Besides his relationships with Louÿs and Hartmann, Debussy continued to foster friendships with, among others, Peter, Lerolle, Bonheur, Satie, and the Fontaines, a family with whom he had been in contact since 1893. Related by marriage to Chausson and to the Lerolles, the Fontaine family included four brothers who spent summers together at their estate in Mercin, in the department of Aisne. The eldest was Arthur, a chief engineer at the National Mining Services, who became a high government official as a director at the Ministry of Commerce; the three others, including Lucien, managed a large hardware business. Arthur in particular was an art lover; he supported Odilon Redon, Eugène Carrière, and Maurice Denis, and was friendly with Francis Jammes, Raymond Bonheur, and André Gide.

The Fontaines

During the summer of 1894, Lucien came up with the idea of a small family choral group to be conducted by Debussy. We know that it began to meet in September, for at that time Debussy wrote that Lucien sang like “a sentimental bull.” The following year, the composer was received at Mercin “like the Prince of Wales.” No doubt the choral group met irregularly, but it was still extant in 1898, when it welcomed a new member, Mlle Worms de Romilly, who remembered being almost awestruck by it: “He [Debussy] was a wonderful choral conductor, with the patience of a saint, teaching each of us our different parts one by one, and he had succeeded in training a small ensemble, comprised of a handful of unreliable and ill-informed amateurs, that was musical and disciplined.” Of the repertoire they tackled, she remembered especially Chabrier's Ode à la musique and some Russian music. This young woman also asked Debussy for voice lessons and remembered the first day, when he arrived in a “small open carriage, called a ‘tonneau,’ pulled by a nervous pony and driven by M. Fontaine.” These sessions soon turned into piano lessons, and the teacher assigned her Schumann's Kreisleriana as a starting challenge. When she wanted to surprise Debussy by playing his Arabesques, he refused, saying: “Not those pieces, they're too awful!”