[Illustration: A LETTER SENT ME BY MASSENET IN 1907, AND SIGNED
"... Your Devoted, Faithful, Obedient, Respectful and Punctual Accompanist"]
"Vert-Logis" (green cottage), my Bellevue villa, stood at a short distance from the Meudon Observatory, the director of which was M. Janssen, the famous astronomer. The observatory was surrounded by a vast and splendid park, everywhere enclosed off. Through the bars of one of the gates Marthe and I saw, one fine summer's day, a large field that was one mass of marguerites. Marthe was longing to gather great bunches of them. We hailed a keeper, who was passing by, and asked him whether he would pick some of the flowers for us and pass them through the gate.... Or perhaps he would open the gate to us for a few minutes?
"Oh! Madame, all that is strictly forbidden," said the man.
I must have looked very disappointed, for hesitatingly he said: "Well, perhaps you might come in the morning, say at eight, before there are people about. I'll open the gate and you can gather a few flowers."
The next day Marthe and I returned from the observatory garden with so many flowers that we could hardly carry them.
The old keeper scratched his head, and remarked: "I thought you only wanted a few! You must be really fond of flowers, Madame."
Soon afterwards I met M. Janssen. We had many friends in common, and the savant gave orders that the gates of the park should always be opened to me and allowed me to gather as many of the flowers as I pleased. Then, with a typical courtesy, the aged astronomer--he was then over eighty years old--said to me: "Madame, since you love flowers so well, would you care to see the flowers of heaven?"
I accepted, of course, and one clear night I experienced the unique joy of watching a star through a powerful telescope. With a feeling of rapture and enchantment that was wholly new to me, I saw the star scintillate, change colour, and shine forth in all the exquisite hues of the rainbow.... And thoughts of the Infinite whirled through my dazzled brain.... I would go to clutch that star, I longed to grasp it; I wanted to know, to understand, the meaning of space and matter, of Eternity and the Infinite--and of Life.... And on my way home, as I looked up towards the star-studded sky, I was thrilled as I had never been before, and forgetting what the old savant had told me about the endless and intricate calculations which are the chief occupations of the star-gazer ("a living algebraical machine") I felt that the astronomer, who constantly watches mysterious and unconceivably distant worlds in the depths of space, is devoting his life to the grandest, the most sublime and lofty science of all. And I thought of my father, who so often, at Beaucourt, had talked to me about the stars, the moon-world, the comets, the milky way.... And I recalled those words of Kant, which he more than once quoted to me: "There are two things which ever fill me with new and growing admiration: the moral law within me, and the starry heavens above me."