In his Retractions, written near the end of his life, St. Augustine recounts the impetus for writing The City of God. Augustine relates that he was moved to defend Christianity against its pagan critics, who charged that the abandonment of the worship of the pagan gods by recent Roman emperors was responsible for the fall of Rome in 410. He notes that the work as a whole contains two major parts. The first part constitutes books 1 through 10 and consists primarily of an attack on the Roman pagan religion in its practices and its principles. The second part, books 11 through 22, provides the positive defense of the Christian teaching, largely consisting of an extended account of the foundation and distinction between the two cities, the City of God and the earthly city. The title of the work is often given as The City of God Against the Pagans, but that is not Augustine's title, and for good reason; only the first half of the work is aimed at the pagans, while the second half is an extended defense of Christian teaching aimed at strengthening the faith of embattled believers.

St. Augustine's “magnum opus et arduum” is much more than an occasional piece, though. The major concern of this work—the relationship between the City of God and the City of Man—is anticipated in his earlier works, and throughout his works he addresses many of the important concerns of this work. An inventory of the important issues that come to the fore in The City of God would include, at least, the Fall and human redemption, the place of Israel in the plan of Divine Providence, pagan heroism in the light of the Christian understanding of virtue, the dangers of civil theology, the authority and persuasiveness of pagan philosophy, and the place of grace and free will in understanding the operations of the human soul. Foremost among the political concerns addressed in this work are the nature of empire, the relative importance of the political order or regime, the founding of political orders, the character of rulers, and the characteristics that bind political communities together.

The thrust of the first ten books of The City of God is a critique of pagan teaching and practice, and St. Augustine focuses attention on the limitations of Roman religion, politics, and philosophy.

Under the malicious title of “Fécondité” (Prolificacy), Le monde musical had published the following few lines at the beginning of 1913:

Beyond his intent to disparage, little did the journalist know that his list was quite out-of-date and incomplete.

From One Project to Another

While Segalen still believed in the Orphée project and revised it according to Debussy's indications, it was not a subject to which the composer could relate. Later, in the middle of the war, he warned the writer that “Orphée will not be singing.”

As for Crimen amoris, Debussy had grown weary of the pressure exerted on him by Charles Morice, and he contacted Laloy to come up with a more suitable libretto for this Verlaine-based project. On 27 January 1914, a new contract was signed between Durand and the three partners; the title of Fête galante replaced that of Crimen amoris, and Laloy's name would “potentially” be added to that of Morice as a collaborator on the libretto. But the situation became more complicated very quickly: on 9 February, the Théâtre Idéaliste presented (in the Paris townhouse of Mme Oedenkoven) Les Fêtes galantes, drame-ballet en deux actes. Vers d'Adrien Remacle adjoints au poème de Paul Verlaine. Musique de Adrien Remacle. This obscure composer claimed that Verlaine, while still alive, had endorsed his work and granted him “the exclusive right, identified in an official document, to write music for the Fêtes galantes poems.” On 23 March, the poet's son, Georges Verlaine, nevertheless confirmed to Morice “the right to a theatrical production with music by Monsieur Debussy on such Verlaine poems as you see fit to use.” Annoyed by the protracted legal wrangling, Debussy stashed the manuscript of this libretto in a drawer.

From this point forward, Debussy would stagnate in the “factories of nothingness”—a phrase borrowed from “our Jules” Laforgue—and would lead an “existence that was circumscribed by a rubber ring.” Although he was given morphine over a period of four months, he noted that “the drugs have no lasting effect.” Since he was not able to leave the house, Emma told his most trusted friends about his condition and invited them to visit. Dukas came to see him on 12 January and tried to cheer him up; the next day, the Laloys came for lunch. And on the 14th, radium treatment began. Knowing that he would be incapacitated for a certain length of time, he chose some classic reading matter, asking his bookseller for Blaise Pascal's Pensées and his Lettres provinciales. “He is better,” Emma was able to report to Pasteur Vallery-Radot; but two weeks later the composer reported that he had been ill for seventy-three days! Even so, he met with Raphaël Martenot on 7 February to double-check the harp part in the (Deuxième) Sonate en trio.

