Then the wonderful story of the tenor, the pork butcher, who was heard giving out such a volume of sound that the sausages were set in motion above him; he was fed, clothed, and educated on the five francs a day earned in the music hall in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet; and when he made his debut at the Theatre Lyrique, thou wert in the last stage of consumption and too ill to go to hear thy pupil’s success.  He was immediately engaged by Mapleson and taken to America.

I remember thy face, Cabaner; I can see it now—­that long sallow face ending in a brown beard, and the hollow eyes, the meagre arms covered with a silk shirt, contrasting strangely with the rest of the dress.  In all thy privation and poverty, thou didst never forego thy silk shirt.  I remember the paradoxes and the aphorisms, if not the exact words, the glamour and the sentiment of a humour that was all thy own.  Never didst thou laugh; no, not even when in discussing how silence might be rendered in music, thou didst say, with thy extraordinary Pyrenean accent, “Pour rendre le silence en music il me faudrait trois orchestres militaires.” And when I did show thee some poor verses of mine, French verses, for at this time I hated and had partly forgotten my native language—­

“My dear Dayne, you always write about love, the subject is nauseating.”

“So it is, so it is; but after all Baudelaire wrote about love and lovers; his best poem....”

“C’est vrai, mais il s’agissait d’une charogne et cela releve beaucoup la chose.”

I remember, too, a few stray snatches of thy extraordinary music, “music that might be considered by Wagner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not fail to understand;” also thy settings of sonnets where the melody was continued uninterruptedly from the first line to the last; and that still more marvellous feat, thy setting, likewise with unbroken melody, of Villon’s ballade “Les Dames du Temps Jadis;” and that Out-Cabanering of Cabaner, the putting to music of Cros’s “Hareng Saur.”

And why didst thou remain ever poor and unknown?  Because of something too much, or something too little?  Because of something too much! so I think, at least; thy heart was too full of too pure an ideal, too far removed from all possible contagion with the base crowd.

But, Cabaner, thou didst not labour in vain; thy destiny, though obscure, was a valiant and fruitful one; and, as in life, thou didst live for others so now in death thou dost live in others.  Thou wert in an hour of wonder and strange splendour when the last tints and lovelinesses of romance lingered in the deepening west; when out of the clear east rose with a mighty effulgence of colour and lawless light Realism; when showing aloft in the dead pallor of the zenith, like a white flag fluttering faintly, Symbolists and Decadents appeared.  Never before was there so sudden a flux and conflux of artistic desire, such aspiration in