immensely.
"Oui, n'est-ce pas? De l'ame!" he exclaimed in his soft Italian manner
of speaking, "C'est ce que je veux...De L'ame! Oh! je suis sensible!
Merci!...C'est que l'ame, c'est toute la musique!" "And he pressed my
hands," says Charles Maurice, "as if I had discovered a new merit in his
rare talent." This specimen of Bellini's conversation is sufficient to
show that his linguistic accomplishments were very limited. Indeed, as
a good Sicilian he spoke Italian badly, and his French was according to
Heine worse than bad, it was frightful, apt to make people's hair stand
on end.

When one was in the same salon with him, his vicinity inspired one with
a certain anxiety mingled with the fascination of terror which repelled
and attracted at the same time. His puns were not always of an amusing
kind. Hiller also mentions Bellini's bad grammar and pronunciation, but
he adds that the contrast between what he said and the way he said
it gave to his gibberish a charm which is often absent from the
irreproachable language of trained orators. It is impossible to
conjecture what Bellini might have become as a musician if, instead
of dying before the completion of his thirty-third year (September 24,
1835), he had lived up to the age of fifty or sixty; thus much, however,
is certain, that there was still in him a vast amount of undeveloped
capability. Since his arrival in Paris he had watched attentively the
new musical phenomena that came there within his ken, and the "Puritani"
proves that he had not done so without profit. This sweet singer from
sensuous Italy was not insensible even to the depth and grandeur of
German music. After hearing Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, for instance,
he said to Hiller, his eyes glistening as if he had himself done a great
deed: "E bel comme la nature!" [Footnote: I give the words literally
as they are printed in Hiller's Kimmerleben. The mixture of Italian
and French was no doubt intended, but hardly the spelling.] In short,
Bellini was a true artist, and therefore a meet companion for a true
artist like Chopin, of whose music it can be said with greater force
than of that of most composers that "it is all soul." Chopin, who of
course met Bellini here and there in the salons of the aristocracy,
came also in closer contact with him amidst less fashionable but
more congenial surroundings. I shall now let Hiller, the pleasant
story-teller, speak, who, after remarking that Bellini took a great
i