take them to pieces. At Venice he heard the renowned prima donna,
Angela, at that time shining in the leading _roles_ at the Teatro di
San Benedetto. She was as supereminent in beauty as she was in art: and
well became, and deserved, her name of Angela. He sought her
acquaintance, and, in spite of all his rugged uncouthness, his most
remarkable violin playing, with its combination of great originality,
force and tenderness, speedily won her artist's heart. A close intimacy
led, in a few weeks, to a marriage--which not made public--because
Angela would neither leave the stage, give up her well-known name, nor
tack on to it strangely-sounding 'Krespel.' He described, with the
bitterest irony, the quite peculiar ingenuity with which Signora Angela
commenced, as soon as she was his wife, to torment and torture him. All
the selfishness, caprice, and obstinacy of all the prima donnas on
earth rolled into one, were, as Krespel considered, incorporated in
Angela's little body. Whenever he tried to assert his true position in
the smallest degree, she would launch a swarm of _abbates_, _maestros_,
and _academicos_ about his ears, who, not knowing his real relations
with her, would snub him, and set him down as a wretched unendurable
ass of an amateur _inamorato_, incapable of adapting himself to the
Signora's charming and interesting humours. After one of those stormy
scenes, Krespel had flown off to Angela's country house, and
phantasizing on his Cremona, was forgetting the sorrows of the day.
This had not lasted long, however, when the Signora, who had followed
him, came into the room. She happened to be in a tender mood: she
embraced Krespel with sweet, languishing glances, she laid her little
head upon his shoulder. But Krespel, lost in the world of his
harmonies, went on fiddling, so that the walls reechoed; and it so
chanced that he touched the Signora, a trifle ungently, with his
bow-arm. She blazed up like a fury, screamed out, '_Bestia tedesca_,'
snatched the violin out of his hand, and dashed it to pieces on a
marble table. Krespel stood before her for a moment, a statue of
amazement, and then, as if awaking from a dream, he grasped the Signora
as with the fists of a giant, shied her out of the window of her own
_palazzo_, and set off--without concerning himself further about the
matter--to Venice, and thence to Germany. It was some little time
before he quite realized what he had done. Though he knew the window
was onl