ome one as poor as
themselves. These rich men buy the autographs of the deceased genius for
small or large sums which would have provided the struggling ones with
comforts for days and days. I have before me such a letter which I
bought for ten francs. I would willingly have given ten times the amount
not to have bought it. It is written to a friend of his youth. "As for
money," it says, "seeing that I am bound to speak of it, things are
going from bad to worse. And it is very certain that in a little while I
shall have to give it up altogether. I have been ill for three weeks
with pains in the back, and fever and ague everywhere. I dare say that
my illness was brought on by my worries, and by the bad food of the
Paris restaurants, also by the constant dampness. Why am I not a little
better off? I fancy that the slight comforts an artist may reasonably
expect would do me a great deal of good. I am not speaking of the body,
though it is a part of ourselves which considerably affects our
intellect, but my imagination would be the better for it, for how can my
brain, constantly occupied as it is with the worry of material wants,
act unhampered? Really, I do not hesitate to say that poverty and
privation kill the imagination."

They did not kill the imagination in David's case, but they undermined
his constitution. It was at that period that he fell in with the
Saint-Simoniens, to the high priest of which, M. Enfantin, who
eventually became the chairman of the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean
Railway Company, he took me many years later. After their dispersion,
the group to which he belonged went to the East, and it is to this
apparently fortuitous circumstance that the world owes not only "Le
Desert," "La Perle du Bresil," and "L'Eden," but probably also
Meyerbeer's "Africaine." Meyerbeer virtually acknowledged that but for
David's scores, so replete with the poetry of the Orient, he would have
never thought of such a subject for one of his operas. M. Scribe, on the
other hand, always maintained that the idea emanated from him, and that
it dated from 1847, when the composer was given the choice between "La
Prophete" and "L'Africaine," and chose the former. One might almost
paraphrase the accusation of the wolf against the lamb in La Fontaine's
fable. "M. Scribe, if you did not owe your idea to Felicien David, you
owed it to Montigny, the director of the Gymnase, who in the thirties
produced a play with a curious name, and a