While I was writing this music I went many times to the Jardin des Plantes to study the habits of these mammals. I loved these friends of which Schopenhauer spoke so evilly when he said that if Asia has her monkeys Europe has her French. The German Schopenhauer was not very friendly to us.
Long before they decided, after many discussions, to start rehearsing Bacchus (it did not appear until the end of the season of 1909) it was my good fortune to begin work on the music in three acts for Don Quichotte. Raoul Gunsbourg was exceedingly anxious to have both the subject and the cast at the Monte Carlo Opéra.
I was in very bad humor when I thought of the tribulations Bacchus had brought on me without there being anything with which I could reproach myself either as a man or as a musician.
So Don Quichotte came into my life as a soothing balm. I had great need of it. Since the preceding September I had suffered acute rheumatic pains and I had passed much more of my existence in bed than out of it. I had found a device which enabled me to write in bed.
I put Bacchus and its uncertain future out of my thoughts, and day by day I advanced the composition of Don Quichotte.
Henri Cain, as is his way, built up very cleverly a scenario out of the heroic play by Le Loraine, the poet whose fine future was killed by the poverty which preceded his death. I salute that hero to art whose physiognomy resembled so much that of our "Knight of the Doleful Countenance."
What charmed me and decided me to write this work was Le Loraine's stroke of genius in substituting for the coarse wench at the inn, Cervantes's Dulcinée, the original and picturesque La Belle Dulcinée. The most renowned French authors had not had that idea.
It brought to our piece an element of deep beauty in the woman's rôle and a potent poetical touch to our Don Quixote dying of love—real love this time—for a Belle Dulcinée who justified the passion.
So it was with infinite delight that I waited for the day of the performance which came in February, 1910. Oh beautiful, magnificent première!
They welcomed our marvellous artists with great enthusiasm. Lucy Arbell was dazzling and extraordinary as La Belle Dulcinée and Gresse was an extremely comical Sancho.