I never parted with the score; I carried it about with me everywhere, and jotted down in stray notes any idea which I thought might be useful whenever I made an attempt to use the subject for an opera. This I did not attempt until seventeen years afterwards.
However, back to Rome and to the Academy I had to go. Pleasant and seductive as Naples was, I never stopped there for any length of time without wanting to get back to Rome. A kind of home-sickness would seize me, and I would leave without a shadow of regret the spot where I had spent so many happy hours. In point of fact, and in spite of all her splendour and prestige, Naples is a noisy, shrill-voiced town, restless and riotous. Her inhabitants squabble and talk and quarrel and argue from dawn till dark, and from dark till dawn, on those quays of hers, where rest and silence are equally unknown. Wrangling is the normal condition of the Neapolitan. You are fallen upon, besieged, haunted by the indefatigable persecutions of facchini, shopkeepers, drivers, and boatmen, who would think but little of carrying you off by force, and every one of whom offers to serve you for less money than his fellow.[3]
Once back in Rome, I set seriously to work. This was in the autumn of 1840.
In spite of her professional duties, which engaged her on week-days from morn till night, my mother still found time to write to me often and fully. She must frequently have cut short her hours of sleep so as to give me this proof of her constant and tender care. The very length of her letters bore sufficient witness to the amount of time, robbed from her nightly rest, she had devoted to them. I knew she had to rise every morning at five, to be ready for her first pupil, who came at six, and that often her breakfast hour was absorbed by another lesson, during which, instead of a proper meal, she would swallow a bowl of soup, or perhaps take nothing but a crust of bread and a glass of wine and water. I knew her daily round lasted till six o'clock every evening, and that after her dinner she had a hundred and one household duties to attend to. Besides, she had many people to write to as well as me, and, what is more, she was a Dame de Charité, and often worked with her own hands to clothe her poor. Nothing but the complete orderliness and method with which she laid out her time could ever have enabled her to do so much; but those two essential and fundamental qualities, without which life can be neither occupied nor useful, were hers in the highest degree.
But she had quite given up that pestilential habit of "paying visits," which simply means wasting one's time from Monday morning to Saturday night in going to other people's houses and wasting theirs; killing that time, in fact, which kills those who misuse it with sheer weariness.
And so we were brought up on short but pithy maxims, flung to us, as it were, with the brevity of a woman who could not spare time to chatter. "Waste not, want not," and so forth.
A family friend once said to me, "Your mother is not one wonder to me, but two; I cannot conceive how she finds time to do so much, or all the money she gives away." I know well enough how she found both. In her own good sense and powerful will. The more she had to do, the more she did. Just the converse of Emile Augier's clever saying, which has much the same meaning, "I have been so idle, I haven't had time to do a single thing."
Now and again my dear excellent brother would slip a word of good and friendly advice into my mother's letters to me. I stood much in need of it, for steadiness was never my strong point, I fear; and weakness, uncounterbalanced by good sense, becomes a power for evil. Alas! I know too well how little I profited by all his warnings, and I cry, Mea culpa.
There is a church in the Corso at Rome, called San Luigi dei Francesi, and served by a French canon and priests. Every year, on the 1st of May (the feast of the patron saint of Louis-Philippe), a musical Mass was performed there. The duty of writing the music for the occasion devolved on the Academy musical prize-holder for the previous year. The year I went to Rome, the Mass (with full orchestral accompaniment) was written by my comrade, Georges Bousquet. The following one, it would be my turn. My mother, fearing my other duties at the Academy would not allow me sufficient leisure to compose so important a work, sent me the Mass I had written for St. Eustache. She had copied it herself from my manuscript score, not caring to let that out of her own keeping or risk losing it in the post.
My feelings when this fresh token of my mother's goodness and patience reached me at Rome may easily be imagined. However, I did not do what she suggested, for I considered it my bounden duty, as a conscientious artist, to try and do still better work (no difficult matter, indeed), and I worked on stoutly at the new Mass I had begun composing for the King's fête-day. I finished it in due course, and conducted it myself.