CHAPTER XVI

In a small port, the name of which I forget, near Perpignan, 25th February, 1822.[1]

This evening I have just found out that music, when it is perfect, puts the heart into the same state as it enjoys in the presence of the loved one--that is to say, it gives seemingly the keenest happiness existing on the face of the earth.

If this were so for all men, there would be no more favourable incentive to love.

But I had already remarked at Naples last year that perfect music, like perfect pantomime, makes me think of that which is at the moment the object of my dreams, and that the ideas, which it suggests to me, are excellent: at Naples, it was on the means of arming the Greeks.

Now this evening I cannot deceive myself--I have the misfortune _of being too great an admirer of milady L_.[2]

And perhaps the perfect music, which I have had the luck to hear again, after two or three months of privation, although going nightly to the Opera, has simply had the effect, which I recognised long ago--I mean that of producing lively thoughts on what is already in the heart.

March 4th--eight days later.

I dare neither erase nor approve the preceding observation. Certain it is that, as I wrote it, I read it in my heart. If to-day I bring it into question, it is

[Pg 54] because I have lost the memory of what I saw at that time.

The habit of hearing music and dreaming its dreams disposes towards love. A sad and gentle air, provided it is not too dramatic, so that the imagination is forced to dwell on the action, is a direct stimulant to dreams of love and a delight for gentle and unhappy souls: for example, the drawn-out passage on the clarionet at the beginning of the quartet in _Bianca and Faliero_(10), and the recitative of La Camporesi towards the middle of the quartet.

A lover at peace with his mistress enjoys to distraction Rossini's famous duet in _Armida and Rinaldo_, depicting so justly the little doubts of happy love and the moments of delight which follow its reconciliations. It seems to him that the instrumental part, which comes in the middle of the duet, at the moment when Rinaldo wishes to fly, and represents in such an amazing way the conflict of the passions, has a physical influence upon his heart and touches it in reality. On this subject I dare not say what I feel; I should pass for a madman among people of the north.

[1] Copied from the diary of Lisio.

[2] [Written thus in English by Stendhal,--Tr.]

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