Now, there are some periods of music, some pitches of which I can hear nothing... of my music as well as of others. I feel that there is on my shoulders nothing more than a terrible cloak of misery and discouragement.
Private letter, dated August 1903, discussing Fauré's encroaching deafness; as quoted in At the Piano with Gabriel Fauré (1963) by Marguerite Long, p. 26