to her own health, became seriously alarmed. She suddenly
departed from the city, leaving a letter for the director, Severini,
avowing a determination not to return, at least till her health was
fully reestablished. This threatened the ruin of the administration, for
Malibran was the all-powerful attraction. M. Viardot, a friend who
had her entire confidence (Mlle. Pauline Garcia afterward became Mme.
Viardot), was sent to Brussels as ambassador, and he represented the
ruin she would entail on the operatic season of the Italiens. This plea
appealed to her generosity, and she returned to fulfill her engagement.
Constant attacks of illness, however, continued to disturb her
performances, and the Parisian public chose to attribute this
interruption of their pleasures to the caprice of the _diva_. She
so resented this injustice that she determined, at the close of
the engagement, that she would never again sing in Paris. Her last
appearance, on January 8,1832, was as _Desdemona_, and the fervency of
her singing and acting made it a memorable night, as the rumor had crept
out that Mme. Malibran was then taking a lasting leave of them as an
artist, and the audience sought to repair their former injustice by
redoubled expressions of enthusiasm and pleasure.

An amusing instance of her eccentric and impulsive resolution was
her hasty tour with La-blache to Italy which occurred a few months
afterward. The great basso, passing through Brussels _en route_ to
Naples, called at her villa to pay his respects. Malibran declared her
intention, in spite of his laughing incredulity, of going with him.
Though he was to leave at dawn the next morning, she was waiting at the
door of his hotel when he came down the stairs. As she had no passport,
she was detained on the Lombardy frontier till Lablache obtained the
needed document. At Milan she only sang in private concerts, and pressed
on to Rome, where she engaged for a short season at the Teatro Valle,
and succeeded in offending the _amour propre_ of the Romans by singing
French romances of her own composition in the lesson-scene of "Il
Barbiere." She learned of the death of her father while in Rome, news
which plunged her in the deepest despondency, for the memory of his
sternness and cruelty had long been effaced by her appreciation of the
inestimable value his training had been to her. She had often remarked
to her friend, Mme. Merlin, that without just such a severe system her
voice wo