“’Now, listen, and bear my lesson well in mind:  there is but one proper way of reciting those lines, do you hear? There is but one way, and this is it.’

“Here, my professor took a pensive attitude:  then, as if crushed by the weight of some melancholy memory, he cast slowly around him a look in which the bitterness of a deep disappointment was painted.  He heaved a sigh, raised his eyes to heaven, still keeping his head bent, and began in a grave, muffled and sustained voice: 

    “‘Nor gold nor greatness....’

“‘See,’ said my master, ’with what art I manage to create a pathetic situation out of those lines!  That is what you should imitate!’

“’Ah! my dear master, you are right; that is the only reading worthy of that masterpiece.  Heavens, how beautiful!’ I said to myself; ’decidedly, my noble teacher and my natural teacher understood nothing about this work.  What an effect I shall make to-morrow at my fourth professor’s class!’

“Alas! a fresh disappointment awaited me at the hands of my fourth master.  He was, perhaps, even more pitiless than the others to all the meanings that I strove to express.

“‘Why, my poor boy,’ said he, ’where the deuce did you hunt up such meanings?’ What a sepulchral tone!  What is the meaning of that cavernous voice?  And why that mournful dumb show?  Heaven forgive me! it is melodrama that you offer us! you have done no great thing.  You have completely crippled poor La Fontaine.’

“‘Alas! alas!’ said I to myself, ’is my dramatic teacher as absurd as the other two?’”

After the three preceding imitations, just as the audience had reached the height of merriment, the story-teller stopped.

“I will excuse you, gentlemen, from the reasonings of my fourth professor, for I do not wish to prolong my discourse indefinitely.”

If this retreat was an orator’s artifice—­which may well be,—­it was a complete success.

There was a shout:  “The fourth! the fourth!”

“Well, gentlemen, the fourth, like the other three, claimed that his was the only correct style:  I made no distinction between verse and prose, thus following the false method recently established by the Theatre-Francais.  To his mind the cadence of the verse and the euphonic charm should outweigh every other interest.  The pauses which I made destroyed its measure.  I had no idea of caesura, my gestures destroyed its harmony, etc., etc.  His pedagogic manner had nothing in common with that of his brethren.”

This episode was not a mere witticism on Delsarte’s part; he intended it to prove his constant assertion—­and with persistent right,—­that previous to his discovery, art, destitute of law and of science, had had none but chance successes.

Delsarte closed this session by a summary of the law and the science which I have set forth in this book; but I must say it was at this moment especially that he seemed anxious that his religious convictions should profit by his artistic wealth; all outside the sphere of rational demonstration is treated from a lofty standpoint, it is true, and is freed from the commonplaceness of the letter, but we can recognize none but a poetic and literary merit in it.