He sat well back in his box, across the front of which the delicate lace curtains were partly drawn. Karl the _Jager_, and the valet who attended, had left the box and retired to their own gallery, where they criticised the play and the music with more interest than did their master. The Prince lay back in his chair, watching the piece listlessly through the gauzy screen, and listening half heedlessly to the music--the wonderful music of Pergolesi. The fairy world of song and harmony, peopled by fantastic and impossible creatures who exist only for the sake of the melodies which give them birth, was not devoid of powerful and pathetic phases of passion and of character; but what made its lesson particularly adapted to the Prince's frame of mind, and gradually aroused his languid interest, was the subordination of passion and character to the nicest art. The deepest sorrow warbled to exquisite airs; passion, despairing and bewildered, flinging itself as an evil thing across the devious paths of Romance, yet never for a second forgetful of the nicest harmony or capable of a jarring note. This ideal musical world--bizarre and rococo as, in some respects, it was--seemed to the Prince in some sort an allegory, or even parody, on the art-life he had set himself to create or to perfect. He thought he saw that even its faults were instinct with, and revealed, the secret of which he was in search. Faultiness and feebleness, folly and littleness, seemed restrained, corrected, transformed, when presented in solemn, noble, and pure melodies. Everything in this parody of life was ruled by art just as, in the so-called reality, he had wished. The lesson was not altogether a noble one. Passion, ennobled by art, lost its fatal, repellent aspect, and became perfect as an artistic whole. Here the poison worked readily in the Prince's mind. To sacrifice the least portion of this art-life to any narrow illiterate scruples was to sin against its perfection, without which the whole structure were worthless. Better, far better, throw the entire scheme to the winds. Imperfect art is worse than none at all. He had already forgotten, if he had ever listened to it, Carricchio's warning against unreal and loveless art.