He was obliged to recognise my phenomenal dislike to music, and to tell my poor disappointed mother that it was simply stealing her money to attempt any longer to make a musician of me.
So I gave up the violin.
Poor Hiraux! After his stirring life he now sleeps the peaceful sleep of death in the pretty cemetery of Villers-Cotterets, surrounded by green weeping willows and flowers in full bloom; and, in thinking of that excellent man, gay, sharp-witted, quaint, I am inevitably reminded of Shakespeare's lines wherein Hamlet apostrophises the skull of his father's former fool:—
"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning; quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that."
[CHAPTER IV]
The dog lantern-bearer—Demoustier's epitaph—My first fencing-master—"The king drinks"—The fourth tenor of my life—The tub of honey.
While all these things that we have related were happening, my mother experienced two fresh sorrows, quite as great as her first: she lost both her father and her mother.