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STORIES OF
find himself in the course of a public ceremony, forced to listen to the famous Republican hymn and apparently was not at all shocked, conse-quently some officious nobody wrote to the local papers about him. One of these, the " Semaine Religieuse," took the matter up in a manner least expected, and said " How is it possible that anybody should be astonished that a bishop should listen with complaisance to an air which in reality has a religious origin?" The idea, promulgated not for the first time, was that the author plagiarized it from a piece of sacred music. Then was revived the story not of Simon Tappertit, but M. Tappert. He affirmed that the theme of the " Marseillaise" was to be found in a credo of a mass composed in 1776 by Holtzmann, chapel master of the parish church at Meersbourg. Naturally this announcement caused an immense sensation among the musical savants, and more particular-ly among those who worshipped the piece as a national and patriotic anthem. M. Tappert was immediadely called on to explain where this mass was to be found, but up to the last he failed to do so, and therefore we are at liberty to assume that he invented the story for some reason or other. In 1886 it was also stated that the air was taken from a religious source
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