Just eighteen years before it was that Bizet had written from Rome: "We are indeed sad, for there come to us the tidings of the death of Léon Benouville. Really, one works oneself half crazy to gain this Prix de Rome; then comes the huge struggle for position; and after all, perchance to end by dying at thirty-eight! Truly, the picture is the reverse of encouraging." Here was his own destiny, _nu comme la main_, save that the fates begrudged him even the thirty-eight years of his brother artist--called him when he could not but "contrast The petty done--the undone vast." But his early life was not unhappy. He had no pitiful struggle with poverty in childhood, at all events. Some tell us he was precocious--terribly so; but I had rather take my cue from his own words, "Je ne me suis donné qu'à contre-coeur à la musique," than dwell upon his precocity, real or fictional. It was only hereditarily consistent that he should have a musical organisation. His father was a teacher of music, not without repute; his mother was a sister of François Delsarte, who, although unknown to Grove, has two columns and more devoted to him by Fetis, by whom he is described as an "artiste un peu étrange, quoique d'un mérite incontestable, doué de facultés très diverses et de toutes les qualités nécessaires à l'enseignement." What there was of music in their son the parents sought to encourage assiduously, and Bizet himself has shown us in his work, more clearly than aught else could, that the true dramatic sense was innate in him. And that he loved his literature too, was well proved by a glance at the little _appartement_ in the Rue de Douai, which he continued to occupy until well-nigh the end. In 1849--he was just over his tenth year--Delsarte took him to Marmontel of the Conservatoire. "Without being in any sense of the word a prodigy," says the old pianoforte master, "he played his Mozart with an unusual amount of taste. From the moment I heard him I recognised his individuality, and I made it my object to preserve it." Then Zimmerman, with whom _l'enseignement_ was a disease, heard of him and sought him for pupil. But Zimmerman seems to have tired of him as he tired of so many and ended by passing him on to Gounod. From entry to exit--an interval of eight years--Bizet's academic career was a series of _premiers et deuxièmes prix_. They were to him but so many stepping-stones to the coveted Grand Prix de Rome. He longed to secure this--to fly the crowded town and seek the secluded shelter of the Villa Medici. And in the end he had his way. In effect, he commenced to live only after he had taken up his abode on the little Pincian Hill. Even there life was a trifle close to him, and some time passed before he really fixed his focus.