“What is it now?”
“Suppress Mercury. Those wings on his head and his heels are really too comical. No one ever saw anybody with wings anywhere but on their shoulders.”
“Ah, you have seen people with wings on their shoulders? I have not, but I can quite understand that wings in unexpected places are awkward. One does not often meet Mercury strolling about the streets of Paris.”
Can any one conceive what these crass idiots made me endure? In addition, I had to fight the musical ideas of Carvalho, who could not believe that, after studying opera for forty years, I knew just a little about it.
The actors alone loyally abstained from worrying me, for which forbearance I give them all most hearty thanks.
The first performance took place on the 4th November 1863. There was no hostile demonstration except the hissing of one man, and he kept on regularly up to the tenth night. Five papers said everything insulting that they could think of, but, on the other hand, fifty articles of admiring criticism—among them those of my friends, Gasperini, d’Ortigue, L. Kreutzer, and Damcke—filled me with a joyous pride to which I had too long been a stranger.
I also received many appreciative letters, and was frequently stopped in the street by strangers who begged to shake hands with the author of The Trojans.
Were these not compensations for the diatribes of my foes? In spite of the cutting and polishing (I called it mutilation) that my Trojans suffered at the hands of Carvalho, it only ran twenty-one nights. The receipts did not reach his expectations; he cancelled the engagement of Madame Charton-Demeur, who left for Madrid, and to my great comfort my work disappeared from the play-bills.
Nevertheless, being both author and composer, my royalties for those twenty-one performances and the sale of the piano score in Paris and London amounted—to my unspeakable joy—to about the annual income I derived from the Journal des Débats, and I was, therefore, able to resign my post as critic.
Freedom, after thirty years of slavery! No more articles to concoct, no more platitudes to excuse, no more commonplaces to extol, no more righteous wrath to bottle up, no more lies, no more farces, no more cowardly compromises! Free! I need never more set foot in theatre! Gloria in excelsis! Thanks to The Trojans the wretched quill-driver is free!!