``Put a few such songs together,'' they urged him. ``String them onto some sort of little plot, and you'll have a delightful operetta.''

He didn't believe them. ``Nonsense,'' he said. ``This is the sort of stuff I write and then throw away!''

``Heaven forbid!'' cried the ladies, enchanted by his music. ``You must make an opera out of this material.''

And they wouldn't leave off arguing and pleading until he had promised.

Oh, the irony and the bitterness of it! That after all his years of effort to become a composer, he should now, now when he was still stoutly replying to the critics of his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, be so close to a success in music and have to reject it.

Or at least appear to reject it!

But what else could he do? You couldn't on the one hand decry the arts and at the same time practice them, could you? Well, yes, perhaps in literature, since you could argue that you couldn't keep silent about your feelings against literature and so were involved in spite of yourself. But now music too? No. That would be too much!

And the fault, of course, was Rameau's. The fault was Rameau's and that of the whole culture of this Parisian age. For it was Rameau's type of music that he had been trying to write, and that he couldn't write. These little songs, however, were sweet nothings from the heart, tender memories of his childhood, little melodies that anyone could hum and that would make one want to weep.