I stopped dead.
Then my dear father’s delicate tact stepped in. Apparently noticing nothing, he said, gently:
“That will do for to-day, my boy; I am tired.”
And I tore away to give vent to my Virgilian misery unmolested.
Will it be credited that when I was only twelve years old, and even before I fell under the spell of music, I became the victim of that cruel passion so well described by the Mantuan?
My mother’s father, who bore a name immortalised by Scott—Marmion—lived at Meylan, about seven miles from Grenoble. This district, with its scattered hamlets, the valley of the winding Isère, the Dauphiny mountains that here join a spur of the Alps, is one of the most romantic spots I know. Here my mother, my sisters, and I usually passed three weeks towards the end of summer.
Now and then my uncle, Felix Marmion, who followed the fiery track of the great Emperor, would pay a flying visit during our stay, wreathed with cannon smoke and ornamented with a fine sabre cut across the face. He was then only adjutant-major in the Lancers; but young, gallant, ready to lay down his life for one look from his leader, he believed the throne of Napoleon as stable as Mont Blanc. His taste for music made him a great addition to our gay little circle, for he both sang and played the violin well.
High over Meylan, niched in a crevice of the mountain, stands a small white house, half-hidden amidst its vineyards and gardens, behind which rise the woods, the barren hills, a ruined tower, and St Eynard—a frowning mass of rock.
This sweet secluded spot, evidently predestined to romance, was the home of Madame Gautier, who lived there with two nieces, of whom the younger was called Estelle. Her name at once caught my attention from its being that of the heroine of Florian’s pastoral Estelle and Némorin, which I had filched from my father’s library, and read a dozen times in secret.
Estelle was just eighteen—tall, graceful, with large, grave, questioning eyes that yet could smile, hair worthy to ornament the helmet of Achilles, and feet—I will not say Andalusian, but pure Parisian, and on those little feet she wore ... pink slippers!
Never before had I seen pink slippers. Do not smile; I have forgotten the colour of her hair (I fancy it was black), yet, never do I recall Estelle but, in company with the flash of her large eyes, comes the twinkle of her dainty pink shoes. I had been struck by lightning. To say I loved her comprises everything. I hoped for, expected, knew nothing but that I was wretched, dumb, despairing. By night I suffered agonies, by day I wandered alone through the fields of Indian corn, or sought, like a wounded bird, the deepest recesses of my grandfather’s orchard.
Jealousy—dread comrade of love—seized me at the least word spoken by a man to my divinity; even now I shudder at the clank of a spur, remembering the noise of my uncle’s while dancing with her.
Every one in the neighbourhood laughed at the piteously precocious child, torn by his obsession. Perhaps Estelle laughed too, for she soon guessed all.
One evening, I remember, there was a party at Madame Gautier’s, and we played prisoner’s base. The men were bidden choose their partners, and I was purposely told to choose first. But I dared not, my heart-beats choked me; I lowered my eyes unable to speak. They were beginning to tease me when Estelle, smiling down from her beauteous height, caught my hand, saying:
“Come! I will begin; I choose Monsieur Hector.”
But ah! she laughed!
Does time heal all wounds; do other loves efface the first? Alas, no! With me time is powerless. Nothing wipes out the memory of my first love.
I was thirteen when we parted. I was thirty when, returning from Italy, I passed near St Eynard again. My eyes filled with tears at the sight of the little white house—the ruined tower. I loved her still!
On reaching home I heard that she was married; but even that could not cure me. A few days later my mother said:
“Hector, will you take this letter to the coach-office. It is for a lady who will be in the Vienne diligence. While they change horses ask the guard for Madame F., give her this letter, and look carefully at her. You may recognise her, although you have not met for seventeen years.”
Without suspicion I went on my errand and asked for Madame F. “I am she, Monsieur,” said a voice that thrilled my heart. “It is Estelle,” said my heart. Estelle! still lovely, still the nymph, the hamadryad of Meylan’s green slopes. Still lovely with her proud carriage, her glorious hair, her dazzling smile. But ah! where were the little pink shoes? She took the letter. Did she know me? I could not tell, but I returned home quite upset by the meeting. My mother smiled at me.
“So Némorin has not forgotten his Estelle,” she said. His Estelle! Mother! mother! was that trick quite fair?
With love came music; when I say music I mean composition, for of course I had long since been able to sing at sight and to play two instruments, thanks, needless to say, to my father’s teaching.
Rummaging one day in a drawer, I unearthed a flageolet, on which I at once tried to pick out “Malbrook.” Driven nearly mad by my squeaks, my father begged me to leave him in peace until he had time to teach me the proper fingering of the melodious instrument, and the right notes of the martial song I had pitched on. At the end of two days I was able to regale the family with my noble tune.
Now, how strikingly this shows my marvellous aptitude for wind instruments. What a fruitful subject for a born biographer!
My father next taught me to read music, explaining the signs thoroughly, and soon after he gave me a flute. At this I worked so hard that in seven or eight months I could play quite fairly.
Wishing to encourage my talent, he persuaded several well-to-do families of La Côte to join together and engage a music-master from Lyons. He was successful in getting a second violin, named Imbert, to leave the Théâtre des Célestins and settle in our outlandish little town to try and musicalise the inhabitants, on condition that we guaranteed a certain number of pupils and a fixed salary for conducting the band of the National Guard.
