the
Conservatoire. There he attended the elocution classes, and a role was
given to him to learn in which he had to say: "How do you do, Papa
Dugrand!" He had no success with this sentence. Each of his four
professors told him a different way of saying it, and he wondered: "How
is this? Are there, then, no principles to go by?" One day a cousin of
his arrived unexpectedly from the country. "How do you do, my dear
cousin!" And immediately after this warm greeting he ran away from his
cousin, crying, excitedly, "I have it! I have it!" and did not stop
until he got to his room and in front of a looking-glass. What he had
was the right attitude and way to say, "How do you do, Papa Dugrand!"
and this way was diametrically opposed to the instruction his professors
had given him on the subject.

My father spent forty-five years in observing. He was the king of
observers. What remains to us is but one-quarter of all his
observations. My father's method is comprehensive; it can be applied to
the arts, to the sciences. His pupils were orators, painters, sculptors,
comedians, lawyers, doctors, society amateurs.

My father had read in the first chapter of Genesis that God made man in
His image. God is Trinity. Trinity is the criterion of my father.

Raymond Brucker was an old friend of my father's. "What is this method
of your friend Delsarte?" was a question often put to him. "Delsarte's
method," he would reply, "is an orthopedic machine to straighten
crippled intellects."

My father considered man as the principle of all arts. He used three
terms to express man: Life, mind and soul. He would compare man to a
carriage occupied by a traveler. In front sits a coachman, who drives
the horse. The carriage is the body of man; the horse that makes it move
is life; the coachman who drives the horse is the mind; the occupant of
the carriage, who gives orders to the coachman, is the soul. Man feels,
thinks and loves.

My father made use of three terms to express three states: Concentric,
normal and excentric. These he would combine with each other. I will
show you, for example, the three concentric attitudes of the hand: The
concentro-concentric, expressing struggle; the concentro-normal, meaning
power; the concentro-excentric, showing convulsion. [_Illustrates._] In
the same way we have the combinations of the eyes and eyebrows, and,
again, those of the head. The head is concentro-concentric when the eyes
look in the same direction