“In the first place, monsieur,” said the composer, “allow me to explain the subject in a few words.  Here, the hearers receiving a musical impression do not work it out in themselves, as religion bids us work out the texts of Scripture in prayer.  Hence it is very difficult to make them understand that there is in nature an eternal melody, exquisitely sweet, a perfect harmony, disturbed only by revolutions independent of the divine will, as passions are uncontrolled by the will of men.

“I, therefore, had to seek a vast framework in which effect and cause might both be included; for the aim of my music is to give a picture of the life of nations from the loftiest point of view.  My opera, for which I myself wrote the libretto, for a poet would never have fully developed the subject, is the life of Mahomet,—­a figure in whom the magic of Sabaeanism combined with the Oriental poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures to result in one of the greatest human epics, the Arab dominion.  Mahomet certainly derived from the Hebrews the idea of a despotic government, and from the religion of the shepherd tribes or Sabaeans the spirit of expansion which created the splendid empire of the Khalifs.  His destiny was stamped on him in his birth, for his father was a heathen and his mother a Jewess.  Ah! my dear Count to be a great musician a man must be very learned.  Without knowledge he can get no local color and put no ideas into his music.  The composer who sings for singing’s sake is an artisan, not an artist.

“This magnificent opera is the continuation of the great work I projected.  My first opera was called The Martyrs, and I intend to write a third on Jerusalem delivered.  You perceive the beauty of this trilogy and what a variety of motives it offers,—­the Martyrs, Mahomet, the Deliverance of Jerusalem:  the God of the West, the God of the East, and the struggle of their worshipers over a tomb.  But we will not dwell on my fame, now for ever lost.

“This is the argument of my opera.”  He paused.  “The first act,” he went on, “shows Mahomet as a porter to Kadijah, a rich widow with whom his uncle placed him.  He is in love and ambitious.  Driven from Mecca, he escapes to Medina, and dates his era from his flight, the Hegira.  In the second act he is a Prophet, founding a militant religion.  In the third, disgusted with all things, having exhausted life, Mahomet conceals the manner of his death in the hope of being regarded as a god,—­last effort of human pride.

“Now you shall judge of my way of expressing in sound a great idea, for which poetry could find no adequate expression in words.”

Gambara sat down to the piano with an absorbed gaze, and his wife brought him the mass of papers forming his score; but he did not open them.