My sister was quite a good musician, and sang prettily; and my mother reproached herself, in spite of our poverty, for not giving equal advantages to both her children; so she decided that I also should learn music. But as it had already been discovered that good Mother Nature, so bountiful towards me in other respects, had endowed me with the most discordant of voices imaginable; and as it had been noticed that I had very nimble fingers and was clever with my hands; they elected to make me an instrumentalist only, and chose the violin,--the instrument which a musician does not use to accompany his voice, unless he is afflicted with blindness. As the town of Villers-Cotterets only possessed one teacher there was no difficulty in choosing a professor. This professor's name was Hiraux. Hiraux really deserves a chapter to himself--or rather two. Hiraux--or Old Hiraux, as he was familiarly called by the town--was for all the world a second Hoffmann; with his long, slender figure, his maroon-coloured coat, and his wig, which had a way of always accompanying his hat with each salutation he made. Because of this, in order to avoid such an inconvenience, Hiraux decided not to wear his wig save on Sundays and on great fête days. On ordinary days, the wig was replaced by a black silk cap, which he would pull down violently over his ears whenever his pupils played a wrong note. Now, after considerable reflection upon the matter, and in view of all I saw and heard, I came to the conclusion that Hiraux gave up wearing his wig daily because of the difficulty of applying it to the same purpose as the cap. Consequently, except on fête days and Sundays, he only half saluted anyone; if by salutation it is understood that I mean he uncovered his head, because, when he took off his hat, he still kept on his black silk cap. Moreover, his black silk cap had become an integral part of his person. A score of times did I touch it, as the inhabitants of Lilliput fingered Gulliver's clothes,--to make sure that this adornment was not his own skin,--Hiraux was so good-natured that he permitted me to make this investigation. Under that cap, Hiraux had one of the most emaciated and parchment-like faces I have ever seen--the cleverest and the most mobile, owing to the play of every muscle on it, which seemed to vibrate in unison with his thoughts, even as the strings of his violin or the keys of his pianoforte vibrated under his long, thin, flexible fingers, fingers like those of Paganini. Hiraux had had an adventurous youth; he had been a choir-boy, an organ-blower in a monastery of Piedmontese monks, then a grocer's lad, then a fiddler, then a music-teacher, and finally an organist.