第31章 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH(5)

"All the charm of all the Muses Often flowering in a lonely word."

Questions he would suavely and often wittily parry or repel: to anunhistorical lady asking if he remembered Madame Du Barry, he said, "my memory is very imperfect as to the particulars of my life during the reign of Lous XV. and the Regency; but I know a lady who has a teapot which belonged, she says, to Madame Du Barry." Madame Novikoff, however, records his discomfiture at the query of a certain Lady E-, who, when all London was ringing with his first Crimean volumes, asked him if he were not an admirer of Louis Napoleon. "LE PAUVRE KINGLAKE, DECONTENANCE, REPONDIT TOUT BAS INTIMIDE COMME UN ENFANT QU'ON MET DATES LE COIN: OUI - NON - PAS PRECISEMENT."He had no knowledge of or liking for music. Present once by some mischance at a MATINEE MUSICALE, he was asked by the hostess what kind of music he preferred. His preference, he owned, was for the drum. One thinks of the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," "LA TROMPETTE MARINE EST UN INSTRUMENT QUI ME PLAIT, EL QUI ESTHARMONIEUX"; we are reminded, too, of Dean Stanley, who, absolutely tone-deaf, and hurrying away whenever music was performed, once from an adjoining room in his father's house heard Jenny Lind sing "I know that my Redeemer liveth." He went to her shyly, and told her that she had given him an idea of what people mean by music. Once before, he said in all seriousness, the same feeling had come over him, when before the palace at Vienna he had heard a tattoo rendered by four hundred drummers.