a tribute to his genius, but the phrase might have had a satirical reference to his enormous bulk. Intending to dine one day at a certain tavern, he ordered beforehand a dinner for three. At the hour appointed he sat down to the table and expressed astonishment that the dinner was not brought up. The waiter explained that he would begin serving when the company arrived. "Den pring up de tinner brestissimo," replied Handel, "I am de gombany." Lulli never forsook the _casserole_. Paganini was as good a cook as he was a violinist. Parke tells a story of Weichsell, not too celebrated a musician, but the father of Mrs. Billington and Charles Weichsell, the violinist: "He would occasionally supersede the labours of his cook, and pass a whole day in preparing his favourite dish, rump-steaks, for the stewing pan; and after the delicious viand had been placed on the dinner-table, together with early green peas of high price, if it happened that the sauce was not to his liking he has been known to throw rump-steaks, and green peas, and all, out of the window, whilst his wife and children thought themselves fortunate in not being thrown after them."

Is there a cooking theme in _Siegfried_ to describe Mime's brewing? Lavignac and others, who have listed the _Ring motive_, have neglected to catalogue it, but it is mentioned by Old Fogy. Practically a whole act is taken up in _Louise_ with the preparation for and consumption of a dinner. Scarpia eats in _Tosca_ and the heroine kills him with a table knife. There is much talk of food in _Hansel und Gretel_ and there is a supper in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. There are drinking songs in _Don Giovanni_, _Lucrezia Borgia_, _Hamlet_, _La Traviata_, _Girofle-Girofla_.... The reference to whiskey and soda in _Madama Butterfly_ is celebrated. J. E. Cox, the author of "Musical Recollections," describes Herr Pischek in the supper scene of _Don Giovanni_ as "out-heroding Herod by swallowing glass after glass of champagne like a sot, and gnawing the drumstick of a fowl, which he held across his mouth with his fingers, just as any of his own middle-class countrymen may be seen any day of the week all the year round at the _mit-tag_ or _abend-essen_ feeding at one of their largely frequented _tables-d'hote_." Eating or drinking on the stage is always fraught with danger, as Charles Santley once discovered during Papageno's supper scene in _The Magic Flute_: "The supper which Tamino commands for the hungry Papageno consisted of pasteboard imitations of good things, but the cup contained real wine, a small draught of which I found refreshing on a hot night in July, amid the dust and heat of the stage. On the occasion in question I was putting the cup to lips, when I heard somebody call to me from the wings; I felt very angry at the interruption, and was just about to swallow the wine when I heard an anxious call not to drink. Suspecting something was wrong, I pretended to drink, and deposited the cup on the table. Immediately after the scene I made inquiries about the reason for the caution I received, and was informed that as each night the carpenters, who had no right to it, finished what remained of the wine before the property men, whose perquisite it was, could lay hold of the cup, the latter, to give their despoilers a lesson, had mingled castor-oil with my drink!"

A young husband of my acquaintance once bemoaned to me the fact that his wife seemed destined to become a great singer. "She is such a remarkable cook!" he explained to account for his despondency. I reassured him: "She will cook with renewed energy when she begins to sing _Sieglinde_ and _Tosca_.... She will practise _Vissi d'Arte_ over the gumbo soup and _Du herstes Wunder_! while the Frankfurters are sizzling. Her trills, her chromatic scales, and her _messa di voce_ will come right in the kitchen; she will equalize her scale and learn to breathe correctly bending over the oven. It is even likely that she will improve her knowledge of _portamento_ while she is washing dishes. When she can prepare a succulent roast suckling pig she will be able to sing _Ocean, thou mighty monster_! and she will understand _Abscheulicher_ when she understands the mysteries of old-fashioned strawberry shortcake. If you hear her shrieking _Suicidio_! invoking Agamemnon, or appealing to the _Casta Diva_ among the kettles and pots be not alarmed.... For the love you bear of good food, man, do not discourage your wife's ambition. The more she loves to sing, the better she will cook!"

_July 17, 1917._

An Interrupted Conversation

_"We can never depend upon any right adjustment of emotion to
circumstance."_

Max Beerbohm.

