had lived there, died to preserve the honour of his art. We were therefore close to the scene of a horrible crime, which the magnitude of the events that closely followed it has somewhat obscured in memory. Albéric Magnard, the author of ‘Guercœur’ and other operas, born on June 9, 1865, was one of the most eminent and successful musicians of France. He had for many years possessed a country-seat at Baron, where he had built a little château, Le Manoir des Fontaines, in which he had brought together a collection of musical instruments and books which was famous. We were reading the inscription on the wall, when a door in the latter opened and a sad woman appeared, asking us if we would like to see the place where Monsieur Magnard died. She led us through a pergola of climbing plants to a point where we suddenly saw before us what resembled a scene in some opera—a garden blazing with begonias and African marigolds, surrounded on three sides by a graceful balustrade, and velvety with green sward. Below the balustrade a little park, beautifully kept, testified to the elegant taste of the proprietor. But in the midst of this brilliance and neatness the livid shell of the house itself stood untouched since the disaster, producing in the midst of the bright parterres and trim lawns an extraordinary effect of sinister and ironic horror. It was like seeing a skeleton in a ball-dress, or a wreath of roses round a skull. The good woman, who herself had lost in the fighting her two sons, described to us the murder. A troop of Germans was marching down the road and, attracted by something in the Manoir des Fontaines, they had insisted on being admitted by the door at which we entered. M. Magnard was in his bath-room, at the back of the house. He is believed to have appeared at the window, and a German soldier immediately shot him dead. They then set fire to the house, and they watched it till the half-calcined body of the composer fell through the rafters on to the floor of the room below. Meanwhile, they took his son and tied him, facing the scene of his father’s murder, to the trunk of a tree in the garden, and prepared to shoot him. But three peasants out of the village of Baron swore that he was not the son of M. Magnard, but of the gardener; and so, when their work was done, the Germans went off, leaving the boy alive, to be released by the villagers. The exact conditions under which the famous composer was killed are mysterious, and are likely to remain so, since no French eye witnessed the actual commission of the crime. It is possible that he offered, or appeared likely to offer, some resistance to the aggressors.