“M.  Delsarte?” she asked.

“I am he, madam!” replied Gustave without flinching.

“Very good,” said his questioner, laughing, “but I wish to speak to your father.”

This same Gustave who, to a certain degree, followed in his father’s footsteps, was struck down a few years after him, at the age of forty-two.

What a striking application of Victor Hugo’s lines: 

    “And both are dead....  Oh Lord, all powerful is thy right hand!”

Gustave’s career seemed to open readily and smoothly.  Not that he could approach his father from a dramatic point of view; he had not his absolute synthesis of talents, and his figure was not suited to the theatre; as a singer, his voice was weak, but what a charm and what a style he had!  Although his voice was not adapted to every part, although he had not that range of the vocal scale which permits one to attack any and every composition, still, its sympathetic, tender and penetrating quality did ample justice to all that is most exquisite in romance.  When you had once heard that voice, guided by the force of his father’s grand method, you never forgot its sincerity and melancholy; it haunted you and left you impatient to hear it again.

As a concert-singer and teacher, Gustave Delsarte might have won high rank.  An ill-assorted marriage and his misanthropic character prevented.  As a composer, he left some few songs, masses and religious fragments which are not without merit.  When he was to produce any of his sacred works, the composer-singer never took a part; but he would lead the orchestra.  If he came to a rehearsal and the performers appeared weak, a holy wrath would seize upon Gustave.  Then he flung a firm, incisive, accentuated note into the midst of the choir, vivid as a spark bursting from a fire covered with ashes.  He would accompany it with a glance which seemed to flash from his father’s eye; at such moments, he resembled him; but this transformation never lasted more than a second; the fictitious power disappeared as all which was Gustave Delsarte was doomed to disappear.

At least, his father did not live to mourn his loss.  And yet he knew that worst of heart-suffering:  the loss of a beloved child.  Alas!  In that radiant family, whose mirth, fresh faces and luxuriant health seemed to defy death, the implacable foe had already twice swept his scythe.

The first to go was Andre, one of the latest born.  He was at the age when the child leaves no lasting memories behind; but we know the grace of innocence, the privilege of impeccability by which infancy atones for the lack of acquirements.  Then these little creatures have the mysterious entrancing smiles, which mothers understand and adore—­and Delsarte loved his children with a mother’s heart.

Time lessens such pangs; but when a fresh sorrow re-opened the era of calamity, it seems as if the sad events trod upon each other’s heels and the interval between seems to have been but one unmitigated agony.