My resolve was intensified by the lives of Gluck and Haydn that I read about this time in the “Biographie Universelle.” “How glorious,” I cried, “to live for Art, to spend one’s life in her beautiful service!” and then came a mere trifle which threw open the gates of that paradise for which I had been so blindly groping. As yet I had never seen a full score; all I knew of printed music was a few scraps of solfeggi with figured bass or bits of operas with a piano accompaniment. But one day I stumbled across a piece of paper ruled with twenty-four staves, and, in a flash, I saw the splendid scope this would give for all kinds of combinations. “What orchestration I might get with that!” I said, and from that minute my music-love became a madness equalled only in force by my aversion to medicine. As I dared not tell my parents, it happened that by means of this very passion for music, my father tried decisive measures to cure me of what he called my “babyish antipathy” to his loved profession. Calling me into his study where Munro’s _Anatomy_, with its life-size pictures of the human framework, lay open on the table, he said: “See, my boy, I want you to work hard at this. I cannot believe that you will let unreasoning prejudice stand in the way of my wishes. If you will do your best, I will order you the very finest flute to be got in Lyons, with all the new keys.” What could I say? My father’s gravity, my love and respect for him, the temptation of the long-coveted flute, were altogether too much for me. Muttering a strangled “Yes,” I rushed away to throw myself on my bed in the depths of misery. Be a doctor! Learn to dissect! Help in horrible operations! Bury myself in the hideous realities of hospitals, wounds, and death, when I might tread the clouds with the immortals!--when music and poetry wooed me with open arms and divine songs. No, no, no! Such a tragedy _could_ not happen! Yet it did. My cousin, A. Robert--now one of the first doctors in Paris--was to share my father’s lessons. Unluckily he played the violin well, being a member of my quintette party, and, of course, we spent more time over music than over osteology. Still he worked so hard at home that he was always ready with his demonstrations, and I was not. Hence frequent scoldings and the vials of my father’s wrath poured out on my poor head. Nevertheless, by hook or by crook, I managed to learn all that my father could teach me without dissections, and when I was nineteen, I consented to go with Robert to Paris to embark on a medical career. * * * * * Before beginning to tell of the deadly conflict that, almost immediately on my arrival in Paris, I began with ideas, people and things generally, and which has continued unremittingly up to this day, I must have a short breathing space.