to understand and love each other, so he has become, with
years, one of my best and most devoted friends. He first produced my
ballet _Javotte_ at the Grand-Theatre in Lyons, which the Monnaie in
Brussels had ordered and then refused. He had dreams of directing the
Opera-Comique and installing _Le Timbre d'Argent_ there. Fate willed
otherwise.

We have seen how the young French school was encouraged under the
Empire. The situation has improved and the old state of affairs has
never returned. But we find more than the analogy between the old point
of view and the one that was revealed not long ago when the French
musicians complained that they were more or less sacrificed in favor of
their foreign contemporaries. At bottom it is the same spirit in a
modified form.

To resume. As everyone knows, the way to become a blacksmith is by
working at a forge. Sitting in the shade does not give the experience
which develops talent. We should never have known the great days of the
Italian theatre, if Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi had had to
undergo our regime. If Mozart had had to wait until he was forty to
produce his first opera, we should never have had _Don Giovanni_ or _Le
Nozze di Figaro_, for Mozart died at thirty-five.

The policy imposed on Bizet and Delibes certainly deprived us of several
works which would now be among the glories of the repertoire at the
Opera and the Opera-Comique. That is an irreparable misfortune; one
which we cannot sufficiently deplore.

CHAPTER V

LOUIS GALLET

As _Dejanire_, cast in a new form, has again appeared in the vast frame
of the Opera stage, I may be allowed to recall my recollections of my
friend and collaborator, Louis Gallet, the diligent and chosen companion
of my best years, whose support was so dear and precious to me.
Collaboration for some reason unknown to me is deprecated. Opera, it is
said, should spring from the brain like Minerva, fully armed. So much
the better if such divine intellects can be found, but they are rare and
always will be. For dramatic and literary art on the one hand and
musical art on the other require different powers, which are not
ordinarily found in the same person.

I first met Louis Gallet in 1871. Camille du Locle, who was the manager
of the Opera-Comique at the time, could not put on _Le Timbre d'Argent_,
and while he waited for better days, which never came, to do that, he
offered me a one-act work. He proposed Louis Gall