"Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself." Satie

Do you remember his laugh?

Indeed I do. And I can see him as clearly as if he was standing before us. He had stepped straight out of a Toulouse-Lautrec picture – as though alighting from a train. He cam from Arcueil, which he’d turned into a little town with only one inhabitant – himself. I can remember, too, the time when he staggered a meeting, chiefly of painters, by announcing that he had discovered twenty-seven entirely new colors. The audience was perplexed, and for a long time he kept them guessing, till finally someone asked him point-blank how he’d done such an extraordinary thing – for, after all, to discover twenty-seven new colors that had no relation to the old ones was nothing less than earth-shaking.
“Like this . . . ,” he (Satie) explained to the old bearded painter. “By suddenly and remorselessly obliterating the colors of the spectrum with an india-rubber.”

Beucler, Ravel and Fargue remembering Satie, from Satie Remembered by Robert Ortledge. photo from satie homepage.