My Dear Maître,

Your friends told me, “We want to pay homage to the memory of Auguste Chapuis—one will speak about the composer, another about the organist, another about the man, and another about the friend—you, if you would like, about the teacher.” What? To pay a debt so old and dear to my heart could only appear, and did appear to me, easy and sweet. But little by little as the days passed, something came to stand between me and myself: I knew and yet could not; I wanted to, and didn't know how—and, hesitation after hesitation, qualm after qualm, postponement after postponement, the present and myself, as I am today—we gradually disappeared, so as to make space for a group, witnesses to a time long past.

I suddenly understood that it is the three members of this group who must be asked to speak, because it is they who keep your image present within me, through them that I always see you, such as you were when I saw you in the past.

The white-haired old man said to me, “How happy I am to have entrusted my daughter to Chapuis—his teaching is clear, calm—his knowledge is so sound that he will never seek to force it upon others; he renders it accessible to his students and then allows them the time to assimilate it. That is just what I was looking for: [someone] capable and willing to understand the student while providing a solid technique.”

The little five-year-old girl told me, “I do love Mr. Chapuis—you can tell him everything, ask everything of him, he listens without ever getting impatient, he answers all questions—and, when I give him my copybook, he laughs so gently in looking at my homework. And when I sing for him and he accompanies me, the piano seems to be as small as me.”

The eleven-year-old girl, for her part: “We left one day with papa and mama to go to Mr. Chapuis’s.Who is this Mr. Chapuis? Is he going to forbid me to write what I love so as to ‘observe’ the rules, make me write harmony exercises that I hate all the time, prevent me from sight-reading, as I like to do?—Now we are at the Boulevard Voltaire.