This is the crowning moment, and I know lots of people who go for nothing but the fun of it.
I do not say this in bitterness of spirit, although, when my turn came, neither father nor mother, nor fiancée[8] were there to congratulate me. My master was ill, my parents estranged, my mistress—ah!
So I only embraced the secretary, and I do not fancy that my “modest blushes” were noticed because, instead of being “newly shorn,” my forehead was buried in a shock of long red hair, which, in conjunction with certain other points in my physiognomy certainly earned me a place in the owl tribe.
Besides, I was not in at all an embrace-inspiring humour that day. Truth obliges me to confess that I was in a howling, rampant rage.
I must go back a little and explain why.
The subject set was the Last Night of Sardanapalus, and it ended with his gathering his most beautiful slaves around him and, with them, mounting the funeral pyre.
I was just going to write a symphonic description of the scene—the cries of the unwilling victims; the king’s proud defiance of the flames, the crash of the falling palace—when I suddenly bethought me that that way lay suicide—since the piano, as usual, would be the only means of interpretation.
I therefore waited and, as soon as the prize was awarded and I knew I could not be deprived of it, I wrote my Conflagration.
At the final orchestral rehearsal it made such a sensation that several of the Academicians came up and congratulated me most warmly, without a trace of pique at the trick I had played upon them. The rumour of it having gone abroad, the hall was packed—for I found I had already made a sort of bizarre reputation.
Not feeling particularly confident in the powers of Grasset, the conductor, I stood close beside him, manuscript in hand, while Madame Malibran, who had been unable to find a seat in the hall, sat on a stool at my elbow between two double-basses. That was the last time I ever saw her.