The sacrifice of all the pleasures of life did not in the least embitter or disturb him. On the contrary, he made light of his poverty, and at no time of his life was he so cheerful and serene as now. In a small room, which only held a bed and a writing-table, he started bravely on his new, laborious existence, and there he spent many a night in arduous work. IV Laroche gives the following account of the years Tchaikovsky spent at the Conservatoire of St. Petersburg:-- “At the Conservatoire, founded by Anton Rubinstein in 1861, under the patronage of the Grand-Duchess Helen, the curriculum consisted of the following subjects: Choral Singing (Lomakin and Dütsch), Solo Singing (Frau Nissen-Soloman), Pianoforte (Leschetitzky and Beggrov), Violin (Wieniawsky), Violoncello (Schuberth), and Composition (Zaremba). Of all these subjects Tchaikovsky studied the last only. “Nicholas Ivanovich Zaremba was then forty years of age. A Pole by birth, he had studied law at the University of St. Petersburg, and had been a clerk in one of the Government offices.... Music--especially composition--he had studied in Berlin under the celebrated theorist Marx, whom he almost worshipped. As a composer, Zaremba is not known to me. Never once, either in class or during his private lessons, did he say so much as a word about his own compositions. Only on one occasion he invited Peter Ilich to his house and, when they were alone together, showed him the manuscript of a string quartet of his own. The following day Peter Ilich told me the work was ‘very nice, in the style of Haydn.’ “Zaremba had many of the qualities of an ideal teacher. Although, if I am not mistaken, teaching was somewhat new to him, he appeared fully equipped, with a course mapped out to the smallest details, firm in his æsthetic views, and inventive in illustrating his subject.... As became an out-and-out follower of Marx, Zaremba was a progressive liberal as regards music, believed in Beethoven (particularly in his latest period), detested the bondage of the schools, and was more disposed to leave his pupils to themselves than to restrict and hamper them with excessive severity. He taught on Marx’s method, with one deviation: he followed up his harmony course by one on strict counterpoint, using a text book of Heinrich Bellermann’s. I do not think, however, that he taught this on his own initiative, but possibly at Rubinstein’s expressed wish.