eme impressed itself on the memory, so that he dealt a terrific blow
to the purity of prosody. We gradually became so disinterested in this
that by Auber's time scarcely any attention was paid to it. Finally,
Offenbach appeared. He was a German by birth and his musical ideas
naturally rhymed with German in direct contradiction to the French words
to which they applied. This constant bungling passed for originality.
Sometimes it would have been necessary to change the division of a
measure to get a correct melody, as in the song:

Un p'tit bonhomme
Pas plus haut qu'ca.

In such a case we might say that he did wrong for the mere pleasure of
going astray. But popular taste was so corrupted that no one noticed it
and everybody who wrote in the lighter vein fell into the same habits.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Andre Messager for breaking away from this
manner and setting musical phraseology aright. His return to the old
traditions was not the least of the attractions of his delightful
_Veronique_.

But we are wandering far from Gluck and _Orphee_, although not so far
as we might think. In art, as in everything, extremes meet, and there
are all kinds of tastes.

CHAPTER XVI

DELSARTE

Felix Duquesnal in one of his brilliant articles has written something
about Delsarte, the singer, in connection with his controversy with
Madame Carvalho. The cause of this controversy was the lessons she took
from him. The name of Delsarte should never be forgotten, as I shall try
to explain. Madame Carvalho did not refuse to pay Delsarte for her
lessons, but she did not want to be called his pupil. Although she had
attended the Conservatoire, she wanted to be known solely as a pupil of
Duprez. As a matter of fact it was Duprez who knew how to make the
"Little Miolan," the delightful warbler, into the great singer with her
important place on the French stage.

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