Gatien Pierre Joseph Ferdinand de Marcailhou d'Aymeric was born on December 18, 1807, in Ax. He was the son of Jean Pierre Augustin Marcailhou (1767–1848), a customs collector, and Rose Élisabeth Astrié du Castelet. His father, who was nicknamed “the Doctrinaire,” taught rhetoric at the age of twenty at the Royal College of Toulouse (a former Doctrinaire at the Esquille of Toulouse; it is said that he was the teacher of the venerable M. Izac) and emigrated to Spain with his three brothers during the Revolution.
Gatien Marcailhou showed a remarkable talent for dealing with people from an early age, a skill he learned under his father’s guidance. By improvising melodies, he soon surpassed the master.
“Marcailhou is the true creator of the modern French waltz. Immortally famous, Marcailhou’s waltzes remain to this day documents of their era, like the white or pale pink camellias that our ancestors of the Second Empire loved.”
— Maurice Ravel, 1933.
The waltz is a little more than a dance [...] It is an era, the exquisite suffering of an era, the vertigo and the flight from an entire vanished Europe. This name, which does not rhyme, is one of the happiest and most elegant words in existence. We must associate it with the name of the musician who was the first to define the form of this law of whirling movements and thus gave so many couples the soul of rhythm: Marcailhou.”
— Paul Valéry.
“Indiana, the paragon of her kind, retains a rosy freshness with a moist heart.”
— Camille Saint-Saëns.
“This sculpture, standing in the center of the salon, is the admirable embodiment of Marcailhou’s waltz.”
— Paul Claudel on the famous bronze sculpture by his sister Camille Claudel.
“Indiana, the stream, the whirlwind that expressed the joy of youthful love, have, over time
