The following night and day were indescribable. Hell seemed let loose upon me, and I felt that no power on earth should drag me back to that Gehenna. The wildest schemes for evading my horrible fate—each madder than the last—chased each other through my burning brain; but finally, worn out and despairing, I yielded to Robert’s persuasion, and went back to the charnel house.
Strange to say, this time I felt nothing but cold, impersonal disgust, worthy of an old soldier in his fiftieth battle. I actually got to the point of ferretting in some poor dead creature’s chest for scraps of lung to feed the sparrow-ghouls of this unsavoury den, and when Robert said, laughing:
“Hallo! you are getting quite civilised. Giving the birds their meat in due season!”
I retorted: “And filling all things living with plenteousness,” as I threw a blade-bone to a wretched famished rat that sat up watching me with anxious eyes.
Life, however, had some compensations.
Some secret affinity drew me to my anatomy demonstrator, Professor Amussat, probably because he, like myself, was a man of one idea, and was as passionately devoted to his science—medicine—as I to my beloved art, music. His marvellous discoveries have brought him world-wide fame, but, insatiable searcher after truth as he is, he takes no rest. He is a genius, and I am honoured in being allowed to call him friend.
I also enjoyed the chemistry lectures of Gay-Lussac, of Thénard (physics) and, above all, the literature course of Andrieux, whose quiet humour was my delight.
Drifting on in this sort of dumb quiescence, I should probably have gone to swell the disastrous list of commonplace doctors, had I not, one night, gone to the Opera. It was Salieri’s Danaïdes.
The magnificent setting, the blended harmonies of orchestra and chorus, the sympathetic and beautiful voice of Madame Branchu, the rugged force of Dérivis, Hypermnestra’s air—which so vividly recalled Gluck’s style, made familiar to me by the scraps of Orpheus I had found in my father’s library—all this, intensified by the sad and voluptuous dance-music of Spontini, sent me up to fever-pitch of excitement and enthusiasm.
I was like a young man, who, never having seen any boat but the cockle-shells on the mountain tarns of his homeland, is suddenly put on board a great three-decker in the open ocean. I could not sleep, of course, and consequently my next day’s anatomy lesson suffered, and to Robert’s frenzied expostulations I responded with airs from the Danaïdes, humming lustily as I dissected.