However he might sometimes err in his doctrine, M. Guhr was at least right in his faith. The supremacy, which he assigned to the great Genoese genius, was expressed in the language of a handsome enthusiasm:— “Rode, Kreutzer, Baillot, Spohr—those giants among violinists—seemed to have exhausted all the resources of the instrument. They had extended its mechanism, introduced the greatest imaginable variety in the use of the bow, which was made subservient to all the shades of expression and execution: they had succeeded, by the magic of their sounds, which rivalled the human voice, in painting all passions and all the movements of sentiment. In short, advancing rapidly in the path marked out by Corelli, Tartini, and Viotti, they had raised the violin to that rank which ensures to it the dominion of the human soul. In _their_ style, they are, and remain, great and unsurpassed. But, when we hear Paganini, and compare him with the other masters, it must be confessed that he has passed all the barriers which custom had hitherto raised, and that he has opened a way peculiar to himself, and which essentially separates him from those great Artists; so much so, that whoever hears him for the first time, is astonished and transported at hearing what is so completely new and unexpected;—astonished by the fiend-like power with which he rules over his instrument;—transported that, with a mechanical facility which no difficulty resists, he at the same time opens to the fancy a boundless space, gives to the violin the divinest breathings of the human voice, and deeply moves the inmost feelings of the soul.” But we have left Paganini himself at Paris, where we must now rejoin him and his fortunes. As for the latter, in the moneyed meaning, they grew with a ratio of increase that would have been more wonderful, had it not been afterwards outdone by that of his gains in London. As it was, they were sufficient to inspire one of the Parisian dilettanti, a nicer worker in figures, with a special access of passion for calculating the value of notes—that is to say, of Paganini’s musical “notes of hand.” The result, based upon a concert given at the Opera at Paris, producing 16,500 francs, and presenting 1365 bars of _the_ fiddling, indicated a quotient of 12 francs for _each bar_, and was still more curiously distributed into proportions as follows:—for a semibreve, 12 francs; a minim, 6 francs; a crotchet, 3 francs; a quaver, 1 franc, 50 centimes; a semiquaver, 15 sous; a demisemiquaver, 7½ sous. This exemplary calculation did not overlook, moreover, the cash value of each of the occurring sorts of _rests_; besides working out a “contingent remainder” of 420 francs—that residue happening to be, by the most curious coincidence, exactly the price of such a violin as the Conservatory usually awards by way of prize to its most successful pupils![39]