om of
Madame de Mortaigne, at the request of a colonel whom the musician had
never met before, whom he never saw again. The soldier was starting next
morning with his regiment for Marseilles, and pressed Boucher to write
him a march there and then. Rouget de l'Isle, an officer of engineers,
having been imprisoned in 1791, for having refused to take a second oath
to the Constitution, heard the march from his cell, and, at the instance
of his gaoler, adapted the words of a patriotic hymn he was then writing
to it.

One may fancy the surprise of Alexandre Boucher, when he heard it sung
everywhere and recognized it as his own composition, though it had been
somewhat altered to suit the words. But the pith of the story is to
come. I give it in the very words of Boucher himself, as he told it to a
Paris journalist whom I knew well.

"A good many years afterwards, I was seated next to Rouget de l'Isle at
a dinner-party in Paris. We had never met before, and, as you may
easily imagine, I was rather interested in the gentleman, whom, with
many others at the same board, I complimented on his production; only I
confined myself to complimenting him on his _poem_.

"'You don't say a word about the music,' he replied; 'and yet, being a
celebrated musician, that ought to interest you. Do not you like it?'

"'Very much indeed,' I said, in a somewhat significant tone.

"'Well, let me be frank with you. The music is not mine. It was that of
a march which came, Heaven knows whence, and which they kept on playing
at Marseilles during the Terror, when I was a prisoner at the fortress
of St. Jean. I made a few alterations necessitated by the words, and
there it is.'

"Thereupon, to his great surprise, I hummed the march as I had
originally written it.

"'Wonderful!' he exclaimed; 'how did you come by it?' he asked.

"When I told him, he threw himself round my neck. But the next moment he
said--

"'I am very sorry, my dear Boucher, but I am afraid that you will be
despoiled for ever, do what you will; for your music and my words go so
well together, that they seem to have sprung simultaneously from the
same brain, and the world, even if I proclaimed my indebtedness to you,
would never believe it.'

"'Keep the loan,' I said, moved, in spite of myself, by his candour.
'Without your genius, my march would be forgotten by now. You have given
it a patent of nobility. It is yours for ever.'"

I return to Louis-Philippe, who, at the ti