love, has its inexplicable mysteries, and gradually we became the best
of friends. We lived in the same quarter and we visited each other
frequently. As we almost never were of the same opinion about anything,
we had interminable arguments, entirely free from rancor, which we
thoroughly enjoyed.

I finally became the confidant of his secret sorrows, and his innermost
griefs. He was endowed with a wonderful visual memory, but he made the
mistake of never using models, for in his opinion they were useless for
an artist who knew his _metier_. So he condemned himself to a perpetual
approximation, which was enough for illustrations demanding only life
and character, but fatal for large canvasses, with half or full sized
figures. This was the cause of his disappointments and failures which he
attributed to malevolence and a hostility, which really did exist, but
which took advantage of this opportunity to make the painter pay for the
exaggerated success of the designer that had been extravagantly praised
by the press from the beginning. He laid himself open to criticism
through his abuse of his own facility. I have seen him painting away on
thirty canvasses at the same time in his immense studio. Three seriously
studied pictures would have been worth more.

At heart this great overgrown jovial boy was melancholy and sensitive.
He died young from heart disease, which was aggravated by grief over the
death of his mother from whom he had never been separated.

I dedicated a slight piece written for the violin to Dore. This was not
lost as the one to Ingres was, but it would be entirely unknown had not
Johannes Wolf, the violinist of queens and empresses, done me the favor
of placing it in his repertoire and bringing his fine talent to its aid.

Hebert was the most serious of the painter-violinists. Down to the end
of his life he delighted in playing the sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven,
and, from all accounts, he played them remarkably. I can say this only
from hearsay, for I never heard him. The few times that I ever saw him
at home in my youth, I found him with his brush in hand. I saw him after
that only at the Academie, where we sat near each other, and he always
greeted me cordially. We talked music from time to time, and he
conversed like a connoisseur.

Henri Regnault was the most musical of all the painters whom I have
known. He did not need a violin--he was his own. Nature had endowed him
with an exquisite tenor voi