Flora Desimone had been born in a Calabrian peasant's hut, and she had

rolled in the dust outside, yelling vigorously at all times. Specialists

declare that the reason for all great singers coming from lowly origin is

found in this early development of the muscles of the throat. Parents of

means employ nurses or sedatives to suppress or at least to smother these

infantile protests against being thrust inconsiderately into the turmoil

of human beings. Flora yelled or slept, as the case might be; her parents

were equally indifferent. They were too busily concerned with the getting

of bread and wine. Moreover, Flora was one among many. The gods are always

playing with the Calabrian peninsula, heaving it up here or throwing it

Advertisement..

down there: il terremoto, the earthquake, the terror. Here nature

tinkers vicariously with souls; and she seldom has time to complete her

work. Constant communion with death makes for callosity of feeling; and

the Calabrians and the Sicilians are the cruellest among the civilized

peoples. Flora was ruthless.

She lived amazingly well in the premier of an apartment-hotel in the

Champs-Elysées. In England and America she had amassed a fortune. Given

the warm beauty of the Southern Italian, the passion, the temperament, the

love of mischief, the natural cruelty, the inordinate craving for

attention and flattery, she enlivened the nations with her affairs. And

she never put a single beat of her heart into any of them. That is why her

voice is still splendid and her beauty unchanging. She did not dissipate;

calculation always barred her inclination; rather, she loitered about the

Forbidden Tree and played that she had plucked the Apple. She had an

example to follow; Eve had none.

Men scattered fortunes at her feet as foolish Greeks scattered floral

offerings at the feet of their marble gods--without provoking the sense of

reciprocity or generosity or mercy. She had worked; ah, no one would ever

know how hard. She had been crushed, beaten, cursed, starved. That she had

risen to the heights in spite of these bruising verbs in no manner

enlarged her pity, but dulled and vitiated the little there was of it. Her

mental attitude toward humanity was childish: as, when the parent strikes,

the child blindly strikes back. She was determined to play, to enjoy life,

to give back blow for blow, nor caring where she struck. She was going to

press the juice from every grape. A thousand odd years gone, she would

have led the cry in Rome--"Bread and the circus!" or "To the lions!" She

would have disturbed Nero's complacency, and he would have played an

obbligato instead of a solo at the burning. And she was malice incarnate.

They came from all climes--her lovers--with roubles and lire and francs

and shillings and dollars; and those who finally escaped her enchantment

did so involuntarily, for lack of further funds. They called her villas

Circe's isles. She hated but two things in the world; the man she could

have loved and the woman she could not surpass.




Most Popular