I improved fast, for I had two lessons a day; having also a pretty soprano voice I soon developed into a pleasant singer, a bold reader, and was able to play Drouet’s most intricate flute concertos. My master had a son a few years older than myself, a clever horn-player, with whom I became great friends. One day, as I was leaving for Meylan, he came to see me.
“Were you going without saying good-bye?” he asked. “You may never see me again.”
His gravity struck me at the moment, but the joy of seeing Meylan and my glorious Stella montis quite put him out of my head. But on my return home my friend was gone; he had hanged himself the very day I left, and no one has ever been able to discover why. It was a sad home-coming for me!
Among some old books I found d’Alembert’s edition of Rameau’s Harmony, and how many weary hours did I not spend over those laboured theories, trying vainly to evolve some sense out of the disconnected ideas. Small wonder that I did not succeed, seeing that one needs to be a past master of counterpoint and acoustics before one can possibly grasp the author’s meaning. It is a treatise on harmony for the use of those only who know all about it already.
However, I thought I could compose, and began by trying arrangements of trios and quartettes that were simply chaos, without form, cohesion, or common sense. Then, quite undaunted, I listened carefully to the quartettes by Pleyel, that our music-lovers performed on Sundays, and studied Catel’s Harmony, which I managed to buy. Suddenly I rent asunder the veil of the inmost temple, and the mystery of form and of the sequence of chords stood revealed. I hurriedly wrote a pot-pourri in six parts on Italian airs, and, as the harmony seemed tolerable, I was emboldened to compose a quintette for flute, two violins, viola, and ’cello, which was played by three amateurs, my master, and myself.
This was indeed a triumph though, unfortunately, my father did not seem as pleased as my other friends. Two months later another quintette was ready, of which he wished to hear the flute part before we performed it in public. Like most provincial amateurs, he thought he could judge the whole by a first-violin part, and at one passage he cried:
“Come now! That is something like music.”
But alas! this elaborate effusion was too much for our performers—particularly the viola and ’cello—they meandered off at their own sweet will. Result—confusion. As this happened when I was twelve and a half, the writers who say I did not know my notes at twenty are just a little out. Later on I burnt[1] the two quintettes, but it is strange that, long afterwards in Paris, I used the very motif that my father liked for my first orchestral piece. It is the air in A flat for the first violin in the allegro of my overture to the Francs-Juges.
After the death of his son, poor Imbert went back to Lyons; his place was taken by Dorant, a man of far higher standing. He was an Alsacian, and played almost every instrument, but he excelled in clarinet, ’cello, violin, and guitar. My elder sister—who had not a scrap of musical instinct, and could never read the simplest song, although she had a charming voice and was fond of music—learnt the guitar with Dorant and, of course, I must needs share her lessons. But ere long our master, who was both honest and original, said bluntly to my father:
“Monsieur, I must stop your son’s guitar lessons.”
“But why? Is he rude to you or so lazy that you can do nothing with him?”
“Certainly not. Only it is simply absurd for me to pretend to teach anyone who knows as much as I do myself.”
So behold me! Past master of those three noble instruments—flageolet, flute, and guitar!
Can anyone doubt my heaven-sent genius or that I should be capable of writing the most majestic orchestral works, worthy of a musical Michael Angelo! Flute, guitar, flageolet!!! I never was any good at other instruments. Oh yes! I am wrong, I am not at all bad at the side-drums.
My father would never let me learn the piano—if he had, no doubt I should have joined the noble army of piano thumpers, just like forty thousand others. Not wishing me to be a musician, he, I believe, feared the effect of such an expressive instrument on my sensitive nature. Sometimes I regret my ignorance, yet, when I think of the ghastly heap of platitudes for which that unfortunate piano is made the daily excuse—insipid, shameless productions, that would be impossible if their perpetrators had to rely, as they ought, on pencil and paper alone—then I thank the fates for having forced me to compose silently and freely by saving me from the tyranny of finger-work—that grave of original thought.
As with most young folks, my early work was downright gloomy, it simply grovelled in melancholy. Minor keys were rampant. I knew it was a mistake, but it seemed impossible to escape from the black crape folds that had enshrouded my soul ever since the Meylan affair.
The natural result of constantly reading Florian’s Estelle was that I ended by setting parts of that mawky pastoral to music.
The faded old-time poetry comes back to me as I write here in London, in the pale spring sunshine. Torn as I am by anxiety, worried by sordid, petty obstacles, by stupid opposition to my plans, it is strange to recall the sickly-sentimental words of a song I wrote in despair at leaving the Meylan woods, which were “lighted by the eyes”—and, may I add, by the little pink slippers of my cruel lady love.
Although it joined the quintettes in the fire before I went to Paris, yet in 1829, when I planned my Symphonie Fantastique, this little melody crept humbly back into my mind; it seemed to me to voice so perfectly the crushing weight of young and hopeless love that I welcomed it home and enshrined it, without any alteration, for the first violins in the largo of the opening movement—Rêveries.
But the fatal hour of choosing a profession drew rapidly nearer. My father made no secret of his intention that I should follow in his footsteps and become a doctor, since this he considered the finest career in the world; I, on the other hand, made no secret of my opinion that it was, to me, the most repulsive.
Without knowing exactly what I did want, I was absolutely certain that I did not want to be tied to the bedsides of sick people, to pass my days in hospitals and operating theatres, and I determined that no power on earth should turn me into a doctor.