Debussy was probably not up-to-date on what was happening with his works outside of France. It seems that on 4 March, at the Aeolian Hall in London, his Sonate pour violoncelle was premiered by Mr. C. Warwick Evans, with Mrs. Alfred Hobday as accompanist; a second performance, by Léonce Allard and Marie Panthès, followed on 9 March at the Saint-Pierre casino in Geneva. England had clearly passed the torch to Switzerland, for in the same concert at the Saint-Pierre casino, Mme Rollan-Mauger sang the “Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maison” for the first time.

Debussy was inundated more than ever with money problems, compounded by medicinal and pharmaceutical costs, as evidenced in some letters to Durand and to his regular “financiers.” To one of them, Gaston Courty, he went so far as to claim that he had an engagement in 1917—in Buenos Aires, no less. Segalen went to visit him on 3 May, and the next day he wrote to his wife, giving his personal medical opinion that the composer was “in remission from an extended and serious illness that, it must be understood, is incurable.”

The number of interpretations of Augustine's political theory testifies simultaneously to the depth of his text and to its moments of ambiguity. Depending on whom you read, Augustine is a political thinker and practitioner impeded by his longing for the next world, a forerunner of Hobbesian regimes, or an early pluralist whose skepticism and theory of conscience contribute to modern and postmodern political projects. In John Milbank we see a theocratic Augustine who casts the church as the societas perfectas, whereas both Gilbert Meilander and Jean Bethke Elshtain emphasize instead the limitations of earthly politics that exist alongside the political obligations of a Christian.

Pierre Manent presents us with a portrait of Augustine as a theorist of the “science of the Romans” Manent's reflections are, for our purposes, the most relevant starting point. For Manent, Augustine is one of the last thinkers in the Western canon to recognize both “the passionate interest in this world as expressed in active participation in the common thing” and “the passionate interest in the eternal and the infinite as expressed in the postulation of another world.” Augustine is trying the “old city by the new,” and in doing so characterizes the operation of the passions for liberty, domination, and glory involved in Roman politics, passions that recur for Augustine in political practice generally. In contrast to the problematic dynamic that these competing desires cause for Roman conceptions of virtue, in Augustine's estimation “true virtue, the virtue that does not lie, the virtue that does not make believe it conquers when it is defeated, must, so to speak, integrate the fact that humans cannot be completely happy in this life.” According to Augustine, true virtue is a powerful concept, bridging this world and the next, relating virtue to the emotional life in a way that causes men and women both to process and to accept the situation of incomplete happiness they can possess on earth and to be conformed to the good in this life.

Robert Dodaro, Eric Gregory, and John von Heyking, in their works on Augustine, all point toward book 10 of The City of God as an interpretive key for understanding what Augustine's full teaching of virtue is, and how it relates to his ethical and political theory.

The first months spent at the Villa were almost as bleak as Debussy claimed in his letters to Henri Vasnier. Nevertheless, five of his friends went to pick him up at Mount Rotondo, north of Rome. No doubt he found little comfort in the welcome given to him by the director, Louis Cabat, a landscape painter who had been running the institution for eight years and who was not involved with the boarders “except in an administrative way.” This second-rate artist, in fragile health, was at the end of his tenure and left a rather dilapidated Villa; there were scandals of mismanagement in addition to the well-known mediocrity of the boarders’ work. As for Mme Cabat, she viewed the boarders as “excessively arrogant, ungrateful, unfair, and at times belligerent.” Achille was of nearly the same opinion: they were stiff, convinced of their own importance, self-centered, and exchanged only catty remarks, he wrote to Vasnier.

One might at first suspect that, knowing Marie would also be reading his letters, Achille deliberately exaggerated his dark state of mind. But Vidal likewise denounced the “cliques that divide the boarders,” and his first impression there had also been that of an “enormous sadness.” In a letter to Henriette Fuchs from 16 February, Vidal confirmed that, two weeks after arriving, Debussy “was terribly bored” and “dreamed only of returning to Paris,” adding that “I'm as pleasant as my work and my taste for solitude permit me to be, but, in the end, I cannot interest myself much in such a self-absorbed person. […] I don't refuse anything that he asks of me, but I don't go out of my way to create distractions in order to entertain him.”

To his “dear parents,” Achille sent the family photo of the boarders, grouped around Cabat on the staircase that led to the Villa gardens. In this photo, Achille is seated at the top on a railing, near Marty and Vidal. He carefully marked the names of the residents and, under his own image, he wrote “the prodigal son.”

