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The Berthelinis
Traveling French husband and wife musician team in the short story "Providence and the Guitar" by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1882 in the collection The New Arabian Nights. Leon sings comic songs and plays guitar. His wife Elvira only sings. They run into legal trouble at the small town of Castel-le-Gachis.
Leon was radiant in velveteen; he had a rakish way of smoking a cigarette between his songs that was worth money in itself; he underlined his comic points, so that the dullest numskull in Castel-le-Gachis had a notion when to laugh; and he handled his guitar in a manner worthy of himself. Indeed his play with that instrument was as good as a whole romantic drama; it was so dashing, so florid, and so cavalier.
Elvira, on the other hand, sang her patriotic and romantic songs with more than usual expression; her voice had charm and plangency; and as Leon looked at her, in her low-bodied maroon dress, with her arms bare to the shoulder, and a red flower set provocatively in her corset, he repeated to himself for the many hundredth time that she was one of the loveliest creatures in the world of women.
