n, the words, in such strange harmony with the
scene, and the melancholy passion of the singer, held the Italians and
the Frenchman spellbound.

At the very first notes, Vendramin's face was wet with tears. Capraja
stood as motionless as one of the statues in the ducal palace. Cataneo
seemed moved to some feeling. The Frenchman, taken by surprise, was
meditative, like a man of science in the presence of a phenomenon that
upsets all his fundamental axioms. These four minds, all so different,
whose hopes were so small, who believed in nothing for themselves
or after themselves, who regarded their own existence as that of a
transient and a fortuitous being,--like the little life of a plant or a
beetle,--had a glimpse of Heaven. Never did music more truly merit the
epithet divine. The consoling notes, as they were poured out, enveloped
their souls in soft and soothing airs. On these vapors, almost visible,
as it seemed to the listeners, like the marble shapes about them in the
silver moonlight, angels sat whose wings, devoutly waving, expressed
adoration and love. The simple, artless melody penetrated to the soul as
with a beam of light. It was a holy passion!

But the singer's vanity roused them from their emotion with a terrible
shock.

"Now, am I a bad singer?" he exclaimed, as he ended.

His audience only regretted that the instrument was not a thing of
Heaven. This angelic song was then no more than the outcome of a man's
offended vanity! The singer felt nothing, thought nothing, of the pious
sentiments and divine images he could create in others,--no more, in
fact, than Paganini's violin knows what the player makes it utter. What
they had seen in fancy was Venice lifting its shroud and singing--and it
was merely the result of a tenor's _fiasco_!

"Can you guess the meaning of such a phenomenon?" the Frenchman asked of
Capraja, wishing to make him talk, as the Duchess had spoken of him as a
profound thinker.

"What phenomenon?" said Capraja.

"Genovese--who is admirable in the absence of la Tinti, and when he
sings with her is a braying ass."

"He obeys an occult law of which one of your chemists might perhaps give
you the mathematical formula, and which the next century will no doubt
express in a statement full of _x_, _a_, and _b_, mixed up with little
algebraic signs, bars, and quirks that give me the colic; for the finest
conceptions of mathematics do not add much to the sum total of our
enjoyment.

"Wh