The Unknown Masterpiece (14 page)

Since Rossini had composed an opera called
Mohammed II
, the amateur then observed to the woman standing beside him: “What a pity they don’t put on some of those operas of Rossini at the Italiens—the ones nobody knows. It certainly is glorious music!”

Gambara smiled.

A few days ago, the wretched sum of thirty-six francs was required for the rent of the attic where the poor couple lived. The wineshop would advance no credit for the brandy with which the wife intoxicated her husband to make him play properly. Gambara’s music then became so insufferable that the ears of the rich were offended, and the tin plate came back empty. It was nine in the evening when a lovely Italian woman, the Principessa Massimilla di Varese, took pity on these poor wretches. She gave them forty francs and asked them questions when she discovered from the wife’s thanks that she was Venetian. Prince Emilio, who accompanied his wife, asked for the story of their misfortunes, which Marianna told without complaint against man or God.

“Madame,” said Gambara, who was not the least bit drunk, “we are the victims of our own superiority. My music is beautiful, but when music passes from sensation to idea, it can have listeners only among people of genius, for they alone have the power to develop its meaning. My misfortune comes from listening to the music of angels and from believing that human beings could understand it. The same is true of women when their love assumes divine forms—men no longer understand them.”

These words were worth at least the forty francs the princess had just bestowed, and she drew from her purse another gold piece, saying as she gave it to Marianna that she would write to Andrea Marcosini.

“Do not write to him, madame,” Marianna said, “and may God keep you beautiful forever.”

“We must look after them,” the princess murmured to her husband, “for this man has remained faithful to the ideal we have killed.”

At the sight of the gold piece, old Gambara wept; then a memory of his former scientific labors returned, and as he wiped away his tears, the poor composer uttered a sentence which the occasion made quite touching: “Water,” he said, “is a burnt substance.”

—Paris, June 1837

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Translation copyright © 2001 by Richard Howard

Introduction copyright © 2001 by Arthur C. Danto

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres,
Odalisque with Slave
(detail), 1842

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799–1850.

[Chef d’œuvre inconnu. English]

The unknown masterpiece ; and, Gambara / by Honoré de Balzac ;

translated by Richard Howard ; introduction by Arthur C. Danto.

p. cm.

I. Title: Unknown masterpiece ; and, Gambara. II. Howard, Richard,

1929– III. Balzac, Honoré de, 1799–1850. Gambara. English. IV. Title:

Gambara. V. Title.

PQ2163.C4 E5 2001

843'.7—dc21

2001000399

eISBN 978-1-59017-415-9
v1.0

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