e vais bien aujourd'hui_," or shake his head and say, "_Non, pas la
aujourd'hui--je ne suis rien!_" He was good looking, bearing a strong
resemblance to the portraits of Oscar Wilde. He dressed well, and his
washing bills--amounting as we were told, with bated breath, to ten and
fifteen marks a week--were the scandal of the theatre! Since those days
he has gone back to his piano, though he persevered in the theatre long
enough to obtain a second Kapellmeister position in a good opera house.
I have met him casually all over Europe, and he is one of the very few
of the old _Kollegen_ from Metz whom I have ever seen again.

These three were the only ones that season whom we cared about, though
we were friendly enough with all of them after Christmas, and as I have
said, we dined at the hotel with a group of them every day. They were
all types in their way. First the director--a survival of the old
school, with rather long dyed hair and enormous dyed moustache, always
in _Gehrock_ (frock coat) with a large tie in which reposed a royal
monogram in pearls and diamonds presented to him by the Hereditary Grand
Duke of Glumphenbergen-Schlimmerheim or something, during his career as
_Heldenbariton_. In the street he wore a soft black felt hat which would
have done for the _Wanderer_ in "Siegfried," and of course a fur-lined
coat whenever the weather gave the least excuse for one. Champagne was
his universal panacea--his very present help in trouble. If he had a
disagreement with a singer for any cause and wished to make it right
again, he would always send a bottle of _Sekt_ if it were a woman, or
present the money to buy one if it were a man. He had been a famous
singer in his day, and known others far more so, and his reminiscences
could be interesting enough. His stories of Bayreuth under the old
regime, were really interesting, with the prescribed position of every
finger, every gesture studied to an inch, every tone closed, opened,
coloured according to strictest rule, every syllable enunciated with
minutest care, and the effect of all this schooling on the singer--the
strained and broken nerves, the wrecked voices that were the result of
it. Diction--_Aussprache_--was naturally enough his hobby, but his ideas
were absurdly exaggerated and caused much more or less hidden amusement
among the _Personal_. He insisted, for example, upon so much "t" in a
phrase like Mignon's "_Dahin, dahin, moecht ich mit dir_," that it
sounded li