“Oh you untiring vagabond! when will you return, once more to preside over our nights of music?
“Between ourselves, you always had too many people at your gatherings—too much talk, too little listening. You, alone, wasted an amount of inspiration that was enough to turn one giddy, without all the rest of the folks in addition.
“Do you remember that evening at Legouvé’s when—the lights put out—you played the C sharp minor sonata, we five lying in the dark on the floor? My tears and Legouvé’s, Schoelcher’s wondering respect, Goubeaux’s astonishment! Ah me! you were indeed sublime that night!
“But to get back to news.
“There is a glorious row toward between our Opera troupe and the Italian; they want to unite them in the Rue Le Pelletier. It will be rather a shock. Lablache against Levasseur, Rubini against Duprez, Tamburini against Dérivis, Grisi against Mdlle. Naudin and the whole lot against the big drum.
“We mean to be there to pick up the dead and the dying. Lots of people find fault with the Opera orchestra, they say they do not keep in tune, that the right-hand side tends to get a quarter-tone higher than the left—which these gentlemen consider most unreasonable——
“‘You seem to suffer in silence,’ one of them said to me the other day.
“‘I? I did not say I suffered at all,’ I replied. ‘First, because I never said a word, and secondly, because....’
“Sometimes when they are at their wit’s end they play Don Giovanni. If Mozart could come back to this world, he would tell them (like Molière’s president) that he would not have it played.
“The other day, Ambroise Thomas, Morel, and I were saying we would give five hundred francs for a good performance of Spontini’s Vestale; that set us off—we know it by heart—and we went on singing it till midnight.