It is now the 24th, and we had a very pleasant evening at Baillot's yesterday. He plays beautifully, and had collected a very musical society of attentive ladies and enthusiastic gentlemen, and I have seldom been so well amused in any circle, or enjoyed such honours. It was the greatest possible delight to me to hear my quartett in E flat major (dedicated to B. P.) performed in Paris by Baillot's quartett, and they executed it with fire and spirit. They commenced with a quintett by Bocherini, an old-fashioned _perruque_, but a very amiable old gentleman underneath it. The company then asked for a sonata of Bach's; we selected the one in A major; old familiar tones dawned once more on me, of the time when Baillot played it with Madame Bigot.[26] We urged each other on, the affair became animated, and so thoroughly amused both us and our audience, that we immediately commenced the one in E major, and next time we mean to introduce the four others.
[26] The lady who instructed Mendelssohn in the piano in Paris, when the family resided there for a time in 1816.
Then my turn came to play a solo. I was in the vein to extemporize successfully, and felt that I did so. The guests being now in a graver mood, I took three themes from the previous sonatas, and worked them up to my heart's content; it seemed to give immense pleasure to those present, for they shouted and applauded like mad. Then Baillot gave my quartett; his manner towards me has something very kind, and I was doubly pleased, as he is rather cold at first and seldom makes advances to any one. He appears a good deal depressed by the loss of his situation. I saw a number of old well-known faces, and they asked after you all, and recalled many anecdotes of that former period.
When I was passing through Louvain two years ago with my "Liederspiel" in my head, and my injured knee,[27] I seized the brass handle of a pump to prevent myself from falling; and when I returned this year in the same miserable diligence, driven by a postilion exactly similar, with a big queue, the "Liederspiel," my knee, and Italy, were all things of the past; and yet the handle of the pump was still hanging there, as clean and brightly rubbed up as ever, having survived 1830, and all the revolutionary storms, and remaining quite unchanged. This is sentimental; my father must not read it, for it is the old story of the past and the present, which we discussed so eagerly one fine evening, and which recurs to me among the crowd here at every step. I thought of it at the Madeleine, and when I went to aunt J----'s, and at the Hôtel des Princes, and at the gallery, which my father showed me fifteen years ago, and when I saw the coloured signs, which at that time impressed me exceedingly, and are now grown brown and shabby.