“Not I,” he answered; “have I not heard Dérivis and Madame Branchu thirty-four times as Danaüs and Hypermnestra?”
“O-o-oh!” and we fell upon each other’s neck.
“I know Dérivis,” said the other man.
“And I Madame Branchu.”
“Lucky fellows!” I said. “But how is it that, since you are not professional musicians, you have not caught Rossini fever and turned your backs on nature and common sense?”
“Well, I suppose it is because, being used to seeking all that is grandest and best in nature for our pictures, we recognise the same spirit in Gluck and Salieri, and so turn our backs on fashionable music.”
“Blessed people! Such as they are alone worthy of being allowed to listen to Iphigenia!”
Again my parents returned to the charge, telling me to choose my profession, since I refused to be a doctor. Again I replied that I could and would only be a musician and must return to Paris to study.
“Never,” said my father, “you may give up that idea at once.”
I was crushed; with paralysed brain I sank into a torpor from which nothing roused me. I neither ate nor spoke nor answered when spoken to, but spent part of the day wandering in the woods and fields and the rest shut up in my own room. I was mentally and morally dying for want of air. Early one morning my father came to my bedside: