Contents

1. Memories of My Childhood
2. The Old Conservatoire
3. Victor Hugo
4. The History of an Opéra-Comique
5. Louis Gallet
6. History and Mythology in Opera
7. Art for Art’s Sake
8. Popular Science and Art
9. Anarchy in Music
10. The Organ
11. Joseph Haydn and the “Seven Words”
12. The Liszt Centenary at Heidelberg (1912)
13. Berlioz’s Requiem
14. Pauline Viardot
15. Orphee
16. Delsarte
17. Seghers
18. Rossini
19. Jules Massenet
20. Meyerbeer
21. Jacques Offenbach
22. Their Majesties
23. Musical Painters

Illustrations

1. The Master, Camille Saint-Saëns
2. The Paris Opéra
3. The First Performance of Déjanire
4. M. Saint-Saëns in his Later Years
5. The Madeleine where M. Saint-Saëns played the organ for twenty years
6. Hector Berlioz
7. Mme. Pauline Viardot
8. Mme. Patti
9. M. Jules Massenet
10. Meyerbeer, Composer of Les Huguenots
11. Jacques Offenbach
12. Ingres, the painter famous for his violin

Chapter I

In bygone days I was often told that I had two mothers, and, as a matter of fact, I did have two—the mother who gave me life and my maternal great-aunt, Charlotte Masson. The latter came from an old family of lawyers named Gayard and this relationship makes me a descendant of General Delcambre, one of the heroes of the retreat from Russia. His granddaughter married Count Durrieu of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. My great-aunt was born in the provinces in 1781, but she was adopted by a childless aunt and uncle who made their home in Paris. He was a wealthy lawyer and they lived magnificently.

My great-aunt was a precocious child—she walked at nine months—and she became a woman of keen intellect and brilliant attainments. She remembered perfectly the customs of the Ancien Régime, and she enjoyed telling about them, as well as about the Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and the times that followed. Her family was ruined by the Revolution and the slight, frail, young girl undertook to earn her living by giving lessons in French, on the pianoforte—the instrument was a novelty then—in singing, painting, embroidery, in fact in everything she knew and in much that she did not. If she did not know, she learned then and there so that she could teach. Afterwards, she married one of her cousins. As she had no children of her own, she brought one of her nieces from Champagne and adopted her. This niece was my mother, Clemence Collin. The Massons were about to retire from business with a