To their hearers, the Duke and Capraja were playing a game of which the premises were unknown.

“Genovese’s voice thrills through every fibre,” said Capraja.

“And la Tinti’s fires the blood,” replied the Duke.

“What a paraphrase of happy love is that cavatina!” Capraja went on.  “Ah!  Rossini was young when he wrote that interpretation of effervescent ecstasy.  My heart filled with renewed blood, a thousand cravings tingled in my veins.  Never have sounds more angelic delivered me more completely from my earthly bonds!  Never did the fairy wave more beautiful arms, smile more invitingly, lift her tunic more cunningly to display an ankle, raising the curtain that hides my other life!”

“To-morrow, my old friend,” replied Cataneo, “you shall ride on the back of a dazzling, white swan, who will show you the loveliest land there is; you shall see the spring-time as children see it.  Your heart shall open to the radiance of a new sun; you shall sleep on crimson silk, under the gaze of a Madonna; you shall feel like a happy lover gently kissed by a nymph whose bare feet you still may see, but who is about to vanish.  That swan will be the voice of Genovese, if he can unite it to its Leda, the voice of Clarina.  To-morrow night we are to hear Mose, the grandest opera produced by Italy’s greatest genius.”

All present left the conversation to the Duke and Capraja, not wishing to be the victims of mystification.  Only Vendramin and the French doctor listened to them for a few minutes.  The opium-smoker understood these poetic flights; he had the key of the palace where those two sensuous imaginations were wandering.  The doctor, too, tried to understand, and he understood, for he was one of the Pleiades of genius belonging to the Paris school of medicine, from which a true physician comes out as much a metaphysician as an accomplished analyst.

“Do you understand them?” said Emilio to Vendramin as they left the cafe at two in the morning.

“Yes, my dear boy,” said Vendramin, taking Emilio home with him.  “Those two men are of the legion of unearthly spirits to whom it is given here below to escape from the wrappings of the flesh, who can fly on the shoulders of the queen of witchcraft up to the blue empyrean where the sublime marvels are wrought of the intellectual life; they, by the power of art, can soar whither your immense love carries you, whither opium transports me.  Then none can understand them but those who are like them.

“I, who can inspire my soul by such base means, who can pack a hundred years of life into a single night, I can understand those lofty spirits when they talk of that glorious land, deemed a realm of chimeras by some who think themselves wise; but the realm of reality to us whom they think mad.  Well, the Duke and Capraja, who were acquainted at Naples,—­where Cataneo was born,—­are mad about music.”

“But what is that strange system that Capraja was eager to explain to the Duke?  Did you understand?”