say a word about music, either then or on a subsequent occasion when I lunched with him at the house of a great friend and admirer, who was a beautiful musician.  I hoped he would play after luncheon.  He was a very old man, and played rarely in those days, but one would have liked to hear him.  Madame M. thought he would perhaps for her, if the party were not too large, and the guests “sympathetic” to him.  I have heard so many artists say it made all the difference to them when they felt the public was with them—­if there were one unsympathetic or criticising face in the mass of people, it was the only face they could distinguish, and it affected them very much.  The piano was engagingly open and music littered about, but he apparently didn’t see it.  He talked politics, and a good deal about pictures with some artists who were present.

[Illustration:  Franz Liszt.]

I did hear him play many years later in London.  We were again lunching together, at the house of a mutual friend, who was not at all musical.  There wasn’t even a piano in the house, but she had one brought in for the occasion.  When I arrived rather early, the day of the party, I found the mistress of the house, aided by Count Hatzfeldt, then German ambassador to England, busily engaged in transforming her drawing-room.  The grand piano, which had been standing well out toward the middle of the room, open, with music on it (I dare say some of Liszt’s own—­but I didn’t have time to examine), was being pushed back into a corner, all the music hidden away, and the instrument covered with photographs, vases of flowers, statuettes, heavy books, all the things one doesn’t habitually put on pianos.  I was quite puzzled, but Hatzfeldt, who was a great friend of Liszt’s and knew all his peculiarities, when consulted by Madame A. as to what she could do to induce Liszt to play, had answered:  “Begin by putting the piano in the furthest, darkest corner of the room, and put all sorts of heavy things on it.  Then he won’t think you have asked him in the hope of hearing him play, and perhaps we can persuade him.”  The arrangements were just finished as the rest of the company arrived.  We were not a large party, and the talk was pleasant enough.  Liszt looked much older, so colourless, his skin like ivory, but he seemed just as animated and interested in everything.  After luncheon, when they were smoking (all of us together, no one went into the smoking-room), he and Hatzfeldt began talking about the Empire and the beautiful fetes at Compiegne, where anybody of any distinction in any branch of art or literature was invited.  Hatzfeldt led the conversation to some evenings when Strauss played his waltzes with an entrain, a sentiment that no one else has ever attained, and to Offenbach and his melodies—­one evening particularly when he had improvised a song for the Empress—­he couldn’t quite remember it.  If there were a piano—­he looked about.  There was none apparently.  “Oh, yes, in a corner,