Claude Debussy instead "an exquisite, pellucid style" capable of conveying "not only gaiety and whimsicality but emotion of a deeper sort". In a 2004 study, Mark DeVoto comments that Debussy's early works are harmonically no more adventurous than existing music by Fauré; in a 2007 book about the piano works, Margery Halford observes that "Deux arabesques" (1888–1891) and "Rêverie" (1890) have "the fluidity and warmth of Debussy's later style" but are not harmonically innovative. Halford cites the popular "Clair de Lune" (1890) from the "Suite Bergamasque" as a transitional work pointing towards the composer's mature style. Musicians from Debussy's time onwards have
Au clair de la lune night by all the little boys of Paris, that song of "Au clair de la lune," every verse of which was a remembrance of happiness to Cresson, and a reproach of cruelty to friend Peterkin, who would not open his door to his neighbor, when he requested this slight service. In his 1952 memoir "Witness", Whittaker Chambers reminisced: In my earliest recollections of her, my mother is sitting in the lamplight, in a Windsor rocking chair, in front of the parlor stove. She is holding my brother on her lap. It is bed time and, in a thin sweet voice,