A glance at the Salon of 1831 will suffice to give us an idea of the then state of the pictorial art in France.  The pictures which attracted the visitors most were:  Delacroix’s “Goddess of Liberty on the barricades”; Delaroche’s “Richelieu conveying Cinq-Mars and De Thou to Lyons,” “Mazarin on his death-bed,” “The sons of Edward in the Tower,” and “Cromwell beside the coffin of diaries I.”; Ary Scheffer’s “Faust and Margaret,” “Leonore,” “Talleyrand,” “Henri iv.,” and “Louis Philippe”; Robert’s “Pifferari,” “Burial,” and “Mowers”; Horace Vernet’s “Judith,” “Capture of the Princes Conde,” “Conti, and Longueville,” “Camille Desmoulins,” and “Pius viii” To enumerate only a few more of the most important exhibitors I shall yet mention Decamps, Lessore, Schnetz, Judin, and Isabey.  The dry list will no doubt conjure up in the minds of many of my readers vivid reproductions of the masterpieces mentioned or suggested by the names of the artists.

Romanticism had not invaded music to the same extent as the literary and pictorial arts.  Berlioz is the only French composer who can be called in the fullest sense of the word a romanticist, and whose genius entitles him to a position in his art similar to those occupied by V. Hugo and Delacroix in literature and painting.  But in 1831 his works were as yet few in number and little known.  Having in the preceding year obtained the prix de Rome, he was absent from Paris till the latter part of 1832, when he began to draw upon himself the attention, if not the admiration, of the public by the concerts in which he produced his startlingly original works.  Among the foreign musicians residing in the French capital there were many who had adopted the principles of romanticism, but none of them was so thoroughly imbued with its spirit as Liszt—­witness his subsequent publications.  But although there were few French composers who, strictly speaking, could be designated romanticists, it would be difficult to find among the younger men one who had not more or less been affected by the intellectual atmosphere.

An opera, “La Marquise de Brinvilliers,” produced in 1831 at the Opera-Comique, introduces to us no less than nine dramatic composers, the libretto of Scribe and Castil-Blaze being set to music by Cherubini, Auber, Batton, Berton, Boieldieu, Blangini, Carafa, Herold, and Paer. [Footnote:  Chopin makes a mistake, leaving out of account Boieldieu, when he says in speaking of “La Marquise de Brinvilliers” that the opera was composed by eight composers.] Cherubini, who towers above all of them, was indeed the high-priest of the art, the grand-master of the craft.  Although the Nestor of composers, none equalled him in manly vigour and perennial youth.  When seventy-six years of age (in 1836) he composed his fine Requiem in D minor for three-part male chorus, and in the following year a string quartet and quintet.  Of his younger colleagues so favourable an account cannot be given.