There is a subtle temptation which leads a man on from mere disinterested craftsmanship, through a positive delight in his own virtuosity, to the exquisite private satisfaction of deceiving the elect.
—Hugh Trevor-Roper, A Hidden Life
The exposure of de Ternant began in 1947 with a letter to the editor of Music & Letters:
Some years ago, when I was working on my books on Debussy, I was in correspondence with Andrew de Ternant. He had published articles in The Musical Times telling most interesting and minutely detailed stories about Debussy.
The author was the eminent French musicologist Léon Vallas (1879–1956), an early biographer of both Claude Debussy and César Franck. Twenty years before, while researching his biography of Debussy, Vallas had come across “Debussy and Brahms,” “Debussy and Some Italian Musicians,” and “Debussy and Some Others on Sullivan,” articles written by de Ternant, a little known writer on musical subjects, in three numbers of The Musical Times. To the biographer, these articles seemed to be goldmines, filled with hitherto unknown adventures of Debussy’s travels and recording detailed conversations between Debussy and a wearily matter-of-fact Leoncavallo, an unusually garrulous Brahms, an accommodating Arrigo Boito, and a rustic, sunny-tempered Verdi. Each of the columns was just a little over two thousand words in length, and, doubtless hoping that de Ternant might be the source of further revelations, Vallas wrote to him.
De Ternant replied to Vallas, explaining that his material
