Gustave Dore was also said to be famous on the violin, and his claims to consideration were far from inconsiderable.  He had acquired a valuable instrument, on which he used to play Berlioz’s Concertos with a really extraordinary facility and spirit.  These superficial works were enough for his musical powers.  The surprising things about his execution was that he never worked at it.  If he could not get a thing at once, he gave it up for good and all.

He was a frequent attendant at Rossini’s salon, and he belonged to the faction which supported melody and opposed “learned scientific music.”  His temperament and mine hardly seem compatible, but friendship, like love, has its inexplicable mysteries, and gradually we became the best of friends.  We lived in the same quarter and we visited each other frequently.  As we almost never were of the same opinion about anything, we had interminable arguments, entirely free from rancor, which we thoroughly enjoyed.

I finally became the confidant of his secret sorrows, and his innermost griefs.  He was endowed with a wonderful visual memory, but he made the mistake of never using models, for in his opinion they were useless for an artist who knew his metier.  So he condemned himself to a perpetual approximation, which was enough for illustrations demanding only life and character, but fatal for large canvasses, with half or full sized figures.  This was the cause of his disappointments and failures which he attributed to malevolence and a hostility, which really did exist, but which took advantage of this opportunity to make the painter pay for the exaggerated success of the designer that had been extravagantly praised by the press from the beginning.  He laid himself open to criticism through his abuse of his own facility.  I have seen him painting away on thirty canvasses at the same time in his immense studio.  Three seriously studied pictures would have been worth more.

At heart this great overgrown jovial boy was melancholy and sensitive.  He died young from heart disease, which was aggravated by grief over the death of his mother from whom he had never been separated.

I dedicated a slight piece written for the violin to Dore.  This was not lost as the one to Ingres was, but it would be entirely unknown had not Johannes Wolf, the violinist of queens and empresses, done me the favor of placing it in his repertoire and bringing his fine talent to its aid.

Hebert was the most serious of the painter-violinists.  Down to the end of his life he delighted in playing the sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven, and, from all accounts, he played them remarkably.  I can say this only from hearsay, for I never heard him.  The few times that I ever saw him at home in my youth, I found him with his brush in hand.  I saw him after that only at the Academie, where we sat near each other, and he always greeted me cordially.  We talked music from time to time, and he conversed like a connoisseur.