César-Auguste Franck (it was an inapt name for so pacific a being) was born in 1822, at Liége, Belgium. There he made his first musical studies, but went to Paris at fifteen to study in the Conservatory. Though without the precocity of «le petit Saint-Saëns,» he must have been a solid musician at sixteen, for in a test that took place in July, 1838, he transposed a piece at sight down a third, playing it «avec un brio remarquable,» and was awarded the first grand prize of honor at his graduation in 1842. Foregoing the career of a concert pianist, which his father wished him to pursue, «repudiating with horror and disgust,» as one of his biographers has it, «the brilliant noise-making that people long mistook for music,» he turned for a livelihood to that laborious work of teaching which he pursued all the rest of his life with patient fidelity. He seems to have been an almost ideal teacher, long-suffering with the dull pupils, painstaking and generous with the able ones, provoking enthusiasm in all by his contagious love for art and his receptivity to ideas. In a degree that is rare even among the best teachers, he combined endurance and vivacity. Giving, all his life, from eight to ten lessons a day, many of them, even after he had made his reputation, in girls' boarding-schools and _pensions_ of the usual wearisome sort, he yet retained vitality to impart to the best minds of the present generation of French composers. Though after teaching all day, often not returning home until supper-time, he would in the evening give correspondence lessons to pupils in the provinces, and though even the Sundays were filled with his duties as organist and choirmaster, still he often found time to assemble his favorite pupils, and to discuss with them, as if with perfect equals, their exercises and his own works. One of these pupils, M. Vincent d'Indy, has described how «père Franck,» as they called him, would play them his choral compositions, singing all the vocal parts in «a terrible voice;» and how he would sit at the piano, fixing with troubled gaze some offending passage in an exercise, murmuring anxiously, «Je n'aime pas ... Je n'aime pas,» until perhaps it grew to seem permissible, and with his bright smile he could cry a «J'aime!» Thanks to his earnest desire to appreciate whatever was good, controlled as it was by a severely classical taste, he could make his students good workmen and stern critics without paralyzing their individual genius. He was thorough without being rigid, and respected learners as much as he revered the masters. Naturally, the learners, in their turn, felt for their «Pater seraphicus,» as they named him, an almost filial affection. Emmanuel Chabrier, speaking over Franck's grave, in Montrouge Cemetery, voiced the feelings of them all when he said that this was not merely an admirable artist, but «the dear regretted master, the most gentle, modest, and wise. He was the model, he was the example.»