How vividly it brings it all back! Though I am a rich man now, and so
comfortably domiciled; though the fashionable world are so eager to lionise
me, and the musical world look upon me almost as a god, and to-morrow
hundreds of people will be turned away, for want of space, from the Hall
where I am to play, just I alone, my last Fantaisie, it was not so very
many years ago that I trudged along, fiddling for half-pence in the
streets. Ninette and I--Ninette with her barrel-organ, and I fiddling. Poor
little Ninette--that air was one of the four her organ played. I wonder
what has become of her? Dead, I should hope, poor child. Now that I am
successful and famous, a Baron of the French Empire, it is not altogether
unpleasant to think of the old, penniless, vagrant days, by a blazing fire
in a thick carpeted room, with the November night shut outside. I am rather
an epicure of my emotions, and my work is none the worse for it.
'Little egoist,' I remember Lady Greville once said of me, 'he has the true
artistic susceptibility. All his sensations are so much grist for his art.'
But it is of Ninette, not Lady Greville, that I think to-night, Ninette's
childish face that the dreary grinding organ brings up before me, not Lady
Greville's aquiline nose and delicate artificial complexion.
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