As a rule, while my father was thus absorbed in his book, I would be sprawling flat in the middle of the room, drawing with a white chalk on a black varnished board, my subjects being eyes, noses, and mouths of which my father had drawn me models. I can see it all now, as if it were yesterday, although I could not have been more than four or four and a half. I was so fond of this employment, I recollect, that had my father lived, I make no doubt I should have desired to be a painter rather than a musician; but my mother's profession, and the education she gave me during my early youth, turned the scale for music. Shortly after my father's death, which took place in the house which bore, and still bears, the number 11 in the Place St. André-des-Arts (or rather "des Arcs"), my mother took another, not very far away from our old home. Our new abode was at 20 Rue des Grands Augustins. It is from that flitting that I can date my first real musical impressions. My mother, who nursed me herself, had certainly given me music with her milk. She always sang while she was nursing me, and I can faithfully say I took my first lessons unconsciously, and without being sensible of the necessity so irksome to any child, and so difficult to impress on him, of fixing my attention on the instruction I was receiving. I had acquired a very clear idea of the various intonations, of the musical intervals they represent, and of the elementary forms of modulation. Even before I knew how to use my tongue, my ear appreciated the difference between the major and the minor key. They tell me that hearing some one in the street--some beggar, doubtless--singing a song in a minor key, I asked my mother why he sang "as if he were crying." Thus my ear was thoroughly practised, and I easily held my place, even at that early age, in a Solfeggio class. I might have acted as its teacher. Proud that her little boy should be more than a match for grown-up girls, especially as it was all thanks to her, my mother could not resist the natural temptation to showing off her little pupil before some eminent musical personage. * * * * * In those days there was a musician of the name of Jadin, whose son and grandson both made themselves an honoured name among contemporary painters. Jadin himself was well known as a composer of romances, very popular in their day. He was, if I am not mistaken, accompanist at the well-known Choron School of Religious Music. My mother wrote and asked him to come and pass judgment on my musical abilities. Jadin came--put me in the corner of the room, with my face to the wall (I see that corner now), and sitting down to the piano, improvised a succession of chords and modulations. At each change he would ask, "What key am I playing in?" and I never made a single mistake in all my answers.