As that place, then so delightfully alive, is to-day a desert which has been abandoned for other quarters, I will describe what the place was in which I grew up and lived for so many years.
The room of which I have spoken was reached by a great staircase entered through a vestibule of columns. As one reached the landing he saw two large pictures done by some painter or other of the First Empire. The door opposite opened on a room ornamented by a large mantelpiece and lighted by a glass ceiling in the style of the ancient temples.
The furniture was in the style of Napoleon I.
A door opened into the office of the director of the Conservatoire, a room large enough to hold ten or a dozen people seated about the green cloth table or seated or standing at separate tables. The decoration of the great hall of the Conservatoire was in the Pompeiian style in harmony with the room I have described.
Ambroise Thomas was leaning on the mantelpiece. When he saw me, he smiled joyfully, held out his arms into which I flung myself, and said with an appearance of resignation, delightful at the time, "Accept it; it is the first rung."
"What shall I accept?" I asked.
"What, you don't know? They gave you the cross yesterday?"
Émile Réty, the valued general secretary of the Conservatoire, took the ribbon from his buttonhole and put it in mine, but not without some difficulty. He had to open it with an ink eraser which he found on the jury's table near the president's desk.
That phrase "the first rung," was delightful and profoundly encouraging.
Now, I had only one urgent errand—to see my publisher.