“Verruckter Kerl! A madman!” he said.
He had seen Lohengrin and that passed muster.
It was dull but no worse. But Siegfried!
When he mentioned it Professor Erlin leaned his head
on his hand and bellowed with laughter. Not a
melody in it from beginning to end! He could
imagine Richard Wagner sitting in his box and laughing
till his sides ached at the sight of all the people
who were taking it seriously. It was the greatest
hoax of the nineteenth century. He lifted his
glass of beer to his lips, threw back his head, and
drank till the glass was empty. Then wiping his
mouth with the back of his hand, he said:
“I tell you young people that before the nineteenth
century is out Wagner will be as dead as mutton.
Wagner! I would give all his works for one opera
by Donizetti.”
The oddest of Philip’s masters was his teacher
of French. Monsieur Ducroz was a citizen of Geneva.
He was a tall old man, with a sallow skin and hollow
cheeks; his gray hair was thin and long. He wore
shabby black clothes, with holes at the elbows of
his coat and frayed trousers. His linen was very
dirty. Philip had never seen him in a clean collar.
He was a man of few words, who gave his lesson conscientiously
but without enthusiasm, arriving as the clock struck
and leaving on the minute. His charges were very
small. He was taciturn, and what Philip learnt
about him he learnt from others: it appeared
that he had fought with Garibaldi against the Pope,
but had left Italy in disgust when it was clear that
all his efforts for freedom, by which he meant the
establishment of a republic, tended to no more than
an exchange of yokes; he had been expelled from Geneva
for it was not known what political offences.
Philip looked upon him with puzzled surprise; for
he was very unlike his idea of the revolutionary:
he spoke in a low voice and was extraordinarily polite;
he never sat down till he was asked to; and when on
rare occasions he met Philip in the street took off
his hat with an elaborate gesture; he never laughed,
he never even smiled. A more complete imagination
than Philip’s might have pictured a youth of
splendid hope, for he must have been entering upon
manhood in 1848 when kings, remembering their brother
of France, went about with an uneasy crick in their
necks; and perhaps that passion for liberty which
passed through Europe, sweeping before it what of
absolutism and tyranny had reared its head during the
reaction from the revolution of 1789, filled no breast
with a hotter fire. One might fancy him, passionate
with theories of human equality and human rights,
discussing, arguing, fighting behind barricades in
Paris, flying before the Austrian cavalry in Milan,
imprisoned here, exiled from there, hoping on and
upborne ever with the word which seemed so magical,
the word Liberty; till at last, broken with disease
and starvation, old, without means to keep body and