My resolve was intensified by the lives of Gluck and Haydn that I read about this time in the “Biographie Universelle.” “How glorious,” I cried, “to live for Art, to spend one’s life in her beautiful service!” and then came a mere trifle which threw open the gates of that paradise for which I had been so blindly groping.
As yet I had never seen a full score; all I knew of printed music was a few scraps of solfeggi with figured bass or bits of operas with a piano accompaniment. But one day I stumbled across a piece of paper ruled with twenty-four staves, and, in a flash, I saw the splendid scope this would give for all kinds of combinations.
“What orchestration I might get with that!” I said, and from that minute my music-love became a madness equalled only in force by my aversion to medicine.
As I dared not tell my parents, it happened that by means of this very passion for music, my father tried decisive measures to cure me of what he called my “babyish antipathy” to his loved profession.
Calling me into his study where Munro’s Anatomy, with its life-size pictures of the human framework, lay open on the table, he said:
“See, my boy, I want you to work hard at this. I cannot believe that you will let unreasoning prejudice stand in the way of my wishes. If you will do your best, I will order you the very finest flute to be got in Lyons, with all the new keys.”
What could I say? My father’s gravity, my love and respect for him, the temptation of the long-coveted flute, were altogether too much for me. Muttering a strangled “Yes,” I rushed away to throw myself on my bed in the depths of misery.
Be a doctor! Learn to dissect! Help in horrible operations! Bury myself in the hideous realities of hospitals, wounds, and death, when I might tread the clouds with the immortals!—when music and poetry wooed me with open arms and divine songs.
No, no, no! Such a tragedy could not happen!
Yet it did.
My cousin, A. Robert—now one of the first doctors in Paris—was to share my father’s lessons. Unluckily he played the violin well, being a member of my quintette party, and, of course, we spent more time over music than over osteology. Still he worked so hard at home that he was always ready with his demonstrations, and I was not. Hence frequent scoldings and the vials of my father’s wrath poured out on my poor head. Nevertheless, by hook or by crook, I managed to learn all that my father could teach me without dissections, and when I was nineteen, I consented to go with Robert to Paris to embark on a medical career.
Before beginning to tell of the deadly conflict that, almost immediately on my arrival in Paris, I began with ideas, people and things generally, and which has continued unremittingly up to this day, I must have a short breathing space.
Moreover, to-day—the 10th April 1848—has been chosen for the great Chartist demonstration. Perhaps, in a few hours, these two hundred thousand men will have upset England, as the revolutionists have upset the rest of Europe, and this last refuge will have failed me. I shall know soon.
8 P.M.—Chartists are rather a decent sort of revolutionists. Those powerful orators—big guns—took the chair, and their mere presence was so convincing that speech was superfluous. The Chartists quite understood that the moment was not propitious for a revolution, and they dispersed quietly and in order. My good folks, you know as much about organising an insurrection as the Italians do about composing symphonies.
12th July.—No possibility of writing for the last three months, and now I am going back to my poor France—mine own country, after all! I am going to see whether an artist can live there, or how long it will take him to die amid those ruins beneath which Art lies—crushed, bleeding, dead!
Farewell, England!
France, 16th July.—Home once more. Paris has buried her dead. The paving-stones, torn up for barricades, are replaced; but for how long?
The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is one mass of desolation and ruin; even the Goddess of Liberty on the Bastille column has a bullet through her. Trees, maimed and uprooted; houses tottering to a fall; squares, streets, quays, still palpitating from the riot—all bear witness to the horrors they have suffered.
Who could think of Art at such a time! Theatres are closed, artists undone, professors idle, pupils fled, pianists become street musicians, painters sweep the gutters, and architects mix mortar in the national work-sheds.
Although the National Assembly has voted a subsidy to the theatres, and some help to the poorest of the artists, what is that among so many?
Take a first violin of the opera, for instance; his pay is nine hundred francs a year, which is eked out by private lessons. What chance has he of saving? Transportation would be a boon to him and his colleagues, for they might earn a living in America, Sydney, or the Indies. But even this is denied them. They fought for the Government and against the insurgents, and being only deserving poor instead of malefactors, they cannot even claim this last favour—it is reserved for criminals.
Surely this way—in this awful, hideous confusion of just and unjust, of good and evil, of truth and untruth—this way doth madness lie!
I must write on and try to forget.
When Robert and I got to Paris in 1822, I loyally kept my promise to my father by studying nothing but medicine. My first trial came when my cousin, telling me that he had bought a subject, took me to the hospital dissecting room.
But the foul air, the grinning heads, the scattered limbs, the bloody cloaca in which we waded, the swarms of ravenous rats and sparrows fighting for the debris of poor humanity, overwhelmed me with such a paroxysm of wild terror that, at one bound, I was through the nearest window, and tearing home as if Death and the Devil were at my heels.
The following night and day were indescribable. Hell seemed let loose upon me, and I felt that no power on earth should drag me back to that Gehenna. The wildest schemes for evading my horrible fate—each madder than the last—chased each other through my burning brain; but finally, worn out and despairing, I yielded to Robert’s persuasion, and went back to the charnel house.
Strange to say, this time I felt nothing but cold, impersonal disgust, worthy of an old soldier in his fiftieth battle. I actually got to the point of ferretting in some poor dead creature’s chest for scraps of lung to feed the sparrow-ghouls of this unsavoury den, and when Robert said, laughing:
“Hallo! you are getting quite civilised. Giving the birds their meat in due season!”
