I lived in a fourth-story garret in a little alley—you couldn't call it a street—just off the exterior boulevard. Whether it was the Clichy or the Batignolles doesn't matter very much now. How I lived was another affair—and also an object lesson for the young fellows who go abroad nowadays equipped with money, with clothes, with everything except humility. Judging from my weekly expenses in my native town, I supposed that Paris could not be very much higher in its living. So I took with me $600 in gold, which, partially an inheritance, partially saved and borrowed, was to last me two years. How I expected to get home was one of those things that I dared not reflect upon. Sufficient for the day are the finger exercises thereof! I paid $8 a month—about 40 francs—for my lodgings. Heavens—what a room! It was so small that I undressed and dressed in the hall, always dark, for the reason that my bed, bureau, trunk, and upright piano quite crowded me out of the apartment. I could lie in bed and by reaching out my hands touch the keyboard of the little rattletrap of an instrument. But it was a piano, after all, and at it I could weave my musical dreams.
I forgot to tell you that my eating and drinking did not cut important figures in my scheme of living. I had made up my mind early in my career that tobacco and beer were for millionaires. Coffee was the grand consoler, and with coffee, soup, bread, I managed to get through my work. I ate at a café frequented by cabmen, and for ten cents I was given soup, the meat of the soup—tasteless stuff—bread, and a potato. What more did an ambitious young man want? There were many not so well off as I. I took two meals a day, the first, coffee and milk with a roll. Then I starved until dark for my soup meat. I recall wintry days when I stayed in bed to keep warm, for I never could indulge in the luxury of fire, and with a pillow on my stomach I did my harmony lessons. The pillow, need I add, was to suppress the latent pangs of juvenile appetite. My one sorrow was my washing. With my means, fresh linen was out of the question. A flannel shirt, one; socks at intervals, and a silk handkerchief, my sole luxury, was the full extent of my wardrobe.
When the wet rain splashed my face as I walked the boulevards on the morning of the examination I was not cast down. I had determined to do or die. With a hundred of my sort, both sexes and varying nationality, I was penned up in a room, one door of which opened on the stage of the Conservatory theater. I looked about me. Giggling girls in crumpled white dresses stalked up and down humming their arias, while shabbily dressed mothers gazed admiringly at them. Big boys and little, bad boys and good, slim, fat, stupid, shrewd boys, encircled me, and, as I was mature for my age, joked me about my senile appearance. I had a numbered card in my hand, No. 13, and all those who saw it shuddered, for the French are as stupid as old-time Southern "darkies." Something akin to the expectant feeling of the early Christian martyrs was experienced by all of us as a number was called aloud by a hoarse-voiced Cerberus, and the victim disappeared through the narrow door leading to the lions in the arena. At last, after some squabbling between No. 14 and No. 15, both of whom thought they had precedence over No. 13, I went forth to my fate.
I came out upon a dimly lighted stage which held two grand pianofortes and several chairs. A colorless-looking individual read my card and with marked asperity asked for my music. Frightened, I told him I had brought none. There were murmurings and suppressed laughter in the dim auditorium. There sat the judges—I don't know how many, but one was a woman, and I hated her though I could not see her. She had a disagreeable laugh, and she let it loose when the assistant professor on the platform stumbled over the syllables of my very Teutonic name. I explained that I had memorized a Beethoven sonata, all the Beethoven sonatas, and that was the reason I left my music at home. This explanation was received in chilly silence, though I did not fail to note that it prejudiced the interrogating professor against me. He evidently took me for a superior person, and he then and there mentally proposed to set me down several pegs. I felt, rather than saw, all this in the twinkling of an eye. I sat down to the keyboard and launched forth into Beethoven's first Sonata in F minor, a favorite of mine. Ominous silence broken by the tapping of a nervous lead pencil in the hand of a nervous woman. I got through the movement and then a voice punctuated the stillness.
"Ah, Mozart is so easy! Try something else!" And then I made my second mistake. I arose and, bowing to the invisible one in the gloom, I said: "That, was not Mozart, but Beethoven." There was an explosion of laughter, formidable, brutal. The feminine voice rose above it all in irritating accents.
"Impertinent! And what a silly beard he has!" I sat down in despair, plucking at my fluffy chin-whiskers and wondering if they looked as frivolous as they felt.
Nudged from dismal reverie, I saw the colorless professor with a music book in his hand. He placed it on the piano-desk and mumbled: "Very indifferent. Read this at sight." Puzzled by the miserable light, the still more wretched typography, I peered at the notes as peers a miser at the gold he is soon to lose. No avail. My vision was blurred, my fingers leaden. Suddenly I noticed that, whether through malicious intent or stupid carelessness, the book was upside down. Now, I knew my Bach fugues, if I may say it, backward. Something familiar about the musical text told me that before me, inverted, was the C-sharp Major Prelude in the first book of the Well-tempered Clavichord. Mechanically my fingers began that most delicious and light-hearted of caprices—I did not dare to touch the music—and soon I was rattling through it, all my thoughts three thousand miles away in a little Ohio town. When I had finished I arose in grim silence, took the music, held it toward the chief executioner, and said:
"And upside down!"
There was another outburst, and again that woman's voice was heard:
"What a comedian is this young Yankee!"