Debussy's life was hardly the stuff of storybooks. Rather, it was the life of an artist who sacrificed nearly everything for his work. While it is commonly accepted that his compositions opened the path to the music of the twentieth century, Debussy's personality, as described in the writings that have been devoted to him, remains enshrouded in grey areas, due in particular to his relatively unstable private life.

Productive periods alternated with moments of uncontrolled uncertainty in his life, which can be understood only by establishing a rigorous chronology of the known facts. We have thus attempted to present Debussy on a day-by-day basis, somewhat in the style of a chronicle, based on his letters as well as on the catalog of his works. There is a great disparity between the years of his youth and those following Pelléas. During the former, although living a very difficult life, he continued to strive for a rigorous artistic ideal and fiercely sought the paths that would allow him to attain it. After 1904, he appears to be a victim of his success as well as of the new social status that was imposed upon him and that hindered his creative development. Most of his contemporaries thought that he was simply becoming gentrified and that he had opted for material ease and conjugal bliss. In reality, in spite of the satisfaction he felt in having successfully completed the Images for orchestra or the Préludes and the Études for piano, he often regretted not having maintained “that calm self-confidence, which is an admirable strength,” and not having succeeded in eliminating, as he expressed it, “all that consumes the best parts of my thought.” If we add to this the slow progression of a terrible illness, his fate seems rather tragic, and we are not surprised to read, over the years, on his face as well as in his words, his sadness at no longer being able to satisfy a “desire always to go further, which took the place of bread and wine for me.”

No full-scale biography of Debussy has been attempted for more than thirty years. Since that time, scholarly studies have proliferated and numerous documents have come to light concerning the composer, his circle, and the context in which he developed artistically.