The Neapolitans adored Malibran, and she loved to sing to these susceptible lovers of the divine art.  On one occasion when she was suffering from a severe accident, she appeared with her arm in a sling rather then disappoint her audience.  During all her Italian seasons, especially in Naples, where perfection of climate and delightful scenery combine to stimulate the animal spirits, she pursued the same wild and reckless course which had so often threatened to cut off her frail tenure of life.  A daring horsewoman and swimmer, she alternated these exercises with fatiguing studies and incessant social pleasures.  She practiced music five or six hours a day, spent several hours in violent exercise, and in the evenings not engaged at the theatre would go to parties, where she amused herself and her friends in a thousand different ways—­making caricatures, doggerel verses, riddles, conundrums, bouts-rimes, dancing, jesting, laughing, and singing.  Full of exhaustless vivacity, she seemed more and more to disdain rest as her physical powers grew weaker.  The enthusiasm with which she was received and followed everywhere was in itself a dangerous draught on her nervous energies, which should have been husbanded, not lavishly wasted.  One night at Milan she was deluged with bouquets of which the leaves were of gold and silver, and recalled by the frantic acclamations of her hearers twenty times, at the close of which she fainted on the stage.  It was during this engagement at Milan that she heard of the death of the young composer, Vincentio Bellini, on September 23, 1835, and she set on foot a subscription for a tribute to his memory, leading the list with four-hundred francs.  It was a premonition of her own departure from the world of art which she had so splendidly adorned, for exactly a year from that day she breathed her last sigh.

Her arrival in Venice during this last triumphant tour of her life was the occasion for an ovation not less flattering than those she had received elsewhere.  As her gondola entered the Grand Canal, she was welcomed with a deafening fanfare of trumpets, the crash of musical bands, and the shouts of a vast multitude.  It was as if some great general had just returned from victories in the field, which had saved a state.  Mali-bran was frightened at this enthusiasm, and took refuge in a church, which speedily became choke-full of people, and a passage had to be opened for her exit to her hotel.  Whenever she appeared, the multitude so embarrassed her that a way had to be made by the gendarmes, and her gondola was always pursued by a cortege of other gondolas, that crowded in her wake.  When she departed, the city presented her with a magnificent diamond and ruby diadem.

In March, 1835, the divorce which she had long been seeking was granted by a French tribunal, and ten months later, at the expiration of the limit fixed by French law, she married M. De Beriot, March 29, 1836, thus legalizing the birth of their son, Wilfred de Beriot, who, with one daughter, that did not live, had been the fruit of their passionate attachment.  On the day of her marriage she distributed a thousand francs among the poor, and her friends showered costly gifts on her, among them being an agraffe of pearls from the Queen of France.