the concerto, which had already been heard at Pleyel’s rooms, and had there obtained a brilliant success.  On this occasion it was not so well received, a fact which, no doubt, must be attributed to the instrumentation, which is lacking in lightness, and to the small volume of tone which M. Chopin draws from the piano.  However, it appears to us that the music of this artist will gain in the public opinion when it becomes better known. [Footnote:  From the “Revue musicale.”]

The great attraction of the evening was not Chopin, but Brod, who “enraptured” the audience.  Indeed, there were few virtuosos who were as great favourites as this oboe-player; his name was absent from the programme of hardly any concert of note.

In passing we will note some other musical events of interest which occurred about the same time that Chopin made his debut.  On March 18 Mendelssohn played Beethoven’s G major Concerto with great success at one of the Conservatoire concerts, [footnote:  It was the first performance of this work in Paris.] the younger master’s overture to the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” had been heard and well received at the same institution in the preceding month, and somewhat later his “Reformation Symphony” was rehearsed, but laid aside.  In the middle of March Paganini, who had lately arrived, gave the first of a series of concerts, with what success it is unnecessary to say.  Of Chopin’s intercourse with Zimmermann, the distinguished pianoforte-professor at the Conservatoire, and his family we learn from M. Marmontel, who was introduced to Chopin and Liszt, and heard them play in 1832 at one of his master’s brilliant musical fetes, and gives a charming description of the more social and intimate parties at which Chopin seems to have been occasionally present.

Madame Zimmermann and her daughters did the honours to a great number of artists.  Charades were acted; the forfeits that were given, and the rebuses that were not guessed, had to be redeemed by penances varying according to the nature of the guilty ones.  Gautier, Dumas, and Musset were condemned to recite their last poem.  Liszt or Chopin had to improvise on a given theme, Mesdames Viardot, Falcon, and Euggnie Garcia had also to discharge their melodic debts, and I myself remember having paid many a forfeit.

The preceding chapter and the foregoing part of this chapter set forth the most important facts of Chopin’s social and artistic life in his early Paris days.  The following extract from a letter of his to Titus Woyciechowski, dated December 25, 1831, reveals to us something of his inward life, the gloom of which contrasts violently with the outward brightness:—­