I thought of Balzac's 'Messe de
l'Athee' and ranked Felix's inconsistency with it, feeling at the same time
how natural such a paradox is. And myself, the last of the trio, at the
mercy of a street organ, I cannot forget Ninette.
Though it was not until many years had passed that I heard that little
criticism, the purchase of my fiddle was destined very shortly to bring
my life in contact with its author. Those were the days when a certain
restraint grew up between Ninette and myself. Ninette, it must be
confessed, was jealous of the fiddle. Perhaps she knew instinctively that
music was with me a single and absorbing passion, from which she was
excluded. She was no genius, little Ninette, and her organ was nothing more
to her than the means of making a livelihood; she felt not the smallest
_tendresse_ for it, and could not understand why a dead and inanimate
fiddle, made of mere wood and catgut, should be any more to me than that.
How could she know that to me it was never a dead thing, that even when it
hung hopelessly out of my reach, in the window of M. Boudinot, before ever
it had given out wild, impassioned music beneath my hands, it was always a
live thing to me, alive and with a human, throbbing heart, vibrating with
hope and passion.
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