reappeared. He gave vent to witty little remarks and flowery speeches
in his German-Gallic patois, very observing and very quaint and said
with an air which disarmed ridicule. But he was so pleased to bring a
laugh to the lips of his two pupils, whose dismal life his sympathy
had penetrated, that he would gladly have made himself wilfully
ridiculous had he failed in being so by nature.

According to one of the nobler ideas of religious education, the young
girls always accompanied their master respectfully to the door. There
they would make him a few kind speeches, glad to do anything to give
him pleasure. Poor things! all they could do was to show him their
womanhood. Until their marriage, music was to them another life within
their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams for
reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct of
protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to
overwhelm them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home,
they flung themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and
spent themselves upon it. Melody, harmony, and composition, three
daughters of heaven, whose choir was led by an old Catholic faun drunk
with music, were to these poor girls the compensation of their trials;
they made them, as it were, a rampart against their daily lives.
Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Paesiello, Cimarosa, Haydn, and certain
secondary geniuses, developed in their souls a passionate emotion
which never passed beyond the chaste enclosure of their breasts,
though it permeated that other creation through which, in spirit, they
winged their flight. When they had executed some great work in a
manner that their master declared was almost faultless, they embraced
each other in ecstasy and the old man called them his Saint Cecilias.

The two Maries were not taken to a ball until they were sixteen years