Delsarte received no very regular musical education from Father Bambini.  The lesson was often given while the teacher was shaving, which did not distract the attention of either party.  The master, having no hand at liberty to hold a book, made his pupil explain all the exercises aloud, sing every composition, and read at sight the authors with whom he wished him to be familiar.  Great progress can be made where there is such mutual good will.  They had faith in each other:  the child, because he saw that his master really loved his art; the old musician, because he realized that his scholar had a genuine vocation and would be a great artist.

One evening they were walking together in the Champs Elysees.  Carriages rolled by filled with fashionable people.  The humble pedestrians were surrounded by luxury.  Suddenly Father Bambini turned toward his scholar: 

“You see,” said he, “all these people who have their carriages, their liveried lackeys and their fine clothes; well, the day will come when they will be only too glad to hear you, and they will envy you because you are so great a singer.”

The child was deeply moved; not by this promise of future glory; not by the thought, that by fame he should gain wealth; but he seemed to see his dream realized in a remote future.  That dream was the complete mastery of his art; it was his ideal attained, or closely approached.  This mode of feeling already justified the prediction.

Delsarte retained a grateful memory of another teacher.  M. Deshayes, he said, spurred him on to scientific discovery, as Bambini directed his attention and his taste to the works of the great masters.

One day, as the young man was studying a certain role, M. Deshayes, busily talking with some one else and not even glancing toward his pupil, exclaimed: 

“Your gesture is incorrect!”

When they were alone Delsarte expressed his astonishment.

“You said my gesture was incorrect,” he exclaimed, “and you could not see me.”

“I knew it by your mode of singing.”

This explanation set the young disciple’s brain in a whirl.  Were there, then, affinities, a necessary concordance between the gesture and the inflections of the voice?  And, from this slight landmark, he set to work, searching, comparing, verifying the principle by the effects, and vice versa.

He gave himself with such vigor to the task that, from this hint, he succeeded little by little in establishing the basis of his system of aesthetics and its complete development.

After these beginnings, which Delsarte considered as a favorable initiation, Father Bambini—­his faithful patron—­thought that he required a more thorough musical education, and chose the Conservatory school.  There, that broad and impulsive spirit in its independence ran counter to classic paths, to rigid processes; there, that exceptional nature, that potent personality, which was already a marked