Under his cap thrown back on his head the hair shows sparse and thin, his beard is large and tangled, and he smiles through his large, clear eyes. His lips move with the singer, and he sings the song with as much fervor and composure as if he were chanting a Halleluiah.
“Father Music!” ...
He is a fine figure in our society, rich in epic types.
I have seen him near us for some weeks, as much in our echelon as in the company of which he assumes the duties of infirmary orderly. I have learned to know him, and to know him is to love him.
By scraps, by fragments of phrases, for he speaks but little—little of himself, but instead launches out in real flights of declamation about an idea, a poem, a well-known tune, the names of artists—I have been able bit by bit and through deductions almost to reconstruct his life.
He is a quiet man in all his ways, habits and ideas. He lived in the quarter of Saint-Sulpice in an old house in the quiet Rue Madame, and made his living by giving music lessons in the institutions in the neighborhood.
They knew him in the quarter as “Monsieur Placide.” On the appointed days at the same hours he went to the Nuns of the Immaculate Conception, to the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, or to special lessons in the city, without ever wandering far away from the quarter, in the old venerable houses, in the Rues d’Assas and Garancière.
On Sundays he played the organ in a small chapel of the Visitation Sisters.
The people knew little about him through social intercourse, for he never went out, or rarely. In summer he sometimes went to the Tuileries to listen to secular music—and that is all.
When in August, 1914, the notices of mobilization called all able-bodied men to arms, his orders were to join a regiment of Colonial infantry in a fort around Paris.