When I got back to Paris in February, I learned with the keenest emotion that my master Ambroise Thomas was dangerously ill.
Although far from well he had dared the cold to attend a festival at the Opéra where they had played the whole of that terrible, superb prelude to Françoise de Rimini.
They encored the prelude and applauded Ambroise Thomas.
My master was the more moved by this reception, as he had not forgotten how cruelly severe they had shown themselves toward this fine work at the Opéra.
He went from the theater to the apartment he occupied at the Conservatoire and went to bed. He never got up again.
The sky was clear and cloudless that day, and the sun shone with its softest brilliance in my venerated master's room and caressed the curtains of his bed of pain. The last words he said were a salutation to gladsome nature which smiled upon him for the last time. "To die in weather so beautiful," he said, and that was all.
He laid in state in the columned vestibule of which I have spoken, at the foot of the great staircase leading to the president's loge which he had honored with his presence for twenty-five years.
The third day after his death, I delivered his funeral oration in the name of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. I began as follows.
"It is said that a king of France in the presence of the body of a powerful seigneur of his court could not help saying, 'How tall he was!' So he who rests here before us seemed tall to us, being of those whose height is only realized after death.
"To see him pass in life so simple and calm, in his dream of art, who of us, accustomed to feel him kindly and forbearing always at our sides, has seen that he was so tall that we had to raise our eyes to look him fairly in the face."