extravagant in form as a Chinese vase; perhaps they even laugh at themselves.  Their personality is generous; like Murat’s kingly garments, it attracts danger.  But Conti’s duplicity will be known only to the women who love him.  In his art he has that deep Italian jealousy which led the Carlone to murder Piola, and stuck a stiletto into Paesiello.  That terrible envy lurks beneath the warmest comradeship.  Conti has not the courage of his vice; he smiles at Meyerbeer and flatters him, when he fain would tear him to bits.  He knows his weakness, and cultivates an appearance of sincerity; his vanity still further leads him to play at sentiments which are far indeed from his real heart.  He represents himself as an artist who receives his inspirations from heaven; Art is something saintly and sacred to him; he is fanatic; he is sublime in his contempt for worldliness; his eloquence seems to come from the deepest convictions.  He is a seer, a demon, a god, an angel.  Calyste, although I warn you about him, you will be his dupe.  That Southern nature, that impassioned artist is cold as a well-rope.  Listen to him:  the artist is a missionary.  Art is a religion, which has its priests and ought to have its martyrs.  Once started on that theme, Gennaro reaches the most dishevelled pathos that any German professor of philosophy ever spluttered to his audience.  You admire his convictions, but he hasn’t any.  Bearing his hearers to heaven on a song which seems a mysterious fluid shedding love, he casts an ecstatic glance upon them; he is examining their enthusiasm; he is asking himself:  ’Am I really a god to them?’ and he is also thinking:  ‘I ate too much macaroni to-day.’  He is insatiable of applause, and he wins it.  He delights, he is beloved; he is admired whensoever he will.  He owes his success more to his voice than to his talent as a composer, though he would rather be a man of genius like Rossini than a performer like Rubini.  I had committed the folly of attaching myself to him, and I was determined and resigned to deck this idol to the end.  Conti, like a great many artists, is dainty in all his ways; he likes his ease, his enjoyments; he is always carefully, even elegantly dressed.  I do respect his courage; he is brave; bravery, they say, is the only virtue into which hypocrisy cannot enter.  While we were travelling I saw his courage tested; he risked the life he loved; and yet, strange contradiction!  I have seen him, in Paris, commit what I call the cowardice of thought.  My friend, all this was known to me.  I said to the poor marquise:  ’You don’t know into what a gulf you are plunging.  You are the Perseus of a poor Andromeda; you release me from my rock.  If he loves you, so much the better! but I doubt it; he loves no one but himself.’  Gennaro was transported to the seventh heaven of pride.  I was not a marquise, I was not born a Casteran, and he forgot me in a day.  I then gave myself the savage pleasure of probing that nature to the bottom.  Certain of the result,