The city was abuzz with a thousand scandals, with literary and poetic gatherings of the arguably avant-garde, with eventful dissident exhibitions, soirées liberally sprinkled with cursed, damned or antiestablishment artists, and sophisticated society dinners given by wellknown and admired academe painters. The Exposition Universelle of 1889, which Delius attended … particularly demonstrated the vitality of the vie parisienne and all its spheres of activity in the period of peace and insouciance after the Franco–Prussian War of 1870 … [For the artists in particular, the city was] full of images of the muffled noise of the luxurious salon of an Academy jury member; the hammering of the rain on the meagre and sordid slum of a cubby-hole studio at the end of a narrow courtyard, unpaved and unlit, belonging to a poor débutant artist; in certain quartiers, multi-coloured and international blocks of artists’ flats, near hearty cafés or ill-famed cabarets; brasseries, with their celebrated drinking bouts – and [in many cases] refined decor, thanks to the continuous municipal policy of embellishment, of health improvements and renovation of the quartiers.

Prosperity and elegance abounded, and the very air seemed to vibrate with life and excitement. The world of music was dominated by Massenet, Gounod, Franck and Fauré, with Debussy just appearing on the horizon; that of letters by Anatole France, Emile Zola, Paul Verlaine and Guy de Maupassant. Led by Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas, painting was entering upon the noonday of Impressionism, and around those great personalities were grouped small circles of lesser effulgence and it was to these, rather than to the haunts of musicians, that Frederick was drawn from the first.

I have now settled down a bit & must confess that I feel very happy here.