"[53]
[Footnote 51: "I have only blank walls before my windows. On the side of
the street a pug dog has been barking for an hour, a parrot screaming,
and a parroqueet imitating the chirp of sparrows. On the side of the
yard the washerwomen are singing, and another parroqueet cries
incessantly, 'Shoulder arrms!' How long the day is!"
"The maddening noise of carriages shakes the silence of the night. Paris
wet and muddy! Parisian Paris! Now everything is quiet ... she is
sleeping the sleep of the unjust" (Written to Ferrand, _Lettres
intimes_, pp. 269 and 302).]
[Footnote 52: He used to say that nothing would remain of his work; that
he had deceived himself; and that he would have liked to burn his
scores.]
[Footnote 53: Blaze de Bury met him one autumn evening, on the quay,
just before his death, as he was returning from the Institute. "His face
was pale, his figure wasted and bent, and his expression dejected and
nervous; one might have taken him for a walking shadow. Even his eyes,
those large round hazel eyes, had extinguished their fire. For a second
he clasped my hand in his own thin, lifeless one, and repeated, in a
voice that was hardly more than a whisper, Aeschylus's words: 'Oh, this
life of man! When he is happy a shadow is enough to disturb him; and
when he is unhappy his trouble may be wiped away, as with a wet sponge,
and all is forgotten'" (_Musiciens d'hier et d'aujourd'hui_).
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