The gestation of the Nocturnes is, of all of Debussy's works, the most difficult to reconstruct. The work's first iteration—that of the Scènes au crépuscule —was, as we have seen, hypothetical to say the least. We know a bit more about his second idea, conceived for violin and orchestra, since the composer wrote to Lerolle on 28 August 1894 that he had begun three Nocturnes in which he intended to use “separate orchestral groups, in order to try to find nuances within these groups alone, because composers don't really risk enough in their music.” Whistler's influence is obvious here and indeed would have been perceived as such at the time when the work became known. The painter's biographer, Théodore Duret, would even attempt, as early as 1904, to compare the two art forms. For various critics, Debussy would be the “Whistler of music.” We will recall that one month later, he outlined his plan to Ysaÿe, for whom the work was intended. On some undetermined date, perhaps near the beginning of 1894, Chausson wrote to Ysaÿe: “Debussy has already written the first part of your violin piece. I don't know it, and don't want to see it until my own piece is finished.” The composition of Pelléas subsequently delayed the continuation of Debussy's work, but he had scarcely completed his opera when he announced to Lerolle that he now wanted “to finish the three Nocturnes”— his typical equivocal expression. In November 1896, everything changed when Ysaÿe let him know that he could not premiere his work. During the following year, the version for violin and orchestra was transformed into a symphonic version.

From the end of 1897 onward, the completion of these new Nocturnes became a leitmotif in Debussy's letters to Hartmann. On 25 June 1898, the composer reported for the first time that the score was finished, but of course he was only talking about a rough draft, and the following months were spent orchestrating it.

The eastern littoral of the African continent is dotted with numerous inhabited islands ranging from the distant and near continental in size, like Madagascar, to the small and barely offshore, like Kilwa Kisiwani. Each of these islands, from the Dahlak Archipelago off Eritrea in the Red Sea to the Mascarene Islands of the southwest Indian Ocean, has its own set of historical connections to continental Africa, while all share certain maritime characteristics unique to islands. No less important are Africa's historical relationships with other, more distant Indian Ocean islands including the peopling of Madagascar from Indonesia, the forced migration of Africans to Sri Lanka, Sumatra, and Java, the deployment of African troops from Mozambique in East Timor, and the important trade in cowries from the Maldive Islands and Zanzibar to West Africa. In this chapter I will survey all of these linkages from the beginning of the Current Era to the present with an eye towards integrating Africa's Indian Ocean islands into the broader sweep of African history. In the process of this overview I will also propose that the tripartite grouping of Africa's Indian Ocean islands that I adopt below can help us to understand the relationship of these insular societies with continental Africa.

In view of the enormous geographical range of my survey and the uneven placement of the numerous islands to which I will refer, I think it makes sense to organize my text spatially in terms of proximity to continental Africa. In my conclusion I will try to make a case for how such grouping can be useful for African studies more generally. Accordingly, in the following sections of my chapter I will discuss inshore and offshore islands first, then—for want of a better term—foreland islands next, and, finally, those islands located much farther afield in the Indian Ocean, which I will designate as distant-water islands, a term I borrow from those scholars who study distant-water fisheries. Of course, none of these categories represent rigid classifications with respect to their African orientation; rather, they are simply a hermeneutic device to make sense of a very large number of discrete geographical bodies.

Inshore and Offshore Islands

The inshore and offshore islands of Indian Ocean Africa have a long history of serving as both frontiers of settlement for coastal inhabitants and stepping stones to the continent for Indian Ocean travelers and traders.

Although no autograph musical manuscript by Achille is dated before 1880, it is clear that by then he had already tried his hand at composing some songs or little piano pieces. This means that the dates of 1876 or 1878, given for some songs in the catalogs based on the lists of works made by Jean-Aubry and Laloy, have very little chance of being authentic. The fact that Debussy allowed these dates to be printed in the early catalogs proves nothing, since he gave unreliable dates to his youthful works in other instances, and he was not at all attentive to this sort of detail.

