Carvalho. Those who heard her say that her voice,
in these passages, was seraphic; but this was nothing to the superhuman
notes that she gave forth in the prison scene and the final trio
in FAUST, which she sang in the place of La Carlotta, who was ill.
No one had ever heard or seen anything like it.
Daae revealed a new Margarita that night, a Margarita of a splendor,
a radiance hitherto unsuspected. The whole house went mad,
rising to its feet, shouting, cheering, clapping, while Christine
sobbed and fainted in the arms of her fellow-singers and had to be
carried to her dressing-room. A few subscribers, however, protested.
Why had so great a treasure been kept from them all that time?
Till then, Christine Daae had played a good Siebel to Carlotta's
rather too splendidly material Margarita. And it had needed
Carlotta's incomprehensible and inexcusable absence from this gala
night for the little Daae, at a moment's warning, to show all that she
could do in a part of the program reserved for the Spanish diva!
Well, what the subscribers wanted to know was, why had Debienne
and Poligny applied to Daae, when Carlotta was taken ill? Did they
know of her hidden genius? And, if they knew of it, why had they
kept it hidden? And why had she kept it hidden? Oddly enough,
she was not known to have a professor of singing at that moment.
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