Yet, though the skill be lacking, goodwill and sincerity I may at least claim to bring with me in full measure to my labour of love. It is no mixture of Fact and Fiction I would here compile, nothing but the simple, unadorned Truth, things I have myself seen and heard. Not that I would have these pages resemble memoirs, in the ordinary sense of the word, for what are memoirs at the best but a superior sort of gossip--when they are not, that is to say, simply gossip of a despicable kind! No mysteries will be here unveiled, no scandalous secrets dragged to light. I do but propose to draw back the curtain from before the picture-gallery within whose sacred precincts I have until now allowed no other footsteps than my own to stray, so that all who will may render homage with me to the moral and intellectual value of the lives these portraits strive to commemorate. CHAPTER I CLARA SCHUMANN It is but fitting and natural that I should open with this revered name the series of my reminiscences, as my childish recollections hardly go further back than the date of the first time I heard her, when I was only eight years old, at my very first concert in Bonn. That was so great an event in my life, and I was so impatient for the evening to come, that I hardly know how I got through the whole day that preceded it. Seldom has any day since appeared so interminably long. Still, the evening did come at last, and I remember accompanying my mother to the concert-room, into which she was wheeled in her invalid-chair, for, although still quite young, she had been for many years in ill-health and unable to walk. But whether I walked by her side, or how I got there, I no longer know, for I have only a sort of confused recollection of having been brought there without any effort on my own part, as though I had been borne thither on wings! My first concert! My heart still beats loud when I think of it.