The surprising energy and versatility shown at the opening of Saint-Saëns's career have proved, in the course of time, to be the salient traits of his typically Gallic nature. He is, to a remarkable degree, the complete Frenchman. He has all the intellectual vivacity, all the nervous force, the quick wit and worldly polish, even the physical swarthiness and the dry keenness of visage, that we associate with his countrymen. M. Georges Servières, in his «La Musique Française Moderne,» gives the following excellent description: «Saint-Saëns is of short stature. His head is extremely original, the features characteristic; a great brow, wide and open, where, between the eyebrows, the energy and the tenacity of the man reveal themselves; hair habitually cut short, and brownish beard turning gray; a nose like an eagle's beak, underlined by two deeply marked wrinkles starting from the nostrils, eyes a little prominent, very mobile, very expressive. The familiars of his Mondays, those who knew the artist before injured health and family sorrows had darkened his character, remember that there was about him then a keen animation, a diabolic mischievousness, a railing irony, and an agility in leaping in talk from one subject to another with a sprightliness of fancy that equaled the mobility of his features, which were animated at one and the same moment by the most contrary expressions; and I could cite as instances of his gay humor many funny anecdotes that he loved to tell, adjusting on his nose the while, with both hands, in a way peculiar to him, his eye-glasses, behind which his eyes sparkled with malice.» Some examples of this railing irony of Saint-Saëns are preserved. There is, for instance, a story of an ambitious woman at one of his «Mondays,» who fairly browbeat him into accompanying her two daughters in a duet. After enduring as long as he could the torture of their timeless and tuneless performance, he turned to the mother with, «_Which_ of your daughters, madam, do you wish me to accompany?» A man of his wit naturally found himself at home in Paris society, and counted among his friends for years such people as the Princess Pauline Metternich, Mme. Viardot-Garcia, and Meissonier, Tourgenieff, and Dumas. A story told in the «Figaro,» of how at Madame Garcia's, where he often played both the organ and the piano, he would pass from improvising «masterly pages» in the contrapuntal style to waltzes for the young people to dance by, illustrates in little that peculiar combination of distinction and gayety, characteristic of Paris, which is the native air of Saint-Saëns.