Meanwhile Gounod, already haunted by an idea which was long to pursue him, had dreamed of bidding farewell, not to his art, but to the world, and had seriously considered taking ecclesiastic orders. His mind possessed by this fancy, he had, during the latter part of his stay at Rome, left the villa Médécis, where at that time the French school was established, and had retired to the seminary. As soon as he returned to Paris, he entered as precentor the Missions Etrangères, where he wore the long robe and costume of the conventual house, and his resolution seemed thenceforth so certain that it was accepted as an accomplished fact. Indeed a special sheet, the _Revue et Gazette Musicale_, published the following under date of Feb. 15, 1846: “M. Gounod, composer and former winner of the grand Institute prize, has just taken orders.” From this moment, Gounod was called “l’Abbé Gounod,” just as, sixty years before, his master Lesueur was called “l’Abbé Lesueur,” when he became precentor of the Metropolitan church. There was this difference, however, that Lesueur had never desired to become a priest, but according to the usage then in vogue at the Notre Dame church, Paris, he was obliged, in order to fulfill the functions of precentor, to don the priestly garb. Gounod, on the other hand, seemed to have made up his mind to a religious life, since in 1846 a publisher brought out a series of religious choruses entitled “Offices of Holy Week, by the Abbé Charles Gounod.” In his retreat Gounod continued to occupy himself with religious music, and in 1849 he had performed at the Saint Eustache church a grand solemn mass which was very well received. At this moment he seemed absolutely lost to profane art, and as he was brought very little before the public, people began to forget about him, when there appeared in the London Athenæum early in 1851, an article which was immediately republished in the _Revue et Gazette Musicale_ of Paris, and which contained an enthusiastic eulogium on several of Gounod’s compositions recently performed at a concert at St. Martin’s Hall. “This music,” said the writer, “brings before us no other composer ancient or modern, either by the form, the melody or the harmony. It is not new in the sense of being bizarre or whimsical; it is not old, if old means dry and stiff, the bare scaffolding, with no fine construction rising behind it; it is the work of an accomplished artist, it is the poetry of a new poet. * * * * * That the impression produced upon the audience was great and real there can be no doubt, but it is the music itself, not its reception, which to our minds presages for M. Gounod an uncommon career; for if there be not in his works a genius at once true and new, then must we go back to school and relearn the alphabet of the art and of criticism.”