Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/24

12 there are other countries in the world; if one is lost there are ten to discover! You have only to push on, and it will be some little while before other towns discover your ignorance! Thus one is sure of never going to bed supperless and of always having a coat to one's back." Everywhere, as he journeys on, he makes free with the table, the cellar and the bed of the Cantors, organists and musicians of the petty States, whom he dazzles by his boasting. He exploits in wholesale fashion the absurd amateurs, the ignorant tradesmen who entertain artists in their desire to pass for connoisseurs. He instals himself in the country houses of rustic squires who, suffering from tedium, are anything but exacting as regards the quality of his music and his jests; he fills his purse and his belly until the moment when he becomes aware that he is beginning to weary his hosts; then he decamps, promptly, without demanding his wages, but not without occasionally carrying off a a few silver spoons and forks. He despoils the poor village schoolmasters of their savings, with the promise of enabling them, in a year's time, to become kapellmeister at some princely Court; and he laughs in the faces of his dupes when they come to him afterwards, weeping and cursing, to demand the return of their money. If one of them takes the jest ill and lodges a complaint, that is his affair: Caraffa is acquainted with the delays of the German law-courts.

Lastly, the rascal has one support which never fails him and consoles him for his mortifications: the women. They are not always seductive, but they are always seduced. Long before the Kreutzer Sonata, Kuhnau had noted the ravages which