I relied on an apartment which I had engaged in advance, but the landlord told me that he had let it to two ladies who seemed very busy. I started to hunt another lodging when I was called back. I learned that the two who had taken my rooms were Emma Calvé and one of her friends. The two ladies doubtless heard my name mentioned and changed their itinerary. However, their presence in that place so far from Paris showed me that our Sapho had necessarily suspended her run of performances.
What whims will not one pardon in such an artiste?
I learned that in two days everything was in order again at the theater in Paris. Would that I had been there to embrace our adorable fugitive!
Two weeks later I learned from the papers in Nice that Albert Carré had been made manager of the Opéra-Comique. Until then the house had been temporarily under the direction of the Beaux-Arts.
Who would have thought that it would have been our new manager who would revive Sapho considerably later with that beautiful artiste who became his wife. But it was she who incarnated the Sapho of Daudet with an unusually appealing interpretation.
Salignac, the tenor, had a considerable success in the rôle of Jean Gaussin.
At the revival Carré asked me to interweave a new act, the act of the Letters, and I carried out the idea with enthusiasm.
Sapho was also sung by that unusual artiste Mme. Georgette Leblanc, later the wife of that great man of letters Maeterlinck.
Mme. Bréjean-Silver also made this rôle an astonishingly lifelike figure.
How many other artists have sung this work!