two local practitioners. When she recovered her senses, she said, "I am
a slain woman, for they have bled me!" She died on September 23, 1836,
and De Bériot's name was the last word that parted her pallid lips.

The death of this great and idolized singer produced a painful shock
throughout Europe, and was regarded as a public calamity, for she had
been as much admired and beloved as a woman as she was worshiped as
an artist. Her remains, first interred in Manchester, were afterward
removed by her husband to Brussels, where he raised a circular memorial
chapel to her memory at Lacken. Her statue, chiseled in white marble by
Geefs, represents her as _Norma_, and stands in the center, faintly lit
by a single sunbeam admitted from a dome, and surrounded by masses of
shadow. "It appears," says the Countess de Merlin, "like a fantastic
thought, the dream of a poet."

Maria Malibran was unquestionably one of the most gifted and remarkable
women who ever adorned the lyric stage. The charm of her singing
consisted in the peculiarity of the timbre and the remarkable range of
her voice, in her excitable temperament, which prompted her to execute
the most audacious improvisations, and in her strong musical feeling,
which kept her improvisations within the laws of good taste. Her voice,
a mezzo-soprano, with a high soprano range superadded by incessant work
and training, was in its middle register very defective, a fault which
she concealed by her profound musical knowledge and technical skill.
It was her mind that helped to enslave her hearers; for without mental
originality and a distinct sort of creative force her defective voice
would have failed to charm, where in fact it did provoke raptures. She
was, in the exact sense of a much-abused adjective, a phenomenal singer,
and it is the misfortune of the present generation that she died too
young for them to hear.