Magia D’Amore

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Professeur Pantalon is beside himself with grief, a fat bird he has brought home for dinner, and for which he has handed over twenty pieces of silver, turning out not to be nearly as dead as promised and walking into the street in an unguarded moment. His estimable wife, Madame Leda, whose bosom is always weighty with considerations, is beside herself with consternation, a silver candelabrum with four cherubim having disappeared from her serving board where it had been standing next to the platter all polished for the stuffed goose. She frames her lips into the shape of a heart and flies through the house crying, “Disorder is everywhere!” a phrase many of the servants take up. But the professeur merely rubs his wispy goatee, folds over and over again his ponderous cloak, and replies, “Nothing to be done, my goose is fled.” Incapable of understanding why he should be more distraught over the loss of a goose than over the disappearance of a silver candelabrum she slaps him over the head with a copy of his latest book, Tintinabula, and he is forced to explain, poor man, hunched in his armchair and hugging his scrawny arms, that he has invited for dinner Docteur Bruneto, an esteemed philosopher. “Aiii!” she hits him again, “and what is in my cupboard to serve him but dried lentils! I am shamed! I am degraded! I am boiled away!” She does a prolonged dance that is less than merry but more than forlorn. She wrings a handkerchief into knots until she has nothing into which a person can nicely sneeze. Whereupon Arlequin, trusted servant, is sent to market to buy what is needed for the Docteur’s soup, in particular stalks of freshest fennel because Bruneto, of course, is a vegetarian. On his way out the door the artful Arlequin pauses. Whenever Professeur Pantalon gives him a coin to spend for the food, Arlequin protests, “Not this, that!” and points to an article of the professeur’s clothing. So that the professeur has to take it off and drape it over Arlequin, who starts to shiver as though he is freezing the more clothing that is laid over him. Pantalon cannot understand why Arlequin does not move off, because now with the professorial clothing decorating his body—a silk shirt, a flowered cravat—he looks gay indeed. Nothing he gives Arlequin is sufficient, though, because the servant keeps crying, “Not this, that!” until finally the professeur is completely naked and Madame Leda is chasing him with a cleaver, screaming, “The soup! The soup!” at the top of her lungs. Finally Arlequin goes to market with the professeur’s pointed shoe upside down on his head.