Part 15 (2/2)

And surely never was the dark d.u.c.h.ess of Ferrara more faithfully personated than by the present artiste. This vraisemblance, which is so seldom witnessed in the opera, seemed to strike every eye. Her figure was tall and majestic, and voluptuously developed. Her air and bearing were haughty, dignified, and queen-like. Her complexion was very dark, but perfectly clear; her forehead broad and high; her brows heavy, but gracefully arched; her eyes large, black and flas.h.i.+ng; her hair dark as night, and arranged with great simplicity in glossy bands; and her mouth large, but filled with teeth of pearl-like whiteness, contrasted by lips of coral wet with the spray. The entire outline of her face was Roman, and exhibited in its contour and lineaments even more than Roman sternness and decision; and its effect was still more heightened by a large mole at one corner of her mouth and the velvet robes in which she was appropriately costumed.

The scene between the d.u.c.h.ess and the Spaniard, Gubetta, was received with the utmost applause, and the pathos of that between the son and his unknown mother, which succeeded, touched the audience to tears; but when the maskers rushed in and her vizard was torn off, and her true name proclaimed, and, amid her heart-rending wailings, the curtain fell on the first act, the shouts were perfectly thunderous with enthusiasm. The role of Gennaro was performed by the brother of the cantatrice, Leon d'Armilly, a young man of twenty, of delicate and graceful figure, and as decidedly blonde as his sister was brunette. Nature seemed to have made a great mistake in s.e.x when this brother and sister were fas.h.i.+oned.

Indeed, it seemed hardly possible that they could be brother and sister, a remark constantly made by the audience, and the kindred announced on the bills was generally viewed as one of those convenient relations.h.i.+ps often a.s.sumed on the stage, but having no more reality than those of the dramatis personae themselves.

”A second Pasta!” cried Chateau-Renaud, entering the stalls immediately on the descent of the curtain. ”Heard you ever such a magnificent contralto?”

”Saw you ever such a magnificent bust?” asked Beauchamp.

”Were it not for a few manifest impossibilities,” thoughtfully remarked Debray, ”I should swear that this same angelic Louise d'Armilly was no other than a certain very beautiful, very eccentric and very talented young lady whom we all once knew as a star of Parisian fas.h.i.+on, and who, the last time she was in this house, sat in the same loge where now sit the African generals.”

”Whom can you mean, Debray?” cried Beauchamp.

”A certain haughty young lady, who was to have married an Italian Prince, but, on the night of the bridal, in the midst of the festivities, the house being thronged with guests, and even while the contract was receiving the signatures, the Prince was arrested as an escaped galley-slave, and at his trial proved to be the illegitimate son of the bride's mother and a certain high legal functionary, the Procureur du Roi, now at Charenton, through whose burning zeal for justice the horrible discovery transpired.”

”Ha!” exclaimed Chateau-Renaud. ”You cannot mean Eugenie Danglars, daughter of the bankrupt baron, whom our unhappy friend Morcerf was once to have wed?”

”The very same,” quietly rejoined the Secretary; ”but this lady cannot be Mlle. Danglars, I say absolutely, for many sufficient reasons,” he quickly added; then, as if to turn the conversation, he hastily remarked: ”Ah! there are M. Dantes and M. Lamartine, as usual, together.”

”M. Dantes!” exclaimed the Count, in surprise, looking around.

”Impossible!”

”And yet most true,” observed Beauchamp; ”in the third loge from the Minister's to the right. What a wonderful resemblance there is between those men--the poet and the Deputy! One would suppose them brothers. The same tall and elegant figure, the same white and capacious brow, the same dark, blazing eye, the same raven hair, and, above all, the same most unearthly and spiritual pallor of complexion.”

”No wonder M. Dantes is pale,” said the Count. ”Have you not heard of the occurrence of this evening in the Chamber? M. Dantes was in the midst of one of his powerful harangues against the Government, when suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped--coughed violently several times, and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; then taking a small vial from his vest pocket, he placed it to his lips, and instantaneously, as if new life had entered him, proceeded more eloquently than ever to the conclusion of his speech.”

”I heard something of this,” said Beauchamp.

”As he descended from the tribune his friends thronged around him, anxious about his health. He quieted their apprehensions with his peculiar smile of a.s.surance, but I observed that his white handkerchief was spotted with blood, and he almost immediately left the Chamber.”

”That man will kill himself in the cause he has espoused,” remarked Debray. ”See how ghastly he now looks. But so much the better for the Ministry. He is a formidable foe. Indeed, that loge contains the two most powerful opponents of the Government.”

”And who are those men just entering the box?” asked Beauchamp.

”None other than the two rival astronomers of Europe,” said Debray, ”and yet most intimate friends. The taller and elder, the one with gray hair, a dark, sharp Bedouin countenance, and that large, wild, black eye, with a smile of mingled sarcasm and humor ever on his thin lip, is Emanuel Arago. The other, the short, robust man, with fair complexion, sandy hair, bright blue eye and vivacious expression, is Le Verrier, the most tireless star-gazer science has produced since Galileo. But hus.h.!.+ the curtain is up.”

”Oh! it matters not,” said the Count; ”only Gennaro and the Spaniard appear in the second act, and I have neither eyes nor ears save for the d.u.c.h.ess to-night. But who are those, Beauchamp?”

”Where?”

”In the loge on the first tier, next to the Minister's and directly opposite to that of M. Dantes?”

”Ah! two officers of the Spahis and two most exquisite women!” exclaimed Debray. ”They belong, doubtless, to the African party in the Minister's loge. Your lorgnette, Count. What a splendid woman!”

Hardly had the Secretary raised the gla.s.s to his eyes before he dropped it with the exclamation:

”A miracle! a miracle!”

”What?” cried both of the other young men, turning to the box at which Debray was gazing.

<script>