“Verruckter Kerl!  A madman!” he said.

He had seen Lohengrin and that passed muster.  It was dull but no worse.  But Siegfried!  When he mentioned it Professor Erlin leaned his head on his hand and bellowed with laughter.  Not a melody in it from beginning to end!  He could imagine Richard Wagner sitting in his box and laughing till his sides ached at the sight of all the people who were taking it seriously.  It was the greatest hoax of the nineteenth century.  He lifted his glass of beer to his lips, threw back his head, and drank till the glass was empty.  Then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he said: 

“I tell you young people that before the nineteenth century is out Wagner will be as dead as mutton.  Wagner!  I would give all his works for one opera by Donizetti.”

XXV

The oddest of Philip’s masters was his teacher of French.  Monsieur Ducroz was a citizen of Geneva.  He was a tall old man, with a sallow skin and hollow cheeks; his gray hair was thin and long.  He wore shabby black clothes, with holes at the elbows of his coat and frayed trousers.  His linen was very dirty.  Philip had never seen him in a clean collar.  He was a man of few words, who gave his lesson conscientiously but without enthusiasm, arriving as the clock struck and leaving on the minute.  His charges were very small.  He was taciturn, and what Philip learnt about him he learnt from others:  it appeared that he had fought with Garibaldi against the Pope, but had left Italy in disgust when it was clear that all his efforts for freedom, by which he meant the establishment of a republic, tended to no more than an exchange of yokes; he had been expelled from Geneva for it was not known what political offences.  Philip looked upon him with puzzled surprise; for he was very unlike his idea of the revolutionary:  he spoke in a low voice and was extraordinarily polite; he never sat down till he was asked to; and when on rare occasions he met Philip in the street took off his hat with an elaborate gesture; he never laughed, he never even smiled.  A more complete imagination than Philip’s might have pictured a youth of splendid hope, for he must have been entering upon manhood in 1848 when kings, remembering their brother of France, went about with an uneasy crick in their necks; and perhaps that passion for liberty which passed through Europe, sweeping before it what of absolutism and tyranny had reared its head during the reaction from the revolution of 1789, filled no breast with a hotter fire.  One might fancy him, passionate with theories of human equality and human rights, discussing, arguing, fighting behind barricades in Paris, flying before the Austrian cavalry in Milan, imprisoned here, exiled from there, hoping on and upborne ever with the word which seemed so magical, the word Liberty; till at last, broken with disease and starvation, old, without means to keep body and