* * * * *

The greatest benefit I got from my experience with Stamaty was my acquaintance with Maleden, whom he gave me as my teacher in composition.  Maleden was born in Limoges, as his accent always showed.  He was thin and long-haired, a kind and timid soul, but an incomparable teacher.  He had gone to Germany in his youth to study with a certain Gottfried Weber, the inventor of a system which Maleden brought back with him and perfected.  He made it a wonderful tool with which to get to the depths of music—­a light for the darkest corners.  In this system the chords are not considered in and for themselves—­as fifths, sixths, sevenths—­but in relation to the pitch of the scale on which they appear.  The chords acquire different characteristics according to the place they occupy, and, as a result, certain things are explained which are, otherwise, inexplicable.  This method is taught in the Ecole Niedermeuer, but I don’t know that it is taught elsewhere.

Maleden was extremely anxious to become a professor at the Conservatoire.  As the result of powerful influence, Auber was about to sign Maleden’s appointment, when, in his scrupulous honesty, he thought he ought to write and warn him that his method differed entirely from that taught in the institution.  Auber was frightened and Maleden was not admitted.

Our lessons were often very stormy.  From time to time certain questions came up on which I could not agree with him.  He would then take me quietly by the ear, bend my head and hold my ear to the table for a minute or two.  Then, he would ask whether I had changed my mind.  As I had not, he would think it over and very often he would confess that I was right.

“Your childhood,” Gounod once told me, “wasn’t musical.”  He was wrong, for he did not know the many tokens of my childhood.  Many of my attempts are unfinished—­to say nothing of those I destroyed—­but among them are songs, choruses, cantatas, and overtures, none of which will ever see the light.  Oblivion will enshroud these gropings after effect, for they are of no interest to the public.  Among these scribblings I have found some notes written in pencil when I was four.  The date on them leaves no doubt about the time of their production.

CHAPTER II

THE OLD CONSERVATOIRE

I cannot let the old Conservatoire in the Rue Bergere go without paying it a last farewell, for I loved it deeply as we all love the things of our youth.  I loved its antiquity, the utter absence of any modern note, and its atmosphere of other days.  I loved that absurd court with the wailing notes of sopranos and tenors, the rattling of pianos, the blasts of trumpets and trombones, the arpeggios of clarinets, all uniting to form that ultra-polyphone which some of our composers have tried to attain—­but without success.  Above all I loved the memories of my education in music which I obtained in that ridiculous and venerable palace, long since too small for the pupils who thronged there from all parts of the world.