But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word. At last my father became uneasy: “I had thought,” he ventured, after an endless preamble, “of asking the advice of the Commission⁠ ⁠…” Then from the face of the noble virtuoso, who had been sitting inert as a player in an orchestra sits until the moment comes for him to begin his part, were uttered, with an even delivery, on a sharp note, and as though they were no more than the completion (but scored for a different voice) of the phrase that my father had begun, the words: “of which you will not hesitate, of course, to call a meeting; more especially as the present members are all known to you personally, and there may be a change any day.” This was not in itself a very remarkable ending. But the immobility that had preceded it made it detach itself with the crystal clarity, the almost malicious unexpectedness of those phrases in which the piano, silent until then, “takes up,” at a given moment, the violoncello to which one has just been listening, in a Mozart concerto.