It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that Franck's fellow-men noticed nothing but his short trousers, or that in his high artistic effort he was entirely without sympathy. Few men have been more fortunate in their friends. The love and veneration of his many pupils, and of such men as Chabrier, Pierné, and Fauré, made an atmosphere in which his heart expanded and his ambition grew. One of this group of admirers tells how they would surround him on his return to Paris in the autumn, to ask what he had done, what he had to show. «Vous verrez, repondait-il»--the French alone can render the endearing vanity and _naïveté_ of his reply--«vous verrez, repondait-il en prenant un air mysterieux, vous verrez; je crois que vous serez content.... J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien travaillé.» It was a similarly frank and guileless self-satisfaction that made him apparently unaware of the coldness of his audiences, who were generally puzzled or bored. Happy, as M. d'Indy records, in having given his friends the pleasure of hearing him play his own compositions, in spite of the scanty applause he never failed to bow profoundly. Thus untroubled by the indifference of the crowd, surrounded by a few men who gave him their warm and discriminating admiration, and inspired by a genius peculiarly exalted and disinterested, bent on beauty alone, and superior to petty jealousies, César Franck lived his quiet, fruitful, and happy life. He died at Paris in 1890. The last anecdote we have of him tells of his finding strength, four days before his death, to praise the «Samson et Dalila» of Saint-Saëns, then running at the Théâtre Lyrique. «I see him yet,» says M. Arthur Coquard, «turning towards me his poor suffering face to say vivaciously and even joyfully, in the vibrant tones that his friends know, 'très beau, très beau.'» The words, expressing that pure love of art which animated his whole career, lodge in the mind of one who studies it, together with those other words of his, which none ever had a better right to use, «J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien travaillé.»