Young Louis Gottschalk was much petted in the aristocratic salons of Paris, to which he had admission through his aunts, the Comtesse de Lagrange and the Comtesse de Bourjally.  His remarkable musical gifts, and more especially his talent for improvisation, excited curiosity and admiration, even in a city where the love of musical novelty had been sated by a continual supply of art prodigies.  Young as he was, he wrote at this time not a few charming compositions, which were in after-years occasional features of his concerts.  His delicate constitution succumbed under hard work, and for a while a severe attack of typhoid fever interrupted his studies.  On his recovery, our young artist spent a few months in the Ardennes.  On returning to Paris, he became the pupil of Hector Berlioz, who felt a deep interest in the young American, as an art prodigy from a land of savages in harmony, and devoted himself so assiduously to the study that he declined an invitation from the Spanish queen to become a guest of the court at Madrid.

An amusing incident occurred in a pedestrian trip which he made to the Vosges in 1846.  He had forgotten his passport, and, on arriving at a small town, was arrested by a gendarme and taken before the maire.  The latter official was reading a newspaper containing a notice of his last concert, and through this means he assured the worthy functionary of his identity, and was cordially welcomed to the hospitality of the official residence.

His friend Berlioz, who was ever on the alert to help the American pupil who promised to do him so much credit, arranged a series of concerts for him at the Italian Opera in the winter of 1846-’47, and these proved brilliantly successful, not merely in filling the young artist’s purse, but in augmenting his fast-growing reputation.  Steady labor in study and concert-giving, many of his public performances being for charity, made two years pass swiftly by.  A musical tour through France in 1849 was highly successful, and the young American returned to Paris, loaded down with gifts, and rich in the sense of having justly earned the congratulations which showered on him from all his friends.  A second invitation now came from Spain, and Louis Gottschalk on arriving at Madrid was made a guest at the royal palace.  From the king he received two orders, the diamond cross of Isabella la Catholique and that of Leon d’Holstein, and from the Duke de Montpensier he received a sword of honor.  We are told that at one of the private court concerts Gottschalk played a duet with Don Carlos, the father of the recent pretender to the Spanish throne.