I retorted: “And filling all things living with plenteousness,” as I threw a blade-bone to a wretched famished rat that sat up watching me with anxious eyes.
Life, however, had some compensations.
Some secret affinity drew me to my anatomy demonstrator, Professor Amussat, probably because he, like myself, was a man of one idea, and was as passionately devoted to his science—medicine—as I to my beloved art, music. His marvellous discoveries have brought him world-wide fame, but, insatiable searcher after truth as he is, he takes no rest. He is a genius, and I am honoured in being allowed to call him friend.
I also enjoyed the chemistry lectures of Gay-Lussac, of Thénard (physics) and, above all, the literature course of Andrieux, whose quiet humour was my delight.
Drifting on in this sort of dumb quiescence, I should probably have gone to swell the disastrous list of commonplace doctors, had I not, one night, gone to the Opera. It was Salieri’s Danaïdes.
The magnificent setting, the blended harmonies of orchestra and chorus, the sympathetic and beautiful voice of Madame Branchu, the rugged force of Dérivis, Hypermnestra’s air—which so vividly recalled Gluck’s style, made familiar to me by the scraps of Orpheus I had found in my father’s library—all this, intensified by the sad and voluptuous dance-music of Spontini, sent me up to fever-pitch of excitement and enthusiasm.
I was like a young man, who, never having seen any boat but the cockle-shells on the mountain tarns of his homeland, is suddenly put on board a great three-decker in the open ocean. I could not sleep, of course, and consequently my next day’s anatomy lesson suffered, and to Robert’s frenzied expostulations I responded with airs from the Danaïdes, humming lustily as I dissected.
Next week I went to hear Méhul’s Stratonice with Persuis’ ballet Nina. I did not think much of the music, with the exception of the overture, but I was greatly affected by hearing Vogt play on the cor anglais the very air sung, years before, by my sister’s friends at my first communion in the Ursuline chapel. A man sitting near told me that it was taken from d’Aleyrac’s opera Nina.
In spite of this double life of mine and the hours spent in brooding over my hard fate, I stuck doggedly to my promise for some time longer. But, hearing that the Conservatoire library, with its wealth of scores, was open to the public, I could not resist the temptation to go and learn more of my adored Gluck. This gave the death-blow to my promise; music claimed me for her own.
I read and re-read, I copied, I learnt Gluck’s scores by heart, I forgot to eat, drink, or sleep, and when at last I managed to hear Iphigenia in Tauris, I swore that, despite father, mother, relations and friends, a musician I would be and nothing else.
Without waiting till my courage oozed away, I wrote to my father telling him of my decision, and begging him not to oppose me. At first he replied kindly, hoping that I should see the error of my ways; but, as time went on, he realised that I was not to be persuaded, and our letters grew more and more acrimonious, until they ended in a perfect bombardment of mutual passion and recrimination.
In the midst of the storm I started composing, and wrote, amongst other things, an orchestral cantata on Millevoye’s poem The Arab Horse.
I also, in the Conservatoire library, made friends with Gerono, a pupil of Lesueur, and, to my great joy, he offered to introduce me to his master, in the hope that I might be allowed to join his harmony class. Armed with my cantata, and with a three-part canon as a sort of aide-de-camp, I appeared before him. Lesueur most kindly read through the cantata carefully, and said: “You have plenty of dramatic force, plenty of feeling, but you do not know how to write yet. The whole thing is so crammed with mistakes that it would be simply waste of time for me to point them out. Get Gerono to teach you harmony—just enough to make my lectures intelligible—then I will gladly take you as a pupil.”
Gerono readily agreed, and, in a few weeks, I had mastered Lesueur’s theory, based on Rameau’s chimera—the resonance of the lower chords, or what he was pleased to call the bass figure—as if thick strings were the only vibrating bodies in the world, or rather as if their vibrations could be taken as the fundamental basis of vibration for all sonorous bodies!
However, I saw from Gerono’s manner of laying down the law that I must swallow it whole, since it was religion and must be blindly followed, or else say good-bye to my chance of joining Lesueur’s class. And such is the force of example that I ended by believing in it so thoroughly and honestly that Lesueur considered me one of his most promising and fervent disciples.
Do not think me ungrateful for his kindliness and for the affection he shewed me up to his last hour, but, oh! the precious time wasted in learning and unlearning his mouldy, antediluvian theories.
At one time I really did admire his little oratories, and it grieved me sorely to find my admiration fading, slowly and surely. Now I can hardly bear to look at one of his scores; it is to me as the portrait of a dear friend, long loved, lost and lamented.
When I compare to-day with that far-off time when, regularly each Sunday, I went to the Tuileries chapel to hear them, how old, how tired, how bereft of illusions I feel. That was the day of great enthusiasms, of rich musical passions, of beautiful dreams, of ineffable, infinite joys.
As I usually arrived early at the Chapel Royal, my master would spend the time before service began in explaining the meaning of his composition. It was as well, for the music had no earthly connection with the words of the mass!
