Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Marie Antoinette Eats Cake, parts 741 - 744



741. They say that if a person who plays the lute lives to be a 100 years old he will spent 99 years tuning his lute. For a harpsichord player it is more like 98 years. Even though a harpsichord must be tuned as many as three times in a day, it does not take too long for a person as expert as the music tutor, he could complete the task in about ten minutes. But while he concentrated on the task the girls would reach into the instrument and touch various strings with a fingernail, thereby throwing everything off. 


742. The tutor would begin over  again, and finally give up in desperation. He said to the girls, "This old instrument was one of the best when it was made fifty years ago, but now the soundboard in old and cracked, the pins will no longer hold their tension, and you must talk the Empress into getting something new."


743. The tutor would decide to teach using the flute, but some olive oil would have accidentally gotten into the bore. He would be puzzled to find that the guitar was strung up with only G strings. As a result the piano lesson would turn into a voice lesson. 

744. The more the girls came to love their music tutor the more they tormented him, but it was not long before they went too far.  Not all the instruments the tutor used belonged to the court, he always brought  his own viola, an old Italian instrument of unknown origin that had belonged to his father.

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