rain was heated with the fumes of wine; but as soon as he had
recovered--or, rather, lost--his reason, he was a monomaniac once more.

However, Paolo was already more easily diverted by the impression
of outside things; his mind was more capable of addressing itself to
several points at a time.

Andrea, who took an artistic interest in his semi-medical treatment,
thought at last that the time had come for a great experiment. He would
give a dinner at his own house, to which he would invite Giardini
for the sake of keeping the tragedy and the parody side by side,
and afterwards take the party to the first performance of _Robert le
Diable_. He had seen it in rehearsal, and he judged it well fitted to
open his patient's eyes.

By the end of the second course, Gambara was already tipsy, laughing
at himself with a very good grace; while Giardini confessed that his
culinary innovations were not worth a rush. Andrea had neglected nothing
that could contribute to this twofold miracle. The wines of Orvieto and
of Montefiascone, conveyed with the peculiar care needed in moving
them, Lachrymachristi and Giro,--all the heady liqueurs of _la cara
Patria_,--went to their brains with the intoxication alike of the grape
and of fond memory. At dessert the musician and the cook both abjured
every heresy; one was humming a _cavatina_ by Rossini, and the other
piling delicacies on his plate and washing them down with Maraschino
from Zara, to the prosperity of the French _cuisine_.

The Count took advantage of this happy frame of mind, and Gambara
allowed himself to be taken to the opera like a lamb.

At the first introductory notes Gambara's intoxication appeared to clear
away and make way for the feverish excitement which sometimes brought
his judgment and his imagination into perfect harmony; for it was their
habitual disagreement, no doubt, that caused his madness. The ruling
idea of that great musical drama appeared to him, no doubt, in its noble
simplicity, like a lightning flash, illuminating the utter darkness in
which he lived. To his unsealed eyes this music revealed the immense
horizons of a world in which he found himself for the first time, though
recognizing it as that he had seen in his dreams. He fancied himself
transported into the scenery of his native land, where that beautiful
Italian landscape begins at what Napoleon so cleverly described as the
_glacis_ of the Alps. Carried back by memory to the time when his
youn