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All my life I have known such ilders, arrogant, corrupt, full of nothing but vainglorious protection of the right to lives of utter worthlessness, the supreme privilege of doing nothing of any significance from the cradle to the grave.
'But your voice! Ah, your voice, your voice which has become the nightly incubus of my beloved Guido and has driven him mad, that is another matter, your voice! Because had you but half the talent he described to me, but half the holy fire, you could have made dwarfs and monsters of ordinary men! London, Prague, Vienna, Dresden, Warsaw, you give the cities to me, was there not in some forgotten corner of your stinking city a world globe? Did you not know that of Europe, had you never been told?
'And in all those capitals you could have brought them to their knees, thousands upon thousands would have heard you, carrying yout name out of the opera houses and the churches into the very streets. They would have said it like a prayer from one end of the continent to the other, as they speak of rulers, of heroes, of the immortals.
'That is what your voice could have been, had you but let it rise out of the ruin of what you were, had you but forged it out of all your suffering and all your pain to give back to God that which He had given you!
'But you are of the ancient ilk that recognizes no other aristocracy save itself, the gilded maggots feeding on the corpse of the Venetian State, brave champions of the supreme privilege of doing nothing, nothing, nothing! And so you forfeit that one strength with which you could have bested any natural man!
'Well, I will not suffer you under my roof any longer. I have no pity for you now. I cannot help you. You are but a freak of nature without its destined gift, and there is nothing lower! Leave this place, go out of it. You have means to find a habitat for your misery somewhere else.
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