It was in some of his operas, I believe, that certain roles were sung by Mlle. de Maupin, whose incredibly wild, scandalous, and ambiguous love affairs, and duels in male costume, made the material for Gautier’s famous romance.

THE TACITURN RAMEAU

The next great master in French opera was Rameau (1683—­1764), who resembled Lully in his stinginess, but not in his brilliant social qualities.  As a boy he neglected his lessons in language for his music-books.  His parents’ efforts were in vain, and his teachers gave him up as hopeless; but at the age of sixteen or seventeen he fell in love with a young widow, who was a neighbour of his.  His letters to her, brought from her the crushing statement: 

“You spell like a scullion.”

This rebuke woke him to his senses as far as orthography was concerned, but his father did not approve of the widow as a teacher, and sent him to Italy to break off the relation.  Some years later he returned to the town, but as he remained only a short time, he evidently did not reillumine his first flame.

He did not wed until he was forty-three years old, and then on February 25, 1726, he married the eighteen-year-old Marie Louise Mangot.  Of her Maret says:  “Madame Rameau is a virtuous woman, sweet and amiable, and she has made her husband very happy.  She has much talent for music, a very pretty voice, and good taste in song.”  They had three children, one a son, who became equerry to the king, a daughter who became a nun, and another who married a musketeer.

Baron Grimm accuses Rameau of being “a savage, a stranger to every sentiment of humanity.”  The great Diderot, in a book called “The Nephew of Rameau,” referred caustically to Rameau’s experiments and theories in acoustics, and added: 

“He is a philosopher in his way; he thinks only of himself, and the rest of the universe is as the puff of a bellows.  His daughter and his wife have only to die when they please; provided the bells of the parish which toll for them continue to sound the 12th and the 17th overtones, all will be well.”

Fetis credits these feelings to men who loved neither Rameau nor French music.  He paid a pension to his invalid sister.  “Sombre and unsociable he fled the world, and kept, even amid his family, a silence almost absolute.”  I do not know whether or not Rameau’s wife survived him.

PERGOLESI

In his old age Rameau said that if he were twenty years younger, he would go to Italy and take Pergolesi for his master in harmony.  This brilliant genius, Pergolesi, died in 1736, at the age of twenty-six.  It was consumption that carried him off, and I find no record of any love of his.  The saccharine romance-monger, Elise Polko, has a rather mawkish story which she connects with his name, though on what authority, I am ignorant.  As Lincoln said, “For those that like that sort of thing, it is about the sort of thing they’ll like.”