have breakfast first. I accepted his invitation, and sat down
with him to a somewhat luxurious meal; my conversation seemed to
appeal to him, but friends came in, and at last Schlesinger among
the number, who burst into a fury at not finding him at work on
the proofs he regarded as so important. Halevy, however, remained
quite unmoved. In the best of good tempers he merely complained
of his latest success, because he had never had more peace than
of late, when his operas, almost without exception, had been
failures, and he had not had anything to do with them after the
first production. Moreover, he feigned not to understand why this
Reine de Chypre in particular should have been a success; he
declared that Schlesinger had engineered it on purpose to worry
him. When he spoke a few words to me in German, one of the
visitors was astonished, whereupon Schlesinger said that all Jews
could speak German. Thereupon Schlesinger was asked if he also
was a Jew. He answered that he had been, but had become a
Christian for his wife's sake. This freedom of speech was a
pleasant surprise to me, because in Germany in such cases we
always studiously avoided the point, as discourteous to the
person referred to. But as we never got to the proof correcting,
Schlesinger made me promise to give Halevy no peace until we had
done them.

The secret of his indifference to success became clear to me in
the course of further conversation, as I learned that he was on
the point of making a wealthy marriage. At first I was inclined
to think that Halevy was simply a man whose youthful talent was
only stimulated to achieve one great success with the object of
becoming rich; in his case, however, this was not the only
reason, as he was very modest in regard to his own capacity, and