Part 2

Indulgent as my father was over my work, yet, for a long while, he was unable to make me love the classics. It seemed impossible to me to concentrate my thoughts long enough to learn by heart a few lines of Horace and Virgil; impatient of the beaten track my wayward mind flew off to the entrancing unknown world of the atlas, roving gaily through the labyrinth of islands, capes, and straits of the Pacific and the Indian Archipelago. This was the origin of my love for travel and adventure.

My father truly said of me:

“He knows every isle of the South Seas, but cannot tell me how many departments there are in France!”

Every book of travel in the library was pressed into my service, and I should most certainly have run away to sea if we had lived in a seaport. My son inherits my taste. He chose the navy for his profession long ere he saw the sea. May he do honour to his choice!

However, in the end the love of poetry and appreciation of its beauty awoke in me. The first spark of passion that fired my heart and imagination was kindled by Virgil’s magnificent epic, and I well remember how my voice broke as I tried to construe aloud the fourth book of the Æneid. One day, stumbling along, I came to the passage where Dido--the presents of Æneas heaped around her--gives up her life upon the funeral pyre; the agony of the dying queen, the cries of her sister, her nurse, her women; the horror of that scene that struck pity even to the hearts of the Immortals, all rose so vividly before me that my lips trembled, my words came more and more indistinctly, and at the line--

“Quæsivit cœlo lucem ingemuitque reperta,”

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.

II

ESTELLE

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_.

III

MUSIC AND ANATOMY

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.

“I am going to leave forever This dear land and my sweet love, So alas! must fond hearts sever, As my tears and grief do prove! River, that has served so gaily To reflect her lovely face, Stop your course to tell her, daily, I no more shall see this place!”

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.

IV

PARIS

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.