He wrote in the preface to his first book of pieces,[18] that in composing he always had a particular subject before his eyes. This accounts for the titles affixed to most of his pieces. We have already referred to ‘battle’ pieces of earlier composers, and to Kuhnau’s narratives in music. Couperin’s music is not of the same sort. The majority of his titled pieces are pure music, admirable and charming in themselves. They are seldom copies. They make their appeal, or they are intelligible, not by what they delineate, but by what they express or suggest. The piece as a whole gives an impression, not the special figures or traits of which it is composed. Let us consider a few of many types. Take what have been often called the portraits of court ladies. In these we cannot by any effort of the imagination find likenesses. It would be ludicrous to try. As ladies may differ in temperament from each other, so do these little pieces differ. There is the allemande _L’Auguste_, which is a dignified, somewhat austere dance piece in G minor; another, _La Laborieuse_, in a complicated contrapuntal style unusual with him. There are three sarabandes called _La Majesteuse_, _La Prude_, and _La Lugubre_, impressive, meagre, and profound in turn. These pieces are hardly personal, nor have they peculiar characteristics apart from the spirit which is clear in each of them. Another type of portrait fits its title a little more tangibly. There is _La Mylordine_, in the style of an English jig; _La Diane_, which is built up on the fanfare figure always associated with the hunt; _La Diligente_, full of bustling finger work. _Les Nonnettes_ are blonde and dark, the blondes, oddly enough, in minor, the dark in major. Many others are so purely music, delicate and tender, that the titles seem more to be a gallant tribute to so and so, rather than the names of prototypes in the flesh. _La Manon_, _La Babet_, _La fleurie, ou la tendre Nanette_, _L’Enchanteresse_, _La tendre Fanchon_, and many others are in no way program music; nor can they ever be interpreted as such, since no man can say what charming girl, two centuries dead, may have suggested their illusive features. It is these ‘portraits’ particularly which are Couperin’s own new contribution to the art of music. So individual is the musical life in each one, so special and complete its character, so full of sentiment and poetry, that, small as it is, it may stand alone as a perfect and enduring work of art. It has nothing to do with the suite or with any of the cyclic forms. Here are the first flowers from that branch of music from which later were to grow the nocturnes of Field, the _Moments musicals_ of Schubert, the preludes of Chopin.