diablerie. They were very shabby and meagre. When Linda throws open her window in her first exquisite scena, some unlucky urchin had drawn an actual face on the very oily-looking moon—a laugh through the house was inevitable.
There is an Italian company here, with a handsome prima donna. There is something very antagonistic in the German and Italian operatic schools. They despise each other mutually. Professors mostly side with the Germans, but I am not sure that they are right.
The Opera begins at six; it is over by nine; and everybody is in bed by ten. If you come home after that hour, the porter has a right to a fee for being disturbed from his bed at untimely hours: as in Paris, you pay him if you come home after twelve. If early rising conduces to health, how very healthy the Germans ought to be! But they have other habits by no means so consonant to our notions of what is good for the preservation of life. Their dislike of fresh air amounts almost to frenzy; this, joined to their smoking, and, in winter, to the close stoves, must make their domestic hearth (only they have no hearth) very incompatible with our tastes.
