When I arrived at the first floor of the old palace of the Dorias, where he lived, I was able to decipher on a card nailed to the door in a dark passage the name which radiates so many memories of enthusiasm and glory: Verdi. He opened the door himself. I stood nonplussed. His sincerity, graciousness and the nobility which his tall stature gave his whole person soon drew us together. I passed unutterably charming moments in his presence, as we talked with the most delightful simplicity in his bedroom and then on the terrace of his sitting room from which we looked over the port of Genoa and beyond on the deep sea as far as the eye could reach. I had the illusion that he was one of the Dorias proudly showing me his victorious fleets. [Illustration: Lucy Arbell] As I was leaving, I was drawn to remark that "now I had visited him, I was in Italy." As I was about to pick up the valise I had left in a dark corner of the large reception room, where I had noticed tall gilt chairs which were in the Italian taste of the Eighteenth Century, I told him that it contained manuscripts which never left me on my travels. Verdi seized my luggage, briskly, and said he did exactly as I did, for he never wanted to be parted from his work on a journey. How much I would have preferred to have had his music in my valise instead of my own! The master even accompanied me across the garden of his lordly dwelling to my carriage. * * * * * When I got back to Paris in February, I learned with the keenest emotion that my master Ambroise Thomas was dangerously ill. Although far from well he had dared the cold to attend a festival at the Opéra where they had played the whole of that terrible, superb prelude to _Françoise de Rimini_. They encored the prelude and applauded Ambroise Thomas. My master was the more moved by this reception, as he had not forgotten how cruelly severe they had shown themselves toward this fine work at the Opéra. He went from the theater to the apartment he occupied at the Conservatoire and went to bed. He never got up again. The sky was clear and cloudless that day, and the sun shone with its softest brilliance in my venerated master's room and caressed the curtains of his bed of pain. The last words he said were a salutation to gladsome nature which smiled upon him for the last time. "To die in weather so beautiful," he said, and that was all. He laid in state in the columned vestibule of which I have spoken, at the foot of the great staircase leading to the president's loge which he had honored with his presence for twenty-five years. The third day after his death, I delivered his funeral oration in the name of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. I began as follows.