Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/25

Rh music, and above all the performer, commits in the feminine heart; and he gives some amusing instances. The most mirth-provoking and the completest of these is that of the châtelaine of Riemelin (Hörnitz), which I should like to relate, if this story, more Gallic than Teutonic, were not a little too undraped. Its hero, moreover, is not Caraffa but another lute-picker, the former playing but a secondary part in it. But Caraffa is himself a Don Juan. He conquers the hearts of the Roman ladies with a sonata of his own composition. "They raved over it; it rained kisses and meaning glances. Never was my phiz thus fêted. Hardly has he arrived in Leipzig but he turns the head of the prettiest girl in the town—beautiful, impressionable, wealthy and a good musician; she loses all judgment and all discretion so soon as Caraffa begins to strum on the clavier and sing with his raucous voice. When the father, a substantial merchant, by name Pluto, learns of the intrigue, he is ready to burst with rage; he reviles his daughter and turns the rascal out of his house. None the less, the lovers continue to meet, by night, in his garden; there Caraffa sings scenes from Orfeo, comparing himself with its hero; the girl is quite ready to play Eurydice and to escape from the house of Pluto; but at the last moment there appears, most seasonably, a strapping wench of a jailor's daughter whom Caraffa got with child during a certain sojourn of his in a Zittau prison to which he was sentenced for swindling. She takes the seducer by the throat, shouting at the top of her voice that he must marry her. In the midst of