One of J. F. Gounod’s friends has written the following lines concerning him: “M. Gounod has made a reputation in engraving. He has produced little and his income could scarcely have been enough to suffice him. Nevertheless, he liked to work and engraving offered him the quiet and deliberation which suited his disposition. In general he spoke but little. When he was obliged to quit the Louvre, he was quite helpless in regard to the great confusion which always characterized his apartment; it was one mass of books, pasteboard, drawings and articles of all sorts scattered about, including a dismembered skeleton, whose bones were all pretty effectually separated from each other. Fortunately one of his cousins undertook to transfer for him everything that was transferable, otherwise Gounod would have abandoned all. He concluded to marry, for it was absolutely necessary that somebody should aid him in finding himself again. He was, nevertheless, a good and excellent man. His wife was charming, a very good musician, and it was she who educated her son. He was getting along in years when he married, and at his death this son was still very young.” Very young indeed, for the future author of “Faust,” “Roméo et Juliette” and “Mireille,” Charles Gounod, was scarcely five years old when he lost his father, whom he had not learned to know. Like Hérold, like Adam, like Halévy, Charles Gounod was born at Paris, where he first saw the light June 17, 1818. His mother, a woman of fine character and high intelligence, neglected nothing that could contribute to his literary and artistic education. She was his first music teacher. He began very young to feel an intense love for this art, which he was to make illustrious. A pupil of the Saint Louis lyceum, he was already an excellent pianist while still pursuing his classical studies at this establishment, and before completing these studies he took up a course of harmony with the famous theoretician, Reicha. He took the degree of bachelor when he was little more than sixteen years old, and was admitted to the Conservatoire in the class of counterpoint and fugue directed by Halévy, and soon after in the composition class of Lesueur, one of the greatest masters that ever glorified the French school. In the following year Gounod took part in the concours of the Institute for the “Prix de Rome,” and carried off without opposition a second grand prize. He was thus exempted from the military service, since the rules of the “Concours de Rome” established at that time this exemption for any pupil having obtained a prize before the age of twenty. This was in 1837, and Gounod was only nineteen.