Gazing from my window on the dome of St. Peter's in the distance, I readily yielded to the melancholy aroused by my first taste of solitude—though solitude is hardly a word applicable to this palace, where twenty-two of us dwelt, and where we all met at least twice daily at the common board, in that splendid dining-hall, the walls of which are covered with the portraits of every student since the foundation of the Academy. Besides, it was my nature to make friends quickly, and live on excellent terms with those about me.
I must admit, too, that my low spirits were in great part due to my first impressions of Rome itself. I was utterly disappointed. Instead of the city of my dreams, majestic and imposing, full of ancient temples, antique monuments, and picturesque ruins, I saw a mere provincial town, vulgar, characterless, and, in most places, very dirty.
My disenchantment was complete, and it would have required but little persuasion to make me throw up the sponge, pack my traps, and hurry back to Paris and all I cared for as quickly as wheels could take me there. As a matter of fact, Rome does possess all the beauties I had dreamt of, but the eye of a new-comer cannot at first perceive them. They must be sought out, felt for, here and there, until by slow degrees the sleeping glories of the splendid past awake, and the dumb ruins and dry bones arise once more to life before their patient student's eyes.
I was still too young, not only in years, but also and especially in character, to grasp or understand at the first glance the deep significance of the solemn, austere city, whose whisper is so low that only ears accustomed to deep silence and sharpened by seclusion can catch its tones. Rome is the echo of the Scriptural words of the Maker of the human soul to His own handiwork: "I will bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably to her." So various is she in herself, and in such deep calm is everything about her lapped, that no conception of her immense ensemble and prodigious wealth of treasures is possible at first. The Past, the Present, and the Future alike crown her the capital not of Italy only, but of the human race in general. This fact is recognised by all who have lived there long; for whatever the country whence the wanderer comes, whatever tongue he speaks, Rome has a universal language understood by all, so that the thoughtful traveller, leaving her, feels he leaves home behind him.
Little by little I felt my low spirits evaporate and a new feeling take their place. I began to know Rome better, and cast aside the winding-sheet which had enwrapped me, as it were. But even up to this I had not been living in downright idleness.
My favourite amusement was reading Goethe's "Faust," in French of course, as I knew no German. I read too, with great interest, "Lamartine's Poems." Before I began to think about sending home my first batch of work, for which I still had plenty of time before me, I busied myself in composing a number of melodies, among others "Le Vallon" and also "Le Soir," the music of which I incorporated ten years afterwards into a scene in the first act of my opera "Sappho," to the beautiful lines written by my dear friend and famous colleague, Emile Augier, "Héro sur la tour solitaire."
I wrote both these songs at a few days' interval, almost as soon as I arrived at the Villa Medecis.
Six weeks or so slipped away. My eyes had grown accustomed to the silent city, which at first had seemed so like a desert to me. The very silence ended by having its own charm, by becoming an actual pleasure to me; and I took particular delight in roaming about the Forum, the ruins of the Palatine Hill, and the Coliseum, those glorious relics of a power and splendour departed, which have rested now for centuries under the august and peaceful rule of the universal Shepherd, and the Empress city of the world.
A very worthy and pleasant family of the name of Desgoffe was at that time staying with Monsieur and Madame Ingres. I had made their acquaintance, and gradually became very intimate with them. Alexandre Desgoffe was not an Academy student like myself, but a private pupil of Monsieur Ingres, and a very fine landscape painter. Yet he lived in the Academy buildings with his wife and daughter, a charming child of nine, who afterwards became Madame Paul Flandrin, and retained as a wife and mother the sweetness which characterised her girlhood. Desgoffe himself was a man in ten thousand; downright and honest, modest and unselfish, simple and pure-minded as a child, the kindest and most faithful soul on earth. It may easily be guessed that my mother was very glad to learn that I had such good people near me to show me true affection, and not only comfort my loneliness, but, if necessary, give me kind and devoted care.
We students always spent our Sunday evenings in the Director's drawing-room, to which we had the right of entrée on that day. Generally there was music. Monsieur Ingres had taken a fancy to me, and he was music mad. He particularly affected Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and above all Gluck, whose noble style, with its touch of pathos, stamped him in his mind as something of the ancient Greek, a worthy scion of Æschylus, of Sophocles, or Euripides.