One day in 1687, while conducting a _Te Deum_ in honor of the King’s recovery from an illness, Lully, “the better to demonstrate his zeal,” the contemporary account relates, “he himself _beat the time with the cane he used for this purpose_, and he struck himself in the heat of action a blow upon the end of his foot. This caused a small blister.”[42] The quack doctor who was summoned was incompetent and Lully died from blood-poisoning. He left four houses in Paris and a large fortune. His portraits, which represent him in the big flowing curls of the day—much like the King’s own wig—and with large heavy features, are said by contemporaries to flatter him. Lully was an undoubted genius and he was always clever. We sometimes wonder if he did not know what he was doing when he wrote his satirical song on “Big Mademoiselle,” who had plenty of enemies ready to laugh at her expense. Lully always knew how to attract attention to himself and he never seems to have made a mistake. I think we may call him the first _real conductor of an Orchestra_. Certain it is that Lully was the first to gather together a virtuoso Orchestra and train it by methods that approach those of to-day. Lully’s Orchestra is, therefore, of the greatest interest to us. So let us stop and examine it: “Lully got together the best Orchestra of his time in Europe. It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that he was the first man to train an Orchestra in France and that before him (accordingly to Perrault) musicians did not know how to play from score and had to learn their parts by heart. But he certainly did improve instrumental execution, especially with regard to the violin, and he created traditions in the conducting of Orchestras, which rapidly became classic and were followed in France and even served as a model in Europe. Among the many foreigners who came to Paris to study was an Alsatian, named Georges Muffat, who especially admired the perfect discipline and strict time of Lully’s Orchestra. He said that Lully’s method was characterized by trueness of tone, by smoothness and evenness of execution, by clean attack and by the way the bows of the whole Orchestra bit into the first chord, that famous ‘first stroke of the bow,’ as well as by the irresistible ‘go,’ the well-defined rhythm and the delightful combination of vigor and flexibility, of grace and vivacity. But of all these qualities, the best was the _rhythm_.”[43] Robert Eitner called it an “incisive and expressive rhythm.” Others tell us that Lully thought quite as much of delicacy of expression; for there are many marks on his scores, such as “Play softly—almost without touching the notes” and “Do not take off the _sordini_ until you are told to.” Lully’s Orchestra showed off splendidly in his operas.