If it be
fiction, it is not without interest, and I take pleasure in telling it.
The natives of Solesmes say that at a very remote period a great
painter, coming from a distance, spent some time in their town. The good
inhabitants of the place know nothing of the pictures which this master
must have produced; perhaps they are quite as wide from his name! But
Delsarte, struck by the probability of this poetic origin, filled with
brotherly sympathy for the pure and graceful talent of Vannuchi del
Sarto, doubted not that the latter was the artist whose memory is held
sacred in Solesmes. Out of respect and veneration for the Italian
master, he divided the syllables, but still retained the French
termination of his name.
We can readily see that an imaginative spirit, such as we now have to
deal with, would be carried away by the legendary side of this story,
and that he would put full faith in his own commentaries:--he believed
so many things!
To return to prose and to reality, I must add that Delsarte based his
sentiment upon partial proof. Before the Revolution, the family did
indeed sign themselves del Sarte; but an ancestor--imbued with the
principles of 1789, and anxious to efface all suspicion of noble
origin--effected a fusion of the two parts of the word, and left us the
name as we have known it and as, perhaps, we regret it.
Those who regard this change of family name as mere vanity seem to me
wide of the truth.
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