Who among us can now speak about the man who was our teacher and friend? We admired him passionately from the time we were young—we entrusted him with the best of ourselves—and every day we had new reasons to admire him, to love him still more. When we left his home after seeing him for the last time, we understood that his illness had been unable to make us consider the possibility of his death. And, now that we must continue the route without him, we feel diminished, impoverished. His presence suffused everything with such clarity!

The physical challenges, more and more frequent, which emaciated his handsome face, could not touch the miraculous youth of his soul. And every time we found ourselves in his presence, we were struck to see him even greater than before. Over the years, an inexpressible serenity developed in him, stripping his thought of any ornamentation that would have altered the purity of forms, filling his words as well as his works with a sort of grave enthusiasm and tender certainty. It was as if his eyes opened onto a new world. It really seemed that our teacher lived on a higher level than us—a level where the mind and the heart were in harmony, sheltered from vain agitations. And everything there seemed to be essential. Gabriel Fauré made us think that, for some men, old age marks the liberation of thought, its peak and not its decline.

And we forgot that the end was near, as we saw only the incomparable building ceaselessly becoming more and more perfect, the edifice to which, until the very last minute, with no weakness or pause, Gabriel Fauré gave all his strength, all his dreams, all his life. It already seemed to us that this life was the most beautiful, the purest artistic life that one could ever imagine.

Today, now that its course has been interrupted, it seems to us that we can see even more clearly its admirable order, its radiant certainty, its complete selflessness, its incredible simplicity, and we no longer know what we feel most strongly: admiration, gratitude, or sadness.