ary, of great strength and range; of moving tone; eminently
sympathetic; but it was an invalid organ and subject to caprice. He was
not always master of it, and this caused him real suffering.

Let me give you the history of his voice as Madame Delsarte herself
lately told it to me. I must go back to his early days of study and
debuts.

Delsarte entered the Conservatory at the age of fourteen. Too young to
endure the fatigue of the regular school-exercises, his voice must have
received an injury. When the singer offered his services at the Opera
Comique---then Salle Vantadour--he was told that his voice was hollow,
that it had no carrying power. This was perhaps partly the fault of the
building, whose acoustic properties were afterward improved. However,
thanks to the flexibility which his voice retained and his perfect
vocalization, the pretended insufficiency was overlooked, and the young
tenor was admitted.

His mode of singing pleased the skilled public, and the special
abilities of this strong artistic organism--as I have already
observed--did not pass unnoted.

A _dilettante_, to whom I mentioned Delsarte long after this time, said:
"What you tell me does not surprise me, I heard him at his first
appearance, and he has lingered in my memory as an artist of the
greatest promise. He was more than a singer; he had that nameless
quality, which is not taught in any school and which marks a
personality; a tone of which nothing, before or since, has given me the
least idea."

The tenor, from the Comic Opera, went to the Ambigu Theatre, and thence
to the Varietes, where an attempt was being made to introduce lyric
works. Francois Delsarte's dramatic career did not, however, last more
than two years. During these various changes--I cannot give the exact
dates--this artist, on his way to glory, was forced to gain a living by
the least aristocratic of occupations. If he did not go so far as
Shakespeare in humility of profession (the English poet was a butcher's
boy), he strangely stooped from that native nobility--great
capacity,--which must yet have claimed, in his secret soul, its
imprescriptible rights.

If this was one more suffering, added to all the rest, it had its good
side. It was, perhaps, the source of the artist's never failing
kindness, of that gracious reception which he never hesitated to bestow
on anyone--from the Princess de Chimay and many other titled lords and
ladies, down to Mother Chorre, the ne