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A scientific pyrotechnist was a novelty, particularly as the experimentings were to be given with the aid of a newly discovered gas. Strange rumours of human levitations, of flying machines seen after dark at unearthly heights, were printed.

For example, Sur la Terrasse, with its audacious crimson, like the imperious challenge of a trumpet; La Loge and its gorgeous fabrics; a Baigneuse in a light-green scheme; the quaint head of Jeanne Samary a rival portrait to Besnard's faun-like Réjane and a lot of Renoir's later experimentings, as fugitive as music; exploding bouquets of iridescence; swirling panels, depicting scenes from Tannhäuser; a flower garden composed of buds and blossoms in colour scales that begin at a bass-emerald and ascend to an altitudinous green where green is no longer green but an opaline reverberation.

Then he went into the stone corridor and coughed as a hint that he was up. Not a sound but the persistent fall at a distance of some heavy metallic substance. It must be Karospina in his workshop, at his rockets, pinwheels, torpedoes, and firecrackers. What a singular change in a bloodthirsty revolutionist. And how childish! Had he squandered his millions on futile experimentings?

The fruit of his experimentings in tonality we see in the whole latter-day school of piano, dramatic and orchestral composers. That Chopin may lead to the development and adoption of the new enharmonic scales, the "Homotonic scales," I do not know. For these M. A. de Bertha claimed the future of music.

This trait, much clarified and spiritualized in later life, became a distinct, ironic note in his character. Possibly it attracted Heine, although his irony was on a more intellectual plane. His piano playing at this time was neat and finished, and he had already begun those experimentings in technique and tone that afterward revolutionized the world of music and the keyboard.