The Unknown Masterpiece by Honore De Balzac

Author:Honore De Balzac
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Classics, General
ISBN: 9781434460387
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2008-02-15T10:00:00+00:00

Six years later, in January 1837, many musicians unlucky enough to have damaged their wind or string instruments would bring them to a dilapidated and disreputable house in the rue Froidmanteau, on the fifth floor of which lived an old Italian named Gambara. For the last five years, this artist had lived alone, abandoned by his wife and subject to many misfortunes. A musical instrument which he had counted on to make his fortune, and which he called the panharmonicon, had been sold by the bailiffs at public auction on the Place du Châtelet, together with great quantities of ruled paper covered with musical notations. The day after the sale these scores had been used in Les Halles to wrap butter, fish, and fruit. In this way three grand operas, of which this poor man used to speak but which a former Neapolitan cook (now a huckster of questionable groceries) declared to be a heap of rubbish, had been scattered throughout Paris and used to line the wicker baskets of secondhand peddlers. In any case, the landlord had received his rent and the bailiff’s men their pay. According to the old Neapolitan huckster, who sold the whores of the rue Froidmanteau the leftovers of the most sumptuous dinners given in town the night before, Signora Gambara had followed a Milanese count to Italy, and no one could say what had become of her. Weary of fifteen years of poverty, perhaps she had ruined this count by her extravagance, for they were so much in love with each other that in all his life the Neapolitan had never seen an example of such a passion.

One evening toward the end of that same month of January, when Giardini the huckster was telling a whore who had come to find something for her supper about this divine Marianna, so pure, so lovely, so nobly devoted, and who nevertheless had ended up like all the others, the whore and the huckster and Signora Giardini noticed in the street a tall woman with a dusty, blackened face, a walking skeleton peering at the street numbers as she passed, evidently trying to recognize a house.

“Ecco la Marianna!” said the huckster in Italian.

In the wretched huckster, Marianna recognized the Neapolitan Giardini. Showing no concern for whatever misfortunes had brought him to this wretched state, she entered the place and sat down, for she had walked from Fontainebleau; indeed the poor woman had walked fourteen leagues that day, and had begged her bread from Turin all the way to Paris. The sight of her dismayed this wretched trio. Of her marvelous beauty nothing was left but her lovely eyes, now sick and lusterless. The only thing that had remained faithful to her was misfortune. She was warmly welcomed by the old instrument mender, who saw her enter his room with inexpressible pleasure.

“Here you are then, my poor Marianna!” he said kindly. “While you were gone, they sold my instrument and my operas, too!”

It was difficult to kill the

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