Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/23

Rh superstition of unlucky gamblers, who believe that in order to recapture their luck they must change their place and take another chair. He leaves the table and the benches and sits on the plank floor. He had brought to his labours all the energies of his body, and never noticed that it was nearly mid-day and that his lamp was still burning. At last the melodies of four well-known songs occurred to him: Bonsoir jardinière, Damon vint en profonde pensée, Une belle dame habite en ce pays, Elle repose. Having once suffered from his poverty he now suffers from abundance; he does not know which of these beautiful airs will best adapt itself to the given text, and, above all, which would be the least recognisable. He is on the point of settling the matter by casting dice; then he decides to blend them together, or rather to juxtapose them." —We can imagine how the musicians of Dresden delighted in this absurdity. At Leipzig, whither Caraffa goes next, the citizens and students make sport of him in a crueller fashion; they set him and another ridiculous musician by the ears, exciting them to burlesque fury, and finally subjecting both to the judgment of a grotesque tribunal, a mythological and facetious masquerade, by which the two simpletons are duped, and which recalls the "Ceremony" scene in the Bourgeois gentilhomme.

Defeated, derided, scoffed at, Caraffa is not greatly perturbed. "Any other man in his position would have had a thousand reasons for being miserable on reflecting upon his precarious situation and his shame. Caraffa, forced to escape hurriedly from Dresden, is as little concerned as a charlatan who, being unmasked in one country, reflects: "Bah!