—London. There he continued his experiments,
finished his improvements, and established a
house. The double action cost him twelve
years of anxious toil; and, although he
took out his first patent in eighteen hundred
and one, he did not complete his invention
until eighteen hundred and eleven. His
immediate, pecuniary success was
extraordinary. He sold twenty-five thousand
pounds' worth of the new harps in London
alone in the first year.

The double escapement of the piano was
not made public until eighteen hundred and
twenty-three. The wonders achieved on the
piano by such performers as Lizt and Thalberg
are due to the scope given to their
perseverance and genius by mechanism which
makes the instrument capable of expressing
the sweetest, the most powerful, and the
most varied sounds, and the most delicate
repetitions.

Organs have occupied the talents of the
Erards, as well as harps and pianos. Sébastien
Erard applied to the organ his system of
expression by the fingers. An organ which he
had constructed in the chapel of the Tuileries,
was destroyed by the insurgents of July,
eighteen hundred and thirty. Luckily, the
whole of the mechanism of the expression
had been preserved in the factory. Pierre
Erard was authorised by the present emperor
to construct another organ in the Imperial
chapel; an order which he promptly executed.
The new instrument is admired as a
chef-d'oeuvre of mechanical art.

The financial career of the Erards was
chequered. The political events in France
towards the end of the first empire had
an evil influence upon commerce, and the
Paris branch of the house was forced to
suspend payments in eighteen hundred and
thirteen, overwhelmed by a debt of more
than one million three hundred thousand
francs, or fifty-two thousand pounds. The
establishment was not, however, totally
crippled; for, aided by the prosperity of the
London house, the firm paid off this debt in
ten years.

The history of the fortunes of the Erards is
picturesquely connected with the beautiful
Château de la Muette, at Passy, near Paris, a
château which may be seen from the end of
the lake recently made in the Bois de Boulogne.
When Sébastien Erard was a young man,
newly arrived in Paris, he waited one Sunday
at the gate of the château to see the Queen
Marie Antoinette, who resided in it, come out
in her carnage. Sébastien, who was in the
midst of the crowd when she passed, cried,
"Vive la Reine!" with a powerful voice and
an Alsacian accent. The queen remarked
the fine young man, whom she mistook for
one of her own countrymen. She spoke
to him, and asked him of what country he
was? He replied, " I am French at heart
by my birth, as your majest is by your
marriage."

The queen ordered the Swiss guards at
the gate to allow him to walk over the garden
and see the grounds. Sébastien went in,
and spent the day in admiring the
magnificent alleys and fairy-like walks of the park.
A few years later Sébastien Erard constructed
a piano for Marie Antoinette, which combined
several remarkable inventions to adapt the
instrument to the limited resources of her
voice. About half a century after the Sunday
on which the Queen of France permitted
the young clavichord-maker to walk over the
gardens, the Château de la Muette was for
sale, and in eighteen hundred and twenty-three
Sébastien Erard was the purchaser,
and installed himself in it with his family.
He took a great pleasure in repeating
the story of his first interview with Marie
Antoinette.

Jean Baptiste Erard died in eighteen hundred
and twenty-six. He had been extremely
useful to his brother in superintending the
execution of his designs and inventions. In
eighteen hundred and thirty-one, Sébastien
died. During the period in which the man
of genius of the family was at the head of it,
uncontrolled and unassisted, the details of
execution were neglected, the financial aspect
of the business was lost sight of, and the
instruments of the Erards lost somewhat of their
repute. Pierre Erard, born in seventeen
hundred and ninety-four, was left sole executor
of his uncle; and, when the inventory of the
state of the affairs was submitted to a London
attorney, Pierre was advised to renounce the
succession. He had, however, more confidence
in the capabilities of the business; and
continued it with such success that in a few
years he extinguished the enormous debt
with which it was encumbered. He attended
to the execution of the pianos, and raised the
house to its greatest pitch of prosperity and
renown.

The Chateau de la Muette plays once more
a part in the history of the Erards. In
eighteen hundred and fifty-two there was a
railway executed which environs Paris. Pierre
Erard saw it in his garden, and heard the
engines shrieking underneath his windows.
It was too much for him. He became a
mental wreck, and died in August, eighteen
hundred and fifty-five.

The Erards have wisely stood by their own
order. When Jean Baptiste might have
obtained, by means of her fortune, a husband
for his daughter from among the nobility of
France, he preferred Spontini, the composer,
who could sympathise with the just pride
and feel the inventive and industrial merits of
the Erards. Their family is now extinct; and
a century elapsing from seventeen hundred
and fifty-two to eighteen hundred and
fifty-five rounds the story from the cradles of the
orphans of the poor cabinet-maker of
Strasbourg to the hearse of the wealthy tradesman
which divided the attention of the Parisians
with the equipage of Queen Victoria.