An Interrupted Conversation

Ordinarily one does not learn things about oneself from Edmund Gosse, but my discovery that I am a Pyrrhonist is due to that literary man. A Pyrrhonist, says Mr. Gosse, is "one who doubts whether it is worth while to struggle against the trend of things. The man who continues to cross the road leisurely, although the cyclists' bells are ringing, is a Pyrrhonist--and in a very special sense, for the ancient philosopher who gives his name to the class made himself conspicuous by refusing to get out of the way of careering chariots." Now the most unfamiliar friend I have ever walked with knows my extreme impassivity at the corners of streets, remembers the careless attitude with which I saunter from kerb to kerb, whether it be across the Grand Boulevard, Piccadilly, or Fifth Avenue. Only once has this nonchalant defiance of traffic caused me to come to even temporary grief; that was on the last night of the year 1913, when, in crossing Broadway, I became entangled, God knows how, in the wheels of a swiftly passing vehicle, and found myself, top hat and all, in the most ignominious position before I was well aware of what had really happened. Then a policeman stooped over me, book and pencil in hand, and another held the chauffeur of the victorious taxi-cab at bay some yards further up the street. But I was not hurt and I waved them all away with a magnanimous gesture.... It is owing to this habit of mine that I often make interesting _rencontres_ in the middle of streets. It accounts, in fact, for my running, quite absent-mindedly, plump into Dickinson Sitgreaves, who is more American than his name sounds, one August day in Paris.

It was one of those charming days which make August perhaps the most delightful month to spend in Paris, although the facts are not known to tourists. Many a sly French pair, however, bored with Trouville, or the season at Aix, take advantage of the allurements of a Paris August to return surreptitiously to the boulevards. On this particular day almost all the seduction of an October day was in the air, a splendid dull warm-cool crispness, which filtered down through the faded chestnut leaves from the sunlight, and left pale splotches of purple and orange on the _trottoirs_ ... a really marvellous day, which I was spending in that most excellent occupation in Paris of gazing into shops and, passing cafes, staring into the faces of those who sat on the _terrasses_.... But this is an occupation for one alone; so, when I met Sitgreaves, we joined a _terrasse_ ourselves. We were near the Napolitain and there he and I sat down and began to talk as only we two can talk together after long separation. He explained in the beginning how I had interrupted him.... There was a _fille_, some little Polish beauty who had captivated his senses a day or so before, brought to him quite by accident in an hotel where the _patron_ furnished his clients with such pleasure as the town and his address book afforded.... I knew the _patron_ myself, a fluent, amusing sort of person, who had been a _cuirassier_ and who resembled Mayol ... a _cafe-concert_ proprietor of an hotel.... It was his boast that he had never disappointed a client and it is certain that he would promise anything. Some have said that his stock in trade was one pretty girl, who assumed costumes, ages, hair, and accents, to please whatever demand was made upon her, but this I do not believe. There must have been at least two of them. The Grand Duchess Anastasia, it was rumoured, had dined with Marcel at one time, in his little hotel, and certainly one king had been seen to go there, and one member of the English royal family, but Marcel remained simple and obliging.

"When will you look up the little _Polonaise_?" I asked, as we sipped _Amer Picon_ and stared with fresh interest at each new boot and ankle that passed. Paris in August is like another place in May.

"Why don't you come along?" queried Sitgreaves in reply, "and we could go at once.... Oh, I know that you are in no mood for pleasure. You see the point is that I shall have to wait. Marcel will have to send for the _fille_. It is a bore to wait in a room with red curtains and a picture of _Amour et Psyche_ on the walls.... What have you been doing?" He paid the _consommation_ and started to leave without waiting for a reply, because he knew of my complaisance. I rose with him and we walked down the boulevard.