Lesueur inclined mostly to the sweet pastorals of the Old Testament—idylls of Naomi, Ruth, Rachel—and I shared his taste. The calm of the unchanging East, the mysterious grandeur of its ruins, its majestic history, its legends—these were the magnetic pole of my imagination. He often allowed me to join him in his walks, telling me of his early struggles, his triumphs and the favour of Napoleon. He even let me, up to a certain point, discuss his theories, but we usually ended on our common meeting-ground of Gluck, Virgil and Napoleon. After these long talks along the edge of the Seine or under the leafy shade of the Tuileries gardens, I would leave him to take the solitary walks which had become to him a necessity of daily life.
Some months after I had become his pupil, but before my admission to the Conservatoire, I took it into my head to write an opera, and nothing would do but that I must get my witty literary master, Andrieux, to write me a libretto. I cannot remember what I wrote to him, but he replied:
“Monsieur,—Your letter interests me greatly. You cannot but succeed in the glorious art you have chosen, and it would afford me the greatest pleasure to be your collaborateur. But, alas! I am too old, my studies and thoughts are turned in quite other directions. You would call me an outer barbarian if I told you how long it is since I set foot in the Opera. At sixty-four I can hardly be expected to write love songs, a requiem would be more appropriate. If only you had come into the world thirty years earlier, or I thirty years later, we might have worked together. With heartiest good wishes,
“Andrieux.”
“17th June 1823.”
M. Andrieux kindly brought his own letter, and stayed a long time chatting. As he was leaving he said:
“Ah! I, too, was an ardent lover of Gluck ... and of Piccini,[2] too!!”
This failure discouraged me, so I turned to Gerono, who was something of a poetaster, and asked him (innocent that I was) to dramatise Estelle for me. Luckily no one ever heard this lucubration, for my ditties were a fair match for his words.
This pink-and-white namby-pamby effusion was followed by a dark and dismal thing called The Gamester. I was really quite enamoured of this sepulchral dirge, which was for a bass voice with orchestral accompaniment, and I set my heart on getting Dérivis to sing it.
Just then the Theatre-Français advertised a benefit for Talma—Athalie, with Gossec’s choruses. “With a chorus,” said I, “they must have an orchestra. My scena is not difficult, and if only I can persuade Talma to put it on the programme Dérivis will certainly not refuse to sing it.”
Off I posted to Talma, my heart beating to suffocation—unlucky omen! At the door I began to tremble, and desperate misgivings seized me. Dared I beard Nero in his own palace? Twice my hand went up to the bell, twice it dropped, then I turned and fled up the street as hard as I could pelt.
I was but a half-tamed young savage even then!
A short time after this M. Masson, choirmaster of St Roch, suggested that I should write a mass for Innocents’ Day.
He promised me a month’s practice, a hundred picked musicians, and a still larger chorus. The choir boys of St Roch should copy the parts carefully, so that that would cost me nothing.
I started gaily. Of course the whole thing was nothing but a milk-and-water copy of Lesueur, and—equally of course—when I showed it to him he gave most praise to those parts wherein my imitation was the closest.
Masson swore by all his gods that the execution should be unrivalled, the one thing needful being a good conductor, since neither he nor I was used to handling such vast masses of sound. However, Lesueur most kindly induced Valentino, conductor of the opera, to take the post, dubious though he was of our vocal and instrumental legions.
The day of the general rehearsal came, and with it our vast masses—twenty choristers (fifteen tenors and five basses), twelve children, nine violins, one viola, one oboe, one horn, one bassoon.
My rage and despair at this treatment of Valentino—one of the first conductors in the world—may be imagined.
“It’s all right,” quoth Master Masson, “they will all turn up on the day.”
Valentino shrugged his shoulders resignedly, raised his baton, and they started.
In two seconds all was confusion; the parts were one mass of mistakes, sharps and flats left out, ten-bar pauses omitted, a little further on thirty bars clean gone.
It was the most appalling muddle ever heard, and I simply writhed in torment. There was nothing for it but to give up utterly my fond dream of a grand orchestral performance.
Still, it was not lost time as far as I was concerned, for, in spite of the shocking execution, I saw where my worst faults lay, and, by Valentino’s advice, I rewrote the whole mass—he generously promising to help me when I should be ready for my revenge.
But alas! while I worked my parents heard of the fiasco, and made another determined onslaught by ridiculing my chosen vocation, and laughing my hopes to scorn. Those were the bitter dregs of my cup of shame; I swallowed them and silently persevered.
Unable, for lack of money, to employ professional copyists, and being justly afraid of amateurs, when my score was finished I wrote out every part myself. It took me three months. Then, like Robinson Crusoe with the boat he could not launch, I was at a stand-still. How should I get it performed? Trust to M. Masson’s musical phalanx? That would be too idiotic. Appeal to musicians myself? I knew none. Ask the help of the Chapel Royal? My master had distinctly told me that was impossible, no doubt because, had he allowed me such a privilege, he would have been bombarded with similar requests from my fellow-students.
My friend, Humbert Ferrand, came to the rescue with a bold proposal. Why not ask M. de Châteaubriand to lend me twelve thousand francs? I believe that, on the principle of it being as well to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, I also asked for his influence with the Ministry. Here is his reply:
“Paris, 31st Dec. 1824.
“Monsieur,—If I had twelve thousand francs you should have them. Neither have I any influence with the ministers. I am indeed sorry for your difficulties, for I love art and artists. However, it is through trial that success comes, and the day of triumph is a thorough compensation for past sufferings. With most sincere regret,
“Châteaubriand.”
Thus I was completely disheartened, and had no plausible answer to make when my parents wrote threatening to stop the modest sum that alone made life in Paris possible.
