While my aunt had had a remarkable education, my mother had not been so widely taught.  But she made up for any lack by the display of an imagination and an eager power of assimilation which bordered on the miraculous.  She often told me about an uncle who was very fond of her—­he had been ruined in the cause of Philippe Egalite.  This uncle was an artist, but he was, nevertheless, passionately fond of music.  He had even built with his own hands a concert organ on which he used to play.  My mother used to sit between his knees and, while he amused himself by running his fingers through her splendid black hair, he would talk to her about art, music, painting—­beauty in every form.  So she got it into her head that if she ever had sons of her own, the first should be a musician, the second a painter, and the third a sculptor.  As a result, when I came home from the nurse, she was not greatly surprised that I began to listen to every noise and to every sound; that I made the doors creak, and would plant myself in front of the clocks to hear them strike.  My special delight was the music of the tea-kettle—­a large one which was hung before the fire in the drawing-room every morning.  Seated nearby on a small stool, I used to wait with a lively curiosity for the first murmurs of its gentle and variegated crescendo, and the appearance of a microscopic oboe which gradually increased its song until it was silenced by the kettle boiling.  Berlioz must have heard that oboe as well as I, for I rediscovered it in the “Ride to Hell” in his La Damnation de Faust.

At the same time I was learning to read.  When I was two-years-and-a-half old, they placed me in front of a small piano which had not been opened for several years.  Instead of drumming at random as most children of that age would have done, I struck the notes one after another, going on only when the sound of the previous note had died away.  My great-aunt taught me the names of the notes and got a tuner to put the piano in order.  While the tuning was going on, I was playing in the next room, and they were utterly astonished when I named the notes as they were sounded.  I was not told all these details—­I remember them perfectly.

I was taught by Le Carpentier’s method and I finished it in a month.  They couldn’t let a little monkey like that work away at the piano, and I cried like a lost soul when they closed the instrument.  Then they left it open and put a small stool in front of it.  From time to time I would leave my playthings and climb up to drum out whatever came into my head.  Gradually, my great-aunt, who fortunately had an excellent foundation in music, taught me how to hold my hands properly so that I did not acquire the gross faults which are so difficult to correct later on.  But they did not know what sort of music to give me.  That written especially for children is, as a rule, entirely melody and the part for the left hand is uninteresting.  I refused to learn it.  “The bass doesn’t sing,” I said, in disgust.