"What is there to do in Paris in August but to enjoy oneself?" I asked. "I have made friends with an _apache_ and his _gigolette_. We eat bread and cheese and drink bad wine on the fortifications.... In the afternoon I walk. Sometimes I go to the Luxembourg gardens to hear the band bray sad music, or to watch the little boys play _diavolo_, or sail their tiny boats about the fountain pond; sometimes I walk quite silently up the Avenue Gabriel, with its _triste_ line of trees, and dream that I am a Grand Duke; in the evening there are again the _terrasses_ of the cafes, dinner in Montmartre at the Clou, or the Cou-Cou, a _revue_ at La Cigale, but it is all governed, my day and my night, by what happens and by whom I meet.... Have you seen Jacques Blanche's portrait of Nijinsky?"

"I think it is Picasso that interests me now," Sitgreaves was saying. "He puts wood and pieces of paper into his composition; architecture, that's what it is.... I don't go to Blanche's any more. It's too delightfully perfect, the atmosphere there.... The books are by all the famous writers, and they are all dedicated to Blanche; the pictures are all of the great men of today, and they are all painted by Blanche; the music is played by the best musicians.... Do you know, I think Blanche is the one man who has made a successful profession of being an amateur--unless one excepts Robert de la Condamine.... You can scarcely call a man who does so much a dilettante. Yes, I think he is an amateur in the best sense."

"I met the Countess of Jena there the other day," I responded. "She had scarcely left the room before three people volunteered, _sans rancune_, to tell her story. She is a devout Catholic, and her husband contrived in some way to substitute a spy for the priest in the confessional. He acquired an infinite amount of information, but it didn't do him any good. She is so witty that every one invites her everywhere in spite of her reputation, and he is left to dine alone at the Meurice. Dull men simply are not tolerated in Paris.

"It was at Blanche's last year that I met George Moore," I continued. "You know I have just seen him in London. He is at work on _The Apostle_, making a novel of it, to be called 'The Brook Kerith.'... For a time he thought of finishing it up as a play because a novel meant a visit to Palestine and that was distasteful to him, but it finally became a novel. He went to Palestine and stayed six weeks, just long enough to find a monastery and to study the lay of the country. For he says, truly enough, that one cannot imagine landscapes; one does not know whether there is a high or low horizon. There may be a brook which all the characters must cross. It is necessary to see these things. Besides he had to find a monastery.... He told me of his thrill when he discovered an order of monks living on a narrow ledge of cliff, with 500 feet sheer rise and descent above and below it ... and when he had found this his work was done and he returned to England to write the book, a reaction, for he told me that he was getting tired of being personal in literature. The book will exhibit a conflict between two types: Christ, the disappointed mystic, and Paul; Christ, who sees that there is no good to be served in saving the world by his death, and Paul, full of hope, idealism, and illusions. It is the drama of the conflict between the nature which is affected by externals and that which is not, he told me."

"It's a subject for Anatole France," said Sitgreaves. "Moore, in my opinion, is not a novelist. His great achievements are his memoirs. I was interested in 'Evelyn Innes' and 'Esther Waters,' but something was lacking. There is nothing lacking in the three volumes of 'Hail and Farewell.' They grow in interest. Moore has found his _metier_."

"But he insists," I explained, before the door of the little hotel, "that 'Hail and Farewell' is a novel. He is infuriated when some one suggests that it is a book after the manner of, say, 'The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill.'..."

We entered and walked up the little staircase.

"Do you mean that the incidents are untrue?"

We were at the door of the _concierge_ and there stood Marcel, his apron spread neatly over his ample paunch. It was early in the afternoon and the room beyond him, sometimes filled with possibilities for customers, was empty.

"_Ah, monsieur est revenu!_" he exclaimed in his piping voice. "_C'est pour la petite Polonaise sans doute que monsieur revient?_"

"_Oui_," answered Sitgreaves, "_faut-il attendre longtemps?_"

"_Mais non, monsieur, un petit moment. Elle habite en face. Je vais envoyer le garcon la chercher tout de suite. Et pour monsieur, votre ami?_"

"_Je ne desire rien_," I replied.

Marcel bowed humbly.... "_Comme monsieur voudra._" Then a doubt assailed him. "_Peut-etre que la petite Polonaise vous suffira a tous les deux?_"

"_Jamais de la vie!_" I shouted, "_Flute, Mercure, allez! Je suis puceau!_"

Marcel was equal to this. "_Et ta soeur?_" he demanded as he disappeared down the staircase.