Fortunately I met, at the opera, a young and clever music-lover, Augustin de Pons, belonging to a Faubourg St Germain family, who, stamping with impotent rage, had witnessed my disaster at St Roch. He was fairly well off then, but, in defiance of his mother, he later on married a second-rate singer, who left him after long wanderings through France and Italy.
Entirely ruined he returned to Paris to vegetate by giving singing lessons. I was able to be of some use to him when I was on the staff of the Journal des Débats, and I greatly wish I could have done more, for his generous and unasked help was the turning-point of my career, and I shall never forget it.
Even last year he found life very hard; I tremble to think what may have become of him since the February revolution took away his pupils.
Seeing me one day in the foyer, he shouted:
“I say, what about your mass? When shall we have another go at it?”
“It is done,” I answered, “but what chance have I of getting it performed?”
“Chance? Why, confound it all, you have only got to pay the performers. How much do you want? Twelve or fifteen hundred francs? Two thousand?”
“Hu-s-s-sh, don’t roar so, for heaven’s sake! If you really mean it I shall be most grateful for twelve hundred francs.”
“All right. Hunt me up to-morrow and we’ll engage the opera chorus and a real good orchestra. We must give Valentino a good innings this time.”
And we did. The mass was grandly performed at St Roch, and was well spoken of by the papers. Thus, thanks to that blessed de Pons, I got my first hearing and my foot in the stirrup—as it were—of all things most difficult and most important in Paris.
I boldly undertook to conduct the rehearsals of chorus and orchestra myself, and, with the exception of a slip or two, due to excitement, I did not do so badly. But alas! how far I was from being an accomplished conductor, and how much labour and pains it has cost me to become even what I am.
After the performance, seeing exactly how little my mass was worth, I took out the Resurrexit—which seemed fairly good—and held an auto-da-fé of the rest, together with the Gamester, Estelle, and the Passage of the Red Sea. A calm inquisitorial survey convinced me of the justice of their fate.
Mournful coincidence! After writing these lines I met a friend at the Opéra Comique, who asked:
“When did you come back?”
“Some weeks ago.”
“Then you know about de Pons? No? He poisoned himself last week. He said he was tired of living, but I am afraid that, really, he was unable to live since the Revolution scattered his pupils.”
Horrible! horrible! most horrible!
I must rush out and work off this horror in the fresh air.
Lesueur, seeing how well I got on, thought it best for me to become a regular Conservatoire student and, with the consent of Cherubini, the director, I was enrolled.
It was a mercy I had not to appear before the formidable author of Medea, for the year before I had put him into one of his white rages by thwarting him.
Now the Conservatoire had not been run on precisely Puritanic lines, so, when Cherubini succeeded Perne as director, he thought proper to begin by making all sorts of vexatious rules. For instance, men must use only the door into the Faubourg Poissonière and women that into the Rue Bergère—which were at opposite ends of the building.
One day, knowing nothing of the new rule, I went in by the feminine door, but was stopped by a porter in the middle of the courtyard and told to go back and all round the streets to the masculine door. I told the man I would be hanged if I did, and calmly marched on.
I had been buried in Alcestis for a quarter of an hour, when in burst Cherubini, looking more wicked and cadaverous and dishevelled even than usual. With my enemy, the porter, at his heels, he jerked round the tables, narrowly eyeing each student, and coming at last to a dead stop in front of me.
“That’s him,” said the porter.
Cherubini was so furious that, for a time, he could not speak, and, when he did, his Italian accent made the whole thing more comical than ever—if possible.
“Eh! Eh! Eh!” he stuttered, “so it is you vill come by ze door I vill not ’ave you?”
“Monsieur, I did not know of the new rule; next time——”
“Next time? Vhat of zis next time? Vhat is it zat you come to do ’ere?”
“To study Gluck, Monsieur, as you see.”
“Gluck! and vhat is it to you ze scores of Gluck? Vhere get you permission for enter ze library?”
“Monsieur” (I was beginning to lose my temper too), “the scores of Gluck are the most magnificent dramatic works I know, and I need no permission to use the library since, from ten to three, it is open to all.”
“Zen I forbid zat you return.”
“Excuse me, I shall return whenever I choose.”
That made him worse.
“Vha-Vha-Vhat is your name?” he stammered.
“My name, Monsieur, you shall hear some day, but not now.”
“Hotin,” to the porter, “catch ’im and make ’im put in ze prison.”
So off we went, the two—master and servant—hot foot after me round the tables. We knocked over desks and stools in our headlong flight, to the amazement of the quiet onlookers, but I dodged them successfully, crying mockingly as I reached the door:
“You shan’t have either me or my name, and I shall soon be back here studying Gluck.”
That was my first meeting with Cherubini, and I rather wondered whether he would remember it when I met him next in a less irregular manner. It is odd that, twelve years later, in spite of him, I should have been appointed first curator, then librarian of that very library. As for Hotin, he is now my devoted slave and a rabid admirer of my music. I have many other Cherubini stories to tell. Any way, if he chastised me with whips, I certainly returned the compliment with scorpions.
The hostility of my people had somewhat died down, thanks to the success of my mass, but, naturally another reverse started it with renewed fury.
In the 1826 preliminary examination of candidates for admission to the Institute I was hopelessly plucked. Of course my father heard of it, and promptly wrote that, if I persisted in staying on in Paris, my allowance would stop.