His first compositional efforts most likely date from 1879. Furthermore, this is the year mentioned in the memoirs of Paul Vidal, who never tired of hearing particularly “Madrid, princesse des Espagnes” and the “Ballade à la lune.” Although the first of these songs, whose text is drawn from Alfred de Musset's Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, has been rediscovered, the second is unknown to us, as are other songs based on Musset poems that Vidal suggested were written under the influence of Edmond Missa, a fellow student in Massenet's class. With Pierné and Passérieu, Vidal heard Achille sing his own works, which “filled us with enthusiasm.” As Vidal pestered him to play some other songs, Achille played a trick on him by memorizing several of Émile Pessard's Joyeusetés de bonne compagnie and passing them off as his own. The following year, when he arrived at Nadezhda von Meck's home, Achille surely had a number of his own compositions in his portfolio.

First Prize in Accompanying

In the meantime, the Chenonceaux dream had faded: Debussy had to come back to Paris and face family worries again, as well as to return—for the seventh year—to the Conservatoire. Since his previous failure barred him from enrolling in a composition class, he focused on the class in piano accompaniment that had been established the previous year by Auguste Bazille, an organist and former rehearsal coach for singers at the Opéra-Comique. A specialist in orchestral reductions at the piano, Bazille praised Léo Delibes's music because it was easy to reduce: “It's the kind of orchestral writing that falls naturally under the fingers,” he used to say.

The two years that followed Achille's return to Paris remain among the most difficult to retrace in his life. With practically no correspondence and very few accounts available to us, there is all the more reason to collate carefully what information we do have.

The reunions with Marie were happy at first, and Achille confessed in a letter to Hébert that he had “genuine reasons to be happy.” The lovers had no doubt found a meeting place, and he no longer felt the need to be the “begging dog,” pleading for a tryst, as when he had come back in secret from Rome. But all this could not last very long. Marguerite Vasnier, Marie's daughter, declared that “the closeness we had in the past was no longer the same. We had moved, made new acquaintances. With his unsociable and moody nature, stuck in his ways, he no longer felt at ease.” Achille tried to resume the lessons that he had begun to give Marguerite, but this quickly failed because he was impatient and did not know how to meet his student at her level. As we have seen, since 1885 (when Achille departed for Rome), the Vasniers no longer maintained the same summer routines. That year, they spent their vacation in Dieppe (at Le Bas-Fort-Blanc) at the chalet of the painter Armand Constant Mélicourt-Lefebvre. At that time, high-society Parisians often visited Dieppe; Countess Greffulhe owned a villa there, where Gabriel Fauré spent some time that same summer. And it was there that, one night, the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche was said to have seen Achille climbing a rope ladder, with Marie at the window! The following year, again at Dieppe, Gustave Popelin loaned his bachelor apartment to Achille, who lifted the bedroom curtain in order to see Marie arriving and later made some rather cynical comments about the scene. The jealousy that had tormented the young composer so much in Rome had certainly dulled, and he had grown weary of taking precautions so as not to compromise his mistress. They were already old lovers, and Marie, herself now forty years old, had put on some weight and was much less attractive. When Achille dedicated his Ariettes to her in 1888, he wrote simply: “To Mme Vasnier, in grateful homage.”

The Comoros and Islandness

In the first issue of the Island Studies Journal, in a discussion of the possibility of developing a coherent theory of island studies, Pete Hay cites Jean-Didier Hache, who asks, in a somewhat doubtful take on island studies, “whether islands have anything in common besides their watery surroundings.” Slightly curiously, Hay did not develop this line of thinking in that particular article, but instead went on to express similar doubts about some of the currents in nissology at the time, concluding with a plea for a phenomenological approach to island studies. This seemed an eminently logical response to the enormous differences in sizes, populations, economies, political systems, cultures, in general, the astonishing diversity of islands that risked rendering an “island studies” paradigm somewhat hollow: what can usefully be said about Manhattan, Iceland, and Bermuda that constitutes them as members of a group that has commonalities and that is qualitatively different from another group that includes places such as São Paolo, Kamchatka, and Gibraltar? There seems to be very little that islands have in common that “mainlands” (and here too, there are problems of definition: are large islands such as Great Britain “mainlands” to their smaller companions?) do not share; and as if this were not enough, the extension—and metaphorization—of the concept of island to desert oases, cities, villages in the rainforest, seemed to render impossible any coherent and cohesive theoretical approach to island studies.

