"]
[Footnote 205: Written in a letter to his sister, Nanci, on 3 April,
1850.]
"Well," said Gautier, "what you tell me pleases me very much. I am
like you; I prefer silence to music. I have only just succeeded,
after having lived part of my life with a singer, in being able to
tell good music from bad; but it is all the same to me."[206]
And he added:
"But it is a very curious thing that all other writers of our time
are like this. Balzac hated music. Hugo could not stand it. Even
Lamartine, who himself is like a piano to be hired or sold, holds
it in horror!"
It needed a complete upheaval of the nation--a political and moral
upheaval--to change that frame of mind. Some indication of the change
was making itself felt in the last years of the second Empire. Wagner,
who suffered from the hostility or indifference of the public in 1860,
at the time when _Tannhaeuser_ was performed at the Opera, had already
found, however, a few understanding people in Paris who discerned his
genius and sincerely admired him. The most interesting of the writers
who first began to understand musical emotion is Charles Baudelaire.
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