Defeated by Malibran’s viciousness in rehearsing her death-scene, she resigned herself to the impromptu imposed upon her, and prepared to follow her Romeo, wherever she might choose to die; but when the evening came, Malibran contrived to die close to the foot-lights and in front of the curtain; Sontag of necessity followed, and fell beside her there; the drop came down, and there lay the two fair corpses in full view of the audience, of course unable to rise or move, till a couple of stage footmen, in red plush breeches, ran in to the rescue, took the dead Capulet and Montague each by the shoulders, and dragged them off at the side scenes; the Spanish woman in the heroism of her maliciousness submitting to this ignominy for the pleasure of subjecting her gentle German rival to it.

Madame Malibran was always an object of the greatest interest to me, not only on account of her extraordinary genius, and great and various gifts, but because of the many details I heard of her youth from M. de la Forest, the French consul in New York, who knew her as Marie Garcia, a wild and wayward but most wonderful girl, under her father’s tyrannical and harsh rule during the time they spent in the United States.  He said that there was not a piece of furniture in their apartment that had not been thrown by the father at the daughter’s head, in the course of the moral and artistic training he bestowed upon her:  it is perhaps wonderful that success in either direction should have been the result of such a system; but, upon the whole, the singer seems to have profited more than the woman from it, as might have been expected.  Garcia was an incomparable artist, actor, and singer (no such Don Giovanni has ever been heard or seen since), and bestowed upon all his children the finest musical education that ever made great natural gifts available to the utmost to their possessors.  I suppose it was from him, too, that Marie derived with her Spanish blood the vehement, uncontrollable nature of which M. de la Forest told me he had witnessed such extraordinary exhibitions in her girlhood.  He said she would fly into passions of rage, in which she would set her teeth in the sleeve of her silk gown, and tear and rend great pieces out of the thick texture as if it were muslin; a test of the strength of those beautiful teeth, as well as of the fury of her passion.  She then would fall rigid on the floor, without motion, breath, pulse, or color, though not fainting, in a sort of catalepsy of rage.

Her marriage with the old French merchant Malibran was speedily followed by their separation; he went to France, leaving his divine devil of a wife in New York, and during his absence she used to write letters to him, which she frequently showed to M. de la Forest, who was her intimate friend and adviser, and took a paternal interest in all her affairs.  These epistles often expressed so much cordial kindness and warmth of feeling toward her husband, that M. de la