Various attempts have been made to resolve the dilemma by stressing the power relations pertaining between islands and mainlands, by inscribing analyses within the context of postcolonial studies, or by emphasizing the shore and the bounded character of islands (thus differentiating them from oases, for example). These approaches have had some success in analytical terms, but still have not coalesced as “island studies” in any satisfactory fashion.4 For example, many islands have indeed been colonized and dominated, but so, too, have they themselves colonized and dominated, for example, British islanders on the African or Asian mainland, or Japan in Korea.

“Nothing very special has marked the beginning of 1909 for me,” Debussy wrote to Gabriel Mourey on 6 January, “apart from a more pronounced case of procrastination… and this strange need to never finish, which does not jibe with the opposing need of my publisher.” For several years, Debussy had been working on the composition of the Images for orchestra (no longer for two pianos, as he had originally projected in 1903), and at the beginning of 1909, a certain urgency can be detected in his production: the manuscript of “Ibéria” that was to be sent to the engraver is dated Christmas Day 1908, the short score of “Rondes de printemps” bears the date of 30 December 1908, and that of “Gigues” is dated 4 January 1909. While immersed in this work, Debussy gave a veritable course in orchestration to Segalen in their interview on 17 December 1908:

At the beginning of February 1909, when Gabriel Fauré invited Debussy to become a member of the Conservatoire's Conseil supérieur (replacing Ernest Reyer!), he accepted. And this appointment was announced in the press as “a major artistic event.

Before 1967 it is difficult to tell how the Bubi felt about the ties that linked their native island of Bioko—Fernando Po at the time—to continental Equatorial Guinea, Rio Muni. For most of the Spanish colonial era (1858–1968), the inhabitants of Bioko had lived with their backs to Rio Muni. Even though the Spanish claimed historical rights over nearly 77,220 square miles of the mainland territory on the basis of the 1777 Treaty of San Ildefonso-El Pardo between Portugal and Spain, European colonial powers refused to acknowledge such rights. Not until 1883 did Spain timidly begin to make effective its presence on a very small portion of the mainland— the Muni Estuary area—and, especially the nearby small islands of Corisco and Elobey Chico. In 1900, after the signing of the Franc o-Spanish Treaty of Paris, Spanish rights over what became known as Rio Muni were eventually recognized and integrated into a single colony with the rest of Spanish possessions in the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea. The treaty, however, dampened Spanish colonial ambitions south of the Sahara, for Spain was awarded only 10,038 square miles of a territory relatively distant from Bioko. Following such a disappointment, Bioko remained the center of political authority during the entire period of Spanish colonial domination as well as the main focus of economic investment and development. Rio Muni was, to a large extent, an appendage, especially after the late 1920s, when it became clear that it could not provide the much-needed labor force for the thriving cocoa plantations of Bioko. In many ways, Bioko had been both island and mainland with Rio Muni largely depending on the political decisions and economic handouts delivered from Bioko. By the mid-1960s, however, the situation was about to change. Negotiations leading to independence designed a future in which the two territories, Bioko and Rio Muni, would become part of a single sovereign nation, Equatorial Guinea. The reaction from segments of the Bubi population was quick and, with the help of Spanish settlers, they founded Unión Bubi (UB), the political organization that would represent the interests of Bioko's indigenous people and which was granted a seat at the Constitutional Conference (1967–68).

As Igor Kopytoff has well shown, historians were the first to document the specificities of African and Asian systems of slavery in the mid-twentieth century. Anthropologists at that time were reluctant to tackle this subject since they were preoccupied with rehabilitating the much-maligned reputation of the people they studied. As their unease with the topic faded away, a number of pioneering studies appeared that confronted slavery. Their authors were primarily concerned with the question of a universal definition of slavery, that is, one that would be applicable to non-Western societies, as well as with the local definitions of slave status and the reconstruction of past indigenous systems of slavery; they also discussed issues such as the Marxian approach to slavery as a mode of production and the cultural variations in systems of slavery. In the mid-1990s, however, the research agenda on slavery was significantly impacted and reshaped by a major UNESCO project, launched in 1994 and called the Slave Route, which supported the worldwide organization of academic conferences and exhibitions on slavery and the slave trade, and the publication of books on the subject. The interests of anthropologists and historians shifted during this period from questions of slavery as an aspect of indigenous social organization and a mode of production to questions about the cultural implications of enslavement and the trade, especially in the construction of social memory and identity. Indeed, during this period ethnographies and historical accounts dealing with slavery increasingly focused on its remembrance.

