"Certainly, sir."
"Let me hear you."
Encouraged by the interest manifested in him, the lad sang in a sweet and pure but sad voice the strains just played by the military band. The old man was amazed.
"Who taught you this process?"
"Nobody, sir; found it out myself."
Bambini--for it was the then distinguished, but now almost forgotten, professor--offered to take the boy home with him; and he who had entered the garden of the Tuileries a rag-picker, left it a recognized musician. In the dust of Paris were first written the elements of a system destined to regenerate art. Bambini taught his protégé all he knew, but the pupil soon surpassed the master and became his instructor in turn; for if the one had talent, the other possessed genius.
Bambini predicted the future of Delsarte. One day when they were walking arm-in-arm in the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, the former said: "Do you see all those people in carriages, with their fine liveries and magnificent clothes? Well, the day will come when they will only be too happy to listen to you, proud of your presence in their salons, envying your fame as a great artist."
Bambini's death left Delsarte poor and friendless. At fourteen, however, he managed to get admitted into the Conservatoire, where, though he labored hard, he met with harsh treatment and discouragement. The professors disliked him for his reflective nature and persistent questionings which brought to light the superficiality of their acquirements; his fellow-pupils, for his exclusive devotion to study and his reserve, the result of diffidence rather than of hauteur. His professors were dictators, who, while differing from each other as teachers, were yet united in frowning upon any attempt on the part of their pupil to emancipate himself from the thraldom of conventionalism and routine. Genius was a heresy for which they had no mercy.
Thrown upon his own resources, he soon developed, by careful observation of nature and a constant study of cause and effect, a system and a style radically differing from those of the professors and their servile imitators.
One day, after having sung in his own style at one of the public exhibitions--applauded, however, only by a single auditor,--he was walking sadly and slowly in the court-yard of the Conservatoire, when a lady and a gentleman approached him.