Colette said of him: ''Il chante mieux que tout ce qui chante''. The phrase has endured; beiung of an uncritical, uncategorical, poetical nature, It seizes on one of the most features of Fournier's musical personality. The celebrated writer, by ranking the cellist among the creators of vocal beauty, focused on a characteristic that, whether more or less consciously, was discerned by most of those who heard him in concert; his impulse towards the ''cantabile''. His was a charisma in which the spiritual and sensual were inextricably interwined as happens so often in French art forms. And Fournier was most definitely French, to the core, in both the exercising of art and in his life.