He had put us meanwhile in the very chamber with the red curtains and the picture of Cupid and Psyche that Sitgreaves had described. Perhaps all the rooms were similarly decorated. I lounged on the bed while Sitgreaves sat on a chair and smoked....

I answered his last question, "No, they are true, but there is selection and form."

"While other memoirs have neither selection nor form and usually are not altogether accurate in the bargain...."

"Especially Madame Melba's...."

"Especially," agreed Sitgreaves delightedly, "Madame Melba's."

"Moore is really right," I went on. "He says that some people insist that Balzac was greater than Turgeniev, because the Frenchman took his characters from imagination, the Russian his from life. You will remember, however, that Edgar Saltus says, 'The manufacture of fiction from facts was begun by Balzac.' Moore's point is that all great writers write from observation. There is no other way. A character may have more or less resemblance to the original; it may be derived and bear a different name; still there must have been something.... In a letter which Moore once wrote me stands the phrase, 'Memory is the mother of the Muses.' 'Hail and Farewell' is just as much a work of imagination, according to Moore, as 'A Nest of Noblemen' or 'Les Illusions Perdues.'"

"Of course," admitted Sitgreaves. "No writer but what has suffered from the recognition of his characters. Dickens got into trouble. Oscar Wilde is said to have done himself in 'Dorian Gray,' and Meredith's models for 'The Tragic Comedians' and 'Diana of the Crossways' are well known."

"All Moore has done is to call his characters by their real names and he has reported their conversations as he remembered them, but, mind you, he has not put into the book all their conversations, or even all the people he knew at that period. Arthur Symons, for instance, a great friend of Moore's at that time, is scarcely mentioned, and with reason: he has no part in the form of the book; its plot is not concerned with him.

"All artists create only in the image of the things they have seen, reduced to terms of art through their imagination. The paintings of Mina Loy seem to the beholder the strange creations of a vagrant fancy. I remember one picture of hers in which an Indian girl stands poised before an oriental palace, the most fantastic of palaces, it would seem. But the artist explained to me that it was simply the facade of Hagenbeck's menagerie in Hamburg, seen with an imaginative eye. The girl was a model.... One day on the beach at the Lido she saw a young man in a bathing suit lying stretched on the sand with his head in the lap of a beautiful woman. Other women surrounded the two. The group immediately suggested a composition to her. She went home and painted. She took the young man's bathing suit off and gave him wings; the women she dressed in lovely floating robes, and she called the picture, _l'Amour Dorlote par les Belles Dames_.

"And once I asked Frank Harris to explain to me the origin of his vivid story, 'Montes the Matador.' 'It's too simple,' he said, 'the model for Montes was a little Mexican greaser whom I met in Kansas. He was one of many in charge of cattle shipped up from Mexico and down from the States. All the white cattle men, the gringos, held him in great contempt. But,' continued Harris, speaking deliberately with his beautifully modulated voice, and his eyes twinkling with the memory of the thing, 'I soon found that the greaser's contempt for the gringos was immeasureably greater than their's for him. "Bah," he would say, "they know nothing." And it was so. He could go into a cattle car on a pitch dark night and make the bulls stand up, a feat that none of the white men would have attempted. I asked him how he did this and he told me the answer in three words, "I know them." He could go into a herd of cattle just let loose together and pick out their leader immediately, pick him out before the cattle themselves had! There was the origin of "Montes the Matador." He was named, of course, after the famous _torero_ described by Gautier in his "Voyage en Espagne." When I was in Madrid sometime later I went to a number of bull-fights before I put the story together.' 'But,' I asked Harris, 'Is it possible for an _espada_ to stand in the bull ring with his back to the bull, during a charge, as you have made him do frequently in the story?' 'Of course not,' he answered me at once, smiling his frankly malevolent smile, 'Of course not. That part was put in to show how much the public will stand for in a work of fiction. I believe one of the _espadas_ tried it some time after the book appeared and was immediately killed.'