, where an initial intonation is barely altered by the inflection of one note which rests upon another, the music of the crowd which is more a language than a music. It was “ ah! le bigorneau, deux sous le bigorneau ,” which brought people running to the cornets in which were sold those horrid little shellfish, which, if Albertine had not been there, would have disgusted me, just as the snails disgusted me which I heard cried for sale at the same hour. Here again it was of the barely lyrical declamation of Moussorgsky that the vendor reminded me, but not of it alone. For after having almost “spoken”: “ Les escargots, ils sont frais, ils sont beaux ,” it was with the vague melancholy of Maeterlinck, transposed into music by Debussy, that the snail vendor, in one of those pathetic finales in which the composer of Pelléas shows his kinship with Rameau: “If vanquished I must be, is it for thee to be my vanquisher?” added with a singsong melancholy: “ On les vend six sous la douzaine.⁠ ⁠… ”