[Illustration:  Mme. Pauline Viardot]

She wrote brilliant operettas in collaboration with Tourguenief, but they were never published and were performed only in private.  One anecdote will show her versatility as a composer.  She was a friend of Chopin and Liszt and her tastes were strongly futuristic.  M. Viardot, on the contrary, was a reactionary in music.  He even found Beethoven too advanced.  One day they had a guest who was also a reactionary.  Madame Viardot sang to them a wonderful work with recitative, aria and final allegro, which they praised to the skies.  She had written it expressly for the occasion.  I have read this work and even the cleverest would have been deceived.

But it must not be thought from this that her compositions were mere imitations.  On the contrary they were extremely original.  The only explanation why those that were published have remained unknown and why so many were unpublished is that this admirable artist had a horror of publicity.  She spent half her life in teaching pupils and the world knew nothing about it.

During the Empire the Viardots used to give in their apartment on Thursday evenings really fine musical festivals which my surviving contemporaries still remember.  From the salon in which the famous portrait by Ary Scheffer was hung and which was devoted to ordinary instrumental and vocal music, we went down a short staircase to a gallery filled with valuable paintings, and finally to an exquisite organ, one of Cavaille-Coll’s masterpieces.  In this temple dedicated to music we listened to arias from the oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn.  She had sung them in London, but could not get a hearing for them in the concerts in Paris as they were averse to such vast compositions.  I had the honor to be her regular accompanist both at the organ and the piano.

But this passionate lover of song was an all-round musician.  She played the piano admirably, and when she was among friends she overcame the greatest difficulties.  Before her Thursday audiences, however, she limited herself to chamber music, with a special preference for Henri Reber’s duets for the piano and the violin.  These delicate, artistic works are unknown to the amateurs of to-day.  They seem to prefer to the pure juice of the grape in crystal glasses poisonous potions in cups of gold.  They must have orgies, sumptuous ceilings, a deadly luxury.  They do not understand the poet who sings, "O rus, quando te aspiciam!" They do not appreciate the great distinction of simplicity.  Reber’s muse is not for them.

Madame Viardot was as learned a musician as any one could be and she was among the first subscribers to the complete edition of Sebastian Bach’s works.  We know what an astounding revelation that work was.  Each year brought ten religious cantatas, and each year brought us new surprises in the unexpected variety and impressiveness of the work.  We thought we had known Sebastian Bach, but now we learned how really