But this was accomplished at a price.  Madame Carvalho told me about it herself.  Her medium register was weak and Duprez undertook to substitute chest tones and develop clearness as much as possible.  “When I began to work,” she said, “my mother was frightened.  One would have thought that a calf was being killed in the house.”

Ordinarily such a method would produce a harsh, shaky voice and all freshness would be lost.  But in Madame Carvalho’s case the opposite was true.  The freshness and purity of her voice were beyond compare, while its smoothness and the harmony of the registers were perfect.  It was a miracle the like of which we shall probably never see again.

But if Duprez made a wonderful voice at the risk of breaking it, I have always thought that Madame Carvalho owed her admirable diction, so distinguishing a mark of her talent, to Delsarte.  Delsarte was a disastrous and deadly teacher of singing.  No voice could stand up under his methods, not even his own, although he attributed its loss to teaching at the Conservatoire.  But he studied deeply the arts of speaking and gesture, and he was a past master in them.

I once attended a course he gave in these subjects.  He stated highly illuminating truths and gave the psychological reasons for accents and the physiological reasons for the gestures.  He determined the use of gestures in some sort of scientific way.  Mystic fancies were mixed up in these questions.

It was extremely interesting to see him dissect one of Fontaine’s fables or a passage from Racine, and to hear him explain why the accent should be on such a word or on such a syllable and not on another, to bring out the sense.  Although this course was so instructive, few took it, for Delsarte was almost unknown to people.  His influence scarcely extended outside a narrow circle of admirers, but the quality made up for the quantity.  This was the circle of the old Debats, which was formerly devoted exclusively to Romanticism, but at this time to the classics—­the set headed by Ingres in painting and Reber in music.  Theirs was a secluded and ascetic world in silent revolt against the abominations of the century.  One had to hear the tone of devotion in which the members of this circle spoke of the ancients to appreciate their attitude.  Nothing in our day can give any idea of them.  “They say,” one of the devotees once told me, “that the ancients learned Beauty through a sort of revelation, and Beauty has steadily degenerated ever since.”

Such false notions were, however, professed by the most sincere people who were deeply devoted to art.  So this group, which had no influence on their own contemporaries, nevertheless, without knowing it or wishing to do so, played a useful role.

As we know, the public was divided into two camps.  On one side were the partisans of Melody, opera-comique, the Italians, and, with some effort, of grand opera.  Opposed to them were the partisans of music in the grand style—­Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Sebastian Bach, although he was little known and is less well known now.