With a little patience the good public would have triumphed over the ill will of which I had been forewarned.
One day in February, 1909, I had finished an act of Don Quichotte (I will speak of that later on)—it was four o'clock in the afternoon—and I rushed to my publishers to keep an appointment with Catulle Mendes. I thought I was late, and as I went in I expressed my regret at keeping my collaborator waiting. An employee answered me in these words:
"He will not come. He is dead."
My brain reeled at the terrible news. I would not have been more knocked out if some one had hit me over the head with a club. In an instant I learned the details of the appalling catastrophe.
When I came to myself I could only say, "We are lost as far as Bacchus is concerned at the Opéra. Our most precious support is gone."
The anger his keen, fine criticism aroused against Catulle Mendes was a pretext for revenge on the part of the slaughtered.
These fears were only too well justified by the doubts of which I have spoken and if, in the sequel, Catulle Mendes had been present at our rehearsals he would have been of great assistance.
My gratitude to those great artists—Bréval, Arbell, Muratore, Gresse—is very great. They fought brilliantly and their talents inspired faith in a fine work. It was often planned to try to counteract the ill feeling. I thank Mm. Messager and Broussan for the thought although it came to nothing.
I wrote an important bit of orchestration (with the curtain down) to accompany the victorious fight of the apes in the Indian forests with the heroic army of Bacchus. I managed to make real—at least I think I did—in the midst of the symphonic developments the cries of the terrible chimpanzees armed with stones which they hurled from the tops of the rocks.
Mountain passes certainly don't bring good luck. Thermopylae and Ronceval as Roland and Leonidas learned to their cost. All their valor was in vain.