from his mother had been spent in the course of a three-years' travel
in Italy after the residence in Rome came to an end. He had seen
Venice, Milan, Florence, Bologna, and Naples leisurely, as he wished
to see them, as a dreamer of dreams, and a philosopher; careless of
the future, for an artist looks to his talent for support as the
_fille de joie_ counts upon her beauty.

All through those splendid years of travel Pons was as happy as was
possible to a man with a great soul, a sensitive nature, and a face so
ugly that any "success with the fair" (to use the stereotyped formula
of 1809) was out of the question; the realities of life always fell
short of the ideals which Pons created for himself; the world without
was not in tune with the soul within, but Pons had made up his mind to
the dissonance. Doubtless the sense of beauty that he had kept pure
and living in his inmost soul was the spring from which the delicate,
graceful, and ingenious music flowed and won him reputation between
1810 and 1814.

Every reputation founded upon the fashion or the fancy of the hour, or
upon the short-lived follies of Paris, produces its Pons. No place in
the world is so inexorable in great things; no city of the globe so
disdainfully indulgent in small. Pons' notes were drowned before long
in floods of German harmony and the music of Rossini; and if in 1824
he was known as an agreeable musician, a composer of various
drawing-room melodies, judge if he was likely to be famous in 183l!
In 1844, the year in which the single drama of this obscure life began,
Sylvain Pons was of no more value than an antediluvian semiquaver;
dealers in music had never heard of his name, though he was still
composing, on scanty pay, for his own orchestra or for neighboring
theatres.