She took an intellectual part in the new doctrines, which
swarmed, during the three years succeeding July, 1830, like gnats in
the sunshine, and turned some female heads. But, like all nobles,
Beatrix, while thinking these novel ideals superb, wanted always to
protect the nobility. Finding before long that there was no place in
this new regime for individual superiority, seeing that the higher
nobility were beginning once more the mute opposition it had formerly
made to Napoleon,--which was, in truth, its wisest course under an
empire of deeds and facts, but which in an epoch of moral causes was
equivalent to abdication,--she chose personal happiness rather than
such eclipse. About the time we were all beginning to breathe again,
Beatrix met at my house a man with whom I had expected to end my days,
--Gennaro Conti, the great composer, a man of Neapolitan origin,
though born in Marseilles. Conti has a brilliant mind; as a composer
he has talent, though he will never attain to the first rank. Without
Rossini, without Meyerbeer, he might perhaps have been taken for a man
of genius.
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