My dear master kindly wrote asking him to reconsider his letter, saying that my eventual success was certain, since I oozed music at every pore. But, by ill luck, he brought in religious arguments—about the worst thing he could have done with my free-thinking father, whose blunt—almost rude—answer could not but wound Lesueur on his most susceptible side. From the beginning:
“Monsieur, I am an atheist,” the rest may be guessed. The forlorn hope of gaining my end by personal pleading sent me back to La Côte, where I was received frostily and left to my own reflections for some days, during which I wrote to Ferrand:
“No sooner away from the capital than I want to talk to you. My journey was tiresome as far as Tarare, where I began a conversation with two young men, whom I had, so far, avoided, thinking they looked dilettanti. They told me they were artists, pupils of Guérin and Gros, so I told them I was a pupil of Lesueur. They said all sorts of nice things of him, and one of them began humming a chorus from the Danaïdes.
“The Danaïdes!” I cried, “then you are not a mere trifler?”
“Not I,” he answered; “have I not heard Dérivis and Madame Branchu thirty-four times as Danaüs and Hypermnestra?”
“O-o-oh!” and we fell upon each other’s neck.
“I know Dérivis,” said the other man.
“And I Madame Branchu.”
“Lucky fellows!” I said. “But how is it that, since you are not professional musicians, you have not caught Rossini fever and turned your backs on nature and common sense?”
“Well, I suppose it is because, being used to seeking all that is grandest and best in nature for our pictures, we recognise the same spirit in Gluck and Salieri, and so turn our backs on fashionable music.”
“Blessed people! Such as they are alone worthy of being allowed to listen to Iphigenia!”
Again my parents returned to the charge, telling me to choose my profession, since I refused to be a doctor. Again I replied that I could and would only be a musician and must return to Paris to study.
“Never,” said my father, “you may give up that idea at once.”
I was crushed; with paralysed brain I sank into a torpor from which nothing roused me. I neither ate nor spoke nor answered when spoken to, but spent part of the day wandering in the woods and fields and the rest shut up in my own room. I was mentally and morally dying for want of air. Early one morning my father came to my bedside:
“Get up and come to my study,” he said, “I want to talk to you.” He was grave and sad, not angry.
“I have decided, after many sleepless nights, that you shall go back to Paris, but only for a time. If you should fail on further trial, I think you will do me the justice to own that I have done all that can be expected, and will consent to try some other career. You know my opinion of second-rate poets—every sort of mediocrity is contemptible—and it would be a deadly humiliation to feel that you were numbered among the failures of the world.”
Without waiting to hear more, I promised all he wished. “But,” he continued, “since your mother’s point of view is diametrically opposed to mine, I desire, in order to avoid trouble, that you do not mention this, and that you start for Paris secretly.”
But it was impossible to hide this sudden bound from utter despair to delirious joy and Nanci, my sister, with many promises not to tell, wormed my secret out of me. Of course she kept it as well as I did, and by nightfall, everyone, including my mother, knew my plans.
Now it will hardly be believed that there are still people in France who look upon anyone connected with theatres or theatrical art as doomed to everlasting perdition, and since, according to French ideas, music hardly exists outside a theatre, it, too, shares the same fate.
Apropos of this I nearly made Lesueur die of laughing over a reply of one of my aunts.
We were arguing on this very point, and I said at last:
“Come, Auntie, I believe you would object to have even Racine a member of your family!”
“Well, Hector,” she said seriously, “we must be respectable before everything.”
Lesueur insisted that such sentiments could only emanate from an elderly maiden aunt, in spite of my asseverations that she was young and as pretty as a flower.
Needless to say, my mother believed I was setting my feet in the broad road that led not only to destruction in the next world, but to social ruin in this. I quickly saw by her wrathful face that she knew all, and did my best to slink out of her way, but it was useless. Trembling with rage and using “you” instead of the old familiar “thou,” she said:
“Hector, since your father countenances your folly I must speak and save you from this mortal sin. You shall not go; I forbid it. See, here I—your mother—kneel at your feet to beg you humbly to give up this mad design and——”
“Mother! mother!” I interrupted, “I cannot bear it! For pity’s sake don’t kneel to me.”
But she knelt on, looking up at me as I stood in miserable silence, and finally she said:
“You refuse, wretched boy? Then go! Drag our honoured name through the fetid mud of Paris; kill your parents with shame and disgrace. Curses on you! You are no more my son, and never again will I look upon your face.”
Could narrow-mindedness towards Art and provincial prejudice go farther? I truly believe that my hatred of these mediæval doctrines dates from that horrible day.
But that was not the end of the trial.
My mother hurried off to our little country house, Le Chuzeau, and when the time of my departure came my father begged me to make one final effort at reconciliation. We all went to Le Chuzeau, where we found her reading in the orchard. As we drew near she fled. We waited, we hunted, my father called her, my sisters and I cried bitterly, but all in vain. Without a kind word or look from my mother, with her curse upon my head, I started on my life’s career.
Once back in Paris, and fairly started in Lesueur’s class, I began to worry about my debt to de Pons.
It would certainly never be paid off out of my monthly allowance of a hundred and twenty francs. I therefore got some pupils for singing, flute and guitar, and, by dint of strict economy, in a few months I scraped together six hundred francs, with which I hurried off to my kind creditor.
