The reproach, therefore, carried no weight.

Delsarte was amused by these exaggerated accusations; in another order of criticisms, it was agreeable to him to hear “that he sang without a voice, as Ingres painted without colors.”  The comparison pleased him, although inexact.

Yes, I say inexact, Delsarte was not without a voice; he had one, on the contrary, of great strength and range; of moving tone; eminently sympathetic; but it was an invalid organ and subject to caprice.  He was not always master of it, and this caused him real suffering.

Let me give you the history of his voice as Madame Delsarte herself lately told it to me.  I must go back to his early days of study and debuts.

Delsarte entered the Conservatory at the age of fourteen.  Too young to endure the fatigue of the regular school-exercises, his voice must have received an injury.  When the singer offered his services at the Opera Comique—–­then Salle Vantadour—­he was told that his voice was hollow, that it had no carrying power.  This was perhaps partly the fault of the building, whose acoustic properties were afterward improved.  However, thanks to the flexibility which his voice retained and his perfect vocalization, the pretended insufficiency was overlooked, and the young tenor was admitted.

His mode of singing pleased the skilled public, and the special abilities of this strong artistic organism—­as I have already observed—­did not pass unnoted.

A dilettante, to whom I mentioned Delsarte long after this time, said:  “What you tell me does not surprise me, I heard him at his first appearance, and he has lingered in my memory as an artist of the greatest promise.  He was more than a singer; he had that nameless quality, which is not taught in any school and which marks a personality; a tone of which nothing, before or since, has given me the least idea.”

The tenor, from the Comic Opera, went to the Ambigu Theatre, and thence to the Varietes, where an attempt was being made to introduce lyric works.  Francois Delsarte’s dramatic career did not, however, last more than two years.  During these various changes—­I cannot give the exact dates—­this artist, on his way to glory, was forced to gain a living by the least aristocratic of occupations.  If he did not go so far as Shakespeare in humility of profession (the English poet was a butcher’s boy), he strangely stooped from that native nobility—­great capacity,—­which must yet have claimed, in his secret soul, its imprescriptible rights.

If this was one more suffering, added to all the rest, it had its good side.  It was, perhaps, the source of the artist’s never failing kindness, of that gracious reception which he never hesitated to bestow on anyone—­from the Princess de Chimay and many other titled lords and ladies, down to Mother Chorre, the neighboring milk-woman, whom he held, he said, “in great esteem and friendship.”