Two men in the audience had better things to do than shout and applaud. The minute the last note had died away, conductors Colonne and Lamoureux leaped to their feet and began a race to the platform. Each man was determined to get there first. Lamoureux, by a masterpiece of broken field running around cheering Polish counts, French dukes, and assorted musicians, won the race. “Monsieur,” he puffed, hearing Colonne slide to a stop behind him, “I have the honor to invite you to appear as soloist in three weeks with the Lamoureux Orchestra!” Lamoureux and other new friends pressed the young pianist to arrange several additional solo recitals at once. “You must strike again while this enthusiasm lasts,” they told him. “You must reinforce this first success, or people will quickly forget you.” All professional artists are aware of the fickleness of the public. Paderewski knew what good advice his friends were giving him. The night’s triumph, therefore, instead of making him happy, plunged him into absolute misery. Why? Because the modest young man, encouraged to try his luck by his success in Vienna, had come to Paris with exactly one program prepared. And he had just finished playing it! He could have postponed his Paris debut until he had a larger repertoire, but it had never once occurred to him that he would be called upon to play anything in Paris but his one recital. And now! “It’s impossible,” he told himself on that triumphant evening of March 3. The first program—the _only_ program—had taken him eight months to prepare to his satisfaction. Now he was asked to prepare a second program in three weeks! “It’s absolutely impossible! I can’t even think about it!” On the morning of March 4, he said, “Well—maybe I could try—” On the evening of March 23 he appeared with the Lamoureux Orchestra in the Saint-Saens Piano Concerto in C minor. He played it, said the city’s toughest music critic, “in a superb and masterful manner.” Critics should be embarrassed, the writer added, to praise Paderewski, because they had been so free and easy in using superlatives to describe other pianists. As a result, there was now a shortage of new words by which to describe the particular genius of the Polish artist. Another newspaper promptly labelled him “the Lion of Paris.”