These global trends have also been followed in Malagasy and Indian Ocean scholarship. In Madagascar, two major conferences were organized as a direct consequence of the UNESCO project: the first, held in Antananarivo in 1996, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the colonial abolition and was mostly concerned with documenting past slavery and its legacy in the present; the second, held in Toamasina in 1999, addressed the topic of slavery and the slave trade on the East Coast. During these meetings it became apparent that the scientific study of slavery and postslavery raised specific concerns in Madagascar because of the concomitance of the colonial conquest (1895) and the abolition (1896), which means that both events are often closely associated, not least because Malagasy slavery provided a convenient moral justification for the French takeover.

Compositional Activities at the Beginning of 1901

At the beginning of 1901, a rather surprising event occurred: after so many aborted projects with Pierre Louÿs, the incidental music for the Chansons de Bilitis was finally performed in the reception room of the Journal, although it was not repeated at the Théâtre des Variétés, as had been originally discussed. “I'm spending every afternoon this week with nude women,” Louÿs wrote to his brother. The production consisted of short scenes depicting twelve of the songs, delivered by Mlle Milton, for which Debussy had written a “delicate mélange” for two harps, two flutes, and a Mustel celeste. The performance took place on 7 February 1901 for an audience of three hundred people, who, according to the Journal 's cheeky columnist, “were able to feel themselves transported to the great epochs of pure nudity.” This work, which could hardly be described as Symbolist, was the last creation of its kind in which Debussy participated, and it contributed nothing to his reputation.

In order to take a break from the laborious task of correcting and copying Pelléas, the composer worked on two very different pieces for piano. Between January and April, he first composed a three-piece suite, titled simply Pour le piano, that would become commercially available in September; he offered the manuscript to a new pupil, Nicolas Coronio, who became something of a friend. Even more surprising was the appearance in April of a piece for two pianos, written in a style that Debussy had long ago abandoned: Lindaraja, whose title came from one of the patios of the Alhambra in Grenada, an image that he had perhaps encountered in an illustrated periodical and kept in his portfolio.

He was also preoccupied with the two-piano reduction of his Nocturnes. Instead of calling upon experienced musicians, such as his friend Dukas, and even though he had undertaken this task himself for the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, he decided to entrust the transcription to two young composers who were still at the Conservatoire: Maurice Ravel and Raoul Bardac. The latter, who since 1899 had also been his composition “pupil,” was the son of a society lady, an amateur singer who had inspired Fauré's La bonne chanson.

After his separation from Lilly, Debussy's relocation to a private mansion away from the center of Paris represented an abrupt change in his life—quite different from his former lifestyle. Emma was accustomed to living in comfort; the birth of Chouchou, in addition to the presence of Emma's daughter Dolly, led to the employment of a nurse and a housekeeper. While Debussy's copyright revenues had increased, and the income and the amounts stipulated in the contracts with Durand for each work were much more substantial than those the composer had received before 1905, his expenses had become onerous and would weigh more and more heavily on his daily life.

All of Debussy's biographers have reiterated that Emma had been expecting to inherit the fortune of her uncle, the financier Osiris, and that he likely disinherited her when she decided to begin a new life with the composer. A reading of the fourth and final will and testament of Daniel Iffla Osiris, drafted on 20 July 1906, provides a completely different view of the facts. Given that the Pasteur Institute was the financier's chief beneficiary (for about forty million francs), Emma had no reason to hope that she would receive his entire inheritance. Among numerous private bequests, Osiris granted a yearly annuity of 3,000 francs to his nephew (the composer Raoul Bardac) and a sum of 100,000 francs to Dolly (Raoul's sister) which, however, she could not access until she turned twenty-one or married. “Mme Emma Moyse, divorced from M. Bardac,” was to receive “an annual sum of no more than 5,000 francs.”

New Relationships

From then on, Debussy would lead a life of hard work, with little exposure to the outside world; he would sit at his desk, on which his favorite objects, such as the wooden toad he called Arkel, were placed. His parents now lived nearby, on the rue La Fontaine, and several photographs from 1906 (no doubt taken by Emma) show their happiness in visiting their son at his beautiful home. Manuel had just retired.

Among Debussy's new acquaintances was a young Portuguese composer, Francisco de Lacerda, who was born in the Azores.