I must relate the crisis of her life; but I turn with regret to the chamber that sheltered her genius and her innocence. I see in spirit--shut in this place--a treasure that no one was permitted to contemplate; for Paganina bloomed in the shade, and reserved for her solitude her beauty and the perfume of her loveliness. Sometimes, only when debauch slept and idleness prolonged its useless repose, the beautiful young girl appeared before her opened window. Robed with the reflection of the aurora, she saluted the growing day; and, as the antique statue, she exhaled divine harmony by contact with its earliest rays. XXII. Having, not without success, terminated his musical studies, André quitted Naples. His affection for his cousin had greatly increased. Love sang in his heart; for, if we may borrow such an expression from the poetical vocabulary, it assuredly belongs to a musician. From the day he was free, he had but one desire--to see Paganina. He set out with this intention, and restless regarding his reception. Indeed, his future depended upon it. During the journey, his thoughts went ahead, and heaped up every imaginable supposition on the manner in which his cousin would receive him; but she did not receive him at all. He entered a deserted mansion. He wandered among the deserted places, where every thing recalled the days of his childhood. Death had passed by, and left, perhaps, some unknown scourge. In his poignant distress, he imagined the worst. Perhaps he did not deceive himself. Paganina was to appear the next day at the theatre of Milan. I must add that she was always worthy of her father, in the strictest sense of the word; though for three months, it is true, in order to prepare herself for the stage, she had mixed in the world of the theatres, and, what is far worse, in the world of parasites, insinuating themselves by every means and with every end. She breathed a poisoned air in the incense of impure flatteries. Her bitter contempt prevented its injuring her; but as soon as she was free, she ran to conceal her wounds in a retreat where no one could discover her. XXIII. Extract from the _Gazette of Lombardy_, the 20th of September, 18--. "Her father was German, her mother an Italian; her father belonged to the church, her mother to the theatre. Both were superior musicians. Such a birth could promise her a more than common destiny, and this birth had a singular predestination. She was born in the side-scenes of the theatre during a _soirée_, the memory of which is still fresh among us. Her first cries were drowned in the passionate strains of the violin of Paganini, and the bursts of admiration from his auditory. The little creature, as if in reply to the powerful invocation of the master, appeared before the hour fixed by nature.