I was twenty when M. and Mme. Viardot introduced me to Rossini. He invited me to his small evening receptions and received me with his usual rather meaningless cordiality. At the end of a month, when he found that I asked to be heard neither as a pianist nor as a composer, he changed his attitude. "Come and see me tomorrow morning," he said. "We can talk then." I was quick to respond to this flattering invitation and I found a very different Rossini from the one of the evening. He was intensely interested in and open-minded to ideas, which, if they were not advanced, were at least broad and noble. He gave proof of this when Liszt's famous _Messe_ was performed for the first time at St. Eustache. He went to its defense in the face of an almost unanimous opposition. He said to me one day, "You have written a duet for a flute and clarinet for Dorus and Leroy. Won't you ask them to play it at one of my evenings?" The two great artists did not have to be urged. Then an unheard of thing happened. As he never had a written programme on such occasions, Rossini managed so that they believed that the duet was his own. It is easy to imagine the success of the piece under these conditions. When the encore was over, Rossini took me to the dining-room and made me sit near him, holding me by the hand so that I could not get away. A procession of fawning admirers passed in front of him. Ah! Master! What a masterpiece! Marvellous! And when the victim had exhausted the resources of the language in praise, Rossini replied, quietly: "I agree with you. But the duet wasn't mine; it was written by this gentleman." Such kindness combined with such ingenuity tells more about the great man than many volumes of commentaries. For Rossini was a great man. The young people of to-day are in no position to judge his works, which were written, as he said himself, for singers and a public who no longer exist. "I am criticised," he said one day, "for the great _crescendo_ in my works. But if I hadn't put the _crescendo_ into my works, they would never have been played at the Opera." In our day the public are slaves. I have read in the programme of one house, "All marks of approbation will be severely repressed." Formerly, especially in Italy, the public was master and its taste law. As it came before the lights were up, a great overture with a _crescendo_ was as necessary as cavatinas, duets and ensembles: they came to hear the singers and not to be present at an opera. In many of his works, especially in _Otello_, Rossini made a great step forward towards realism in opera. In _Moise_ and _Le Siege de Corinthe_ (not to mention _Guillaume Tell_) he rose to heights which have not been surpassed in spite of the poverty of the means at his disposal. As Victor Hugo has victoriously demonstrated, such poverty is no obstacle to genius and wealth in them is only an advantage to mediocrity.