There is no one alive who could give us such intimate souvenirs of Turgénieff as Madame Viardot-Garcia. He was the family friend, the closest companion, of her husband; it was an undisturbed intimacy for many years. His letters, the most eloquent, were written to Madame Viardot-Garcia, and to both he opened his mind about music. He knew Gounod, who often visited him and rolled about on his bearskin rug when he was in the travail of composition. It was at Courtavenel, the country place of the Viardots, that Gounod met Turgénieff. Their liking was mutual. Turgénieff knew the piano slightly, for he writes of his having played duos of Beethoven and Mozart with a sister of Tolstoy. He counsels, in a letter from Spasskoïé, Madame Viardot to work at her composition. This gifted woman, singer, and pianist, admired by Liszt, Heine, and half of Europe, occasionally found time to compose. “And now set to work!” cries Turgénieff. “I have never admired and preached work so much as I have since I have been doing nothing myself; and yet look here, I give you my word of honor, that, if you will begin to write sonatas, I will take up my literary work again. ‘Hand me the cinnamon and I’ll hand you the senna.’ A novel for a sonata—does that suit you?” In an earlier letter he speaks of Russia “with its vast and sombre countenance, motionless and veiled like the sphinx of Œdipus. She will swallow me up later on. I seem to see her large, inert gaze fixed upon me, with its dreary scrutiny appropriate to eyes of stone. Never mind, sphinx, I shall return to thee; and thou mayest devour me at thine ease, if I do not guess thy riddle! Meanwhile, leave me in peace a little longer; I shall return to thy steppes.” All his life passionately preoccupied with Russia, Turgénieff had the bitter misfortune of being discredited by his countrymen. Never a bard and prophet like Tolstoy, he nevertheless loved Russia and saw her weaknesses with as keen an eye as the other writer. Accused of an ultra-cosmopolitanism, wofully misunderstood, this great man went to his grave sorrowing because young Russia, the extreme left, refused him. If he was solicitous in advancing the names of Flaubert, Daudet, the de Goncourts, Zola, and de Maupassant, his zeal for rising talent in his native land led him to extremes. Halperine-Kaminsky and Mr. James say that he had always in tow some wonderful Russian genius, poet, painter, musician, sculptor, or nondescript, who was about to revolutionize art. In a month he was hot on the trail of a new one, and his pains were usually rewarded by ineptitude or ingratitude. To paint him as an indifferent patriot, an “absentee” landlord,—his behavior to his tenants was ridiculously tender,—is an injustice, as unjust as the reception given Tschaïkowsky at the beginning of his career by certain of his contemporaries.