things easy for their ignorance and snobbishness, for it relieved them
of the necessity of knowing anything else. The author of the opera, a
Parisian, whose name Christophe heard for the first time, had, said some,
made a clean sweep of all that had gone before him, cleaned up, renovated,
and recreated music. Christophe started at that. He asked nothing better
than to believe in genius. But such a genius as that, a genius who had at
one swoop wiped out the past.... Good heavens! He must be a lusty lad: how
the devil had he done it? He asked for particulars. The others, who would
have been hard put to it to give any explanation and were disconcerted by
Christophe, referred him to the musician of the company, Theophile Goujart,
the great musical critic, who began at once to talk of sevenths and ninths.
Goujart knew music much as Sganarelle knew Latin....

"_... You don't know Latin?_"

"_No._"

_(With enthusiasm) "Cabricias, arci thuram, catalamus, singulariter ...
bonus, bona, bonum."_

Finding himself with a man who "understood Latin" he prudently took refuge
in the chatter of esthetics. From that impregnable fortress he began to
bombard Beethoven, Wagner, and classical art, which was not before the
house (but in France it is impossible to praise an artist without making
as an offering a holocaust of all those who are unlike him). He announced
the advent of a new art which trampled under foot the conventions of the
past. He spoke of a new musical language which had been discovered by the
Christopher Columbus of Parisian music, and he said it made an end of the
language of the classics: that was a dead language.