The Count took advantage of this happy frame of mind, and Gambara allowed himself to be taken to the opera like a lamb.

At the first introductory notes Gambara’s intoxication appeared to clear away and make way for the feverish excitement which sometimes brought his judgment and his imagination into perfect harmony; for it was their habitual disagreement, no doubt, that caused his madness.  The ruling idea of that great musical drama appeared to him, no doubt, in its noble simplicity, like a lightning flash, illuminating the utter darkness in which he lived.  To his unsealed eyes this music revealed the immense horizons of a world in which he found himself for the first time, though recognizing it as that he had seen in his dreams.  He fancied himself transported into the scenery of his native land, where that beautiful Italian landscape begins at what Napoleon so cleverly described as the glacis of the Alps.  Carried back by memory to the time when his young and eager brain was as yet untroubled by the ecstasy of his too exuberant imagination he listened with religious awe and would not utter a single word.  The Count respected the internal travail of his soul.  Till half-past twelve Gambara sat so perfectly motionless that the frequenters of the opera house took him, no doubt, for what he was—­a man drunk.

On their return, Andrea began to attack Meyerbeer’s work, in order to wake up Gambara, who sat sunk in the half-torpid state common in drunkards.

“What is there in that incoherent score to reduce you to a condition of somnambulism?” asked Andrea, when they got out at his house.  “The story of Robert le Diable, to be sure, is not devoid of interest, and Holtei has worked it out with great skill in a drama that is very well written and full of strong and pathetic situations; but the French librettist has contrived to extract from it the most ridiculous farrago of nonsense.  The absurdities of the libretti of Vesari and Schikander are not to compare with those of the words of Robert le Diable; it is a dramatic nightmare, which oppresses the hearer without deeply moving him.

“And Meyerbeer has given the devil a too prominent part.  Bertram and Alice represent the contest between right and wrong, the spirits of good and evil.  This antagonism offered a splendid opportunity to the composer.  The sweetest melodies, in juxtaposition with harsh and crude strains, was the natural outcome of the form of the story; but in the German composer’s score the demons sing better than the saints.  The heavenly airs belie their origin, and when the composer abandons the infernal motives he returns to them as soon as possible, fatigued with the effort of keeping aloof from them.  Melody, the golden thread that ought never to be lost throughout so vast a plan, often vanishes from Meyerbeer’s work.  Feeling counts for nothing, the heart has no part in it.  Hence we never come upon those happy inventions, those artless scenes, which captivate all our sympathies and leave a blissful impression on the soul.