Lablache;
she was the widow of the painter Boucher, whose exquisite confections
every one knows. They had a daughter, who was a singer of great gifts.

Meyerbeer in 1825 lost his father, whom he loved to the depth of his
large heart. At the father's death-bed he renewed an old love with his
cousin, Minna Mosson, and they were betrothed. Niggli says she was "as
sweet as she was fair." Two years later he married her. She bore him
five children, of whom three, with the wife, survived him and inherited
his great fortune.

Josef Strauss, son of a saloon-keeper, married Anna Streim, daughter of
an innkeeper. After she had borne him five children, they were divorced
on the ground of incompatibility. How many children did they want for
compatibility's sake? Their son Johann married Jetty Treffy in 1863;
she was a favourite public singer, and her ambition raised him out of a
mere dance-hall existence to the waltz-making for the world. When she
died he paid her the exquisite compliment of choosing another singer,
before the year was over, for the next waltz. Her name was Angelica
Dittrich.

Joachim Raff fell in love with an actress named Doris Genast, and
followed her to Wiesbaden in 1856; he married her three years later,
and she bore him a daughter.

The Russian Glinka was sent travelling in search of health. He liked
Italian women much and many, but it was in Berlin that he made his
declarations to a Jewish contralto, for whose voice he wrote six
studies. But he married Maria Petrovna Ivanof, who was young, pretty,
quarrelsome, and extravagant. She brought along also a dramatic
mother-in-law, and he set out again for his health. His wife married
again, and the scandal of the whole affair preyed on him so that he
went to Paris and sought diversion recklessly along the boulevards.

His countryman, Anton Rubinstein, married Vera Tschekonanof in 1865.
She accompanied him on his first tour, but after that, not.

The Bohemian composer Smetana married his pupil, Katharine Kolar; he
was another of those whose happiness deafness ruined. He was
immortalised in a composition as harrowing as any of Poe's stories, or
as Huneker's "The Lord's Prayer in B," the torment of one high note
that rang in his head unceasingly, until it drove him mad.

FRANZ SCHUBERT

Among the beautiful figures, whom the critical historian tries to drive
back into that limbo, where an imaginary Homer flirts with a fabulous
Pocahontas, we are asked to plac