How could I save out of such a sum? Well, I had a tiny fifth-floor room at the corner of the Rue de Harley and the Quai des Orfèvres, I gave up restaurant dinners and contented myself with a meal of dry bread with prunes, raisins or dates, which cost about fourpence.
As it was summer time I took my dainties, bought at the nearest grocer’s, and ate them on that little terrace on the Pont Neuf at the foot of Henry IV.’s statue; watching the while the sun set behind Mont Valerien, with its exquisite reflections in the murmuring river below, and pondering over Thomas Moore’s poems, of which I had lately found a translation.
But de Pons, troubled at my privations—which, since we often met, I could not hide from him—brought fresh disaster upon me by a piece of well-meant but fatal interference. He wrote to my father, telling him everything, and asking for the balance of his debt. Now my father already repented bitterly his leniency towards me; here had I been five months in Paris without in the least bettering my position. No doubt he thought that I had nothing to do but present myself at the Institute to carry all before me: win the Prix de Rome, write a successful opera, get the Legion of Honour, and a Government pension, etc., etc.
Instead of this came news of an unpaid debt. It was a blow and naturally reacted on me.
He sent de Pons his six hundred francs, and told me that, if I refused to give up my musical wild-goose chase, I must depend on myself alone, for he would help me no more.
As de Pons was paid, and I had my pupils, I decided to stay in Paris—my life would be no more frugal than heretofore. I was really working very steadily at music. Cherubini, of the orderly mind, knowing I had not gone through the regular Conservatoire mill to get into Lesueur’s class, said I must go into Reicha’s counterpoint class, since that should have preceded the former. This, of course, meant double work.
I had also, most happily, made friends some time before with a young man named Humbert Ferrand—still one of my closest friends—who had written the Francs-Juges libretto for me, and in hot haste I was writing the music.
Both poem and music were refused by the Opera committee and were shelved, with the exception of the overture; I, however, used up the best motifs in other ways. Ferrand also wrote a poem on the Greek Revolution, which at that time fired all our enthusiasm; this too I arranged. It was influenced entirely by Spontini, and was the means of giving my innocence its first shock at contact with the world, and of awakening me rudely to the egotism of even great artists.
Rudolph Kreutzer was then director of the Opera House, where, during Holy Week, some sacred concerts were to be given. Armed with a letter of introduction from Monsieur de Larochefoucauld, Minister of Fine Arts, and with Lesueur’s warm commendations, I hoped to induce Kreutzer to give my scena.
Alas for youthful illusions!
This great artist—author of the Death of Abel, on which I had written him heaven only knows what nonsense some months before—received me most rudely.
“My good friend” (he did not know me in the least), he said shortly, turning his back on me, “we can’t try new things at sacred concerts—no time to work at them. Lesueur knows that perfectly well.”
With a swelling heart I went away.
The following Sunday Lesueur had it out with him in the Chapel Royal, where he was first violin. Turning on my master in a temper, he said:
“Confound it all! If we let in all these young folks, what is to become of us?”
He was at least plain spoken!
Winter came on apace. In working at my opera I had rather neglected my pupils, and my Pont Neuf dining-room, growing cold and damp, was no longer suitable for my feasts of Lucullus.
How should I get warm clothes and firewood? Hardly from my lessons at a franc a piece, since they might stop any day.
Should I write to my father and acknowledge myself beaten, or die of hunger in Paris? Go back to La Côte to vegetate? Never. The mere idea filled me with maddening energy, and I resolved to go abroad to join some orchestra in New York or Mexico, to turn sailor, buccaneer, savage, anything, rather than give in.
I can’t help my nature. It is about as wise to sit on a gunpowder barrel to prevent it exploding as it is to cross my will.
I was nearly at my wits’ end when I heard that the Théâtre des Nouveautés was being opened for vaudeville and comic opera. I tore off to the manager to ask for a flautist’s place in the orchestra. All filled! A chorus singer’s? None left, confound it all! However the manager took my address and promised to let me know if, by any possibility there should be a vacancy. Some days later came a letter saying that I might go and be examined at the Freemason’s Hall, Rue de Grenelle. There I found five or six poor wights in like case with myself, waiting in sickening anxiety—a weaver, a blacksmith, an out-of-work actor and a chorister. The management wanted basses, my voice was nothing but a second-rate baritone; how I prayed that the examiner might have a deaf ear.
The manager appeared with a musician named Michel, who still belongs to the Vaudeville orchestra. His fiddle was to be our only accompaniment.
We began. My rivals sang, in grand style, carefully prepared songs, then came my turn. Our huge manager (appropriately blessed with the name of St Leger) asked what I had brought.
“I? Why nothing.”
“Then what do you mean to sing?”
“Whatever you like. Haven’t you a score, some singing exercise, anything?”
“No. And besides”—with resigned contempt—“I don’t suppose you could sing at sight if we had.”
“Excuse me, I will sing at sight anything you give me.”
“Well, since we have no music, do you know anything by heart?”
“Yes. I know the Danaïdes, Stratonice, the Vestal, Œdipus, the two Iphigenias, Orpheus, Armida——”
“There, that will do! That will do! what a devil of a memory you must have! Since you are such a prodigy, give us “Elle m’a prodigué” from Sacchini’s Œdipus. Can you accompany him, Michel?”
“Certainly. In what key?”
“E flat. Do you want the recitative too?”
“Yes. Let’s have it all.”
And the glorious melody: