'
She laughed softly, a laugh which surprised one with its ineffable grace
on that plaintive mouth.
'You remember, Francesca, the multitude of notes with which we afflicted
the margins of our favourite pieces at school. One day, after a most
serious consultation, we changed the title of every piece of Schumann's
we possessed, and each title had a long explanatory note. I have the
papers still. Now, when I play the _Myrthen_ or the _Albumblaetter_, all
these mysterious annotations are quite incomprehensible to me; my
emotions and my point of view have changed completely, but there is a
delicate pleasure in comparing the sentiments of the present with those
of the past, the new picture and the old. It is a pleasure very similar
to that of re-reading one's diary, only perhaps rather more mournful and
intense. A diary is generally the description of real events, a
chronicle of days happy or otherwise, the gray or rosy traces left by
time in its flight; the notes written in youth on the margin of a piece
of music are, on the contrary, fragments of the secret poems of a soul
that is just breaking into bloom, the lyric effusions of our ideality as
yet untouched, the story of our dreams. What language? What a flow of
words! You remember, Francesca?'
She talked with perfect freedom, even with a touch of spiritual
exaltation, like a person long condemned to intercourse with inferiors,
who has the irresistible desire to open her mind and heart to a breath
of the higher life.
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