As he chatted with me, he remarked that my thoughts were elsewhere and that I was preoccupied with another idea. That was it exactly. I was drawn to confess my adventure with Roma.
My desire to find in that work the text of my dreams was immediately shared by Henri Cain; forty-eight hours afterwards he brought me the authorization of the heirs. They had signed an agreement which gave me five years in which to write and put on the work.
It is an agreeable thing to thank again Mme. Parodi, a woman of unusual and real distinction, and her sons, one of whom holds a high place in the Department of Public Instruction.
As I have already said, I found myself in February, 1910, at Monte Carlo for the rehearsals and first performance of Don Quichotte. I again lived as before in that apartment in the Hotel du Prince de Galles which has always pleased me so much. I always returned to it with joy. How could it be otherwise?
The room in which I worked looked out on the level of the boulevards of the city and I had an incomparable view from my windows.
In the foreground were orange, lemon, and olive trees; on the horizon the great rock rising out of the azure waves, and on the rock the old palace modernized by the Prince of Monaco.
In this quiet peaceful home—an exceptional thing for a hotel—in spite of the foreign families installed there, I was stirred to work. During my hours of freedom from rehearsals I busied myself in writing an overture for Roma. I had brought with me the eight hundred pages of orchestration in finished manuscript.
The second month of my stay at Monte Carlo I spent at the Palace of Monaco. I finished the composition there amidst enchantment, in its deeply poetic splendor.
When I was present at the rehearsals of Roma two years later and first heard the work played at sight by the artists of the Opéra conducted with an extraordinary art by that master Leon Jehin, I thought of the coincidence that these pages had been written on the spot so near where they were to be played.
When I returned to Paris in April, after the sumptuous fêtes with which the Oceanographic Museum was opened, I received a call from Raoul Gunsbourg. He came in the name of his Serene Highness to learn whether I had a work I could let him have for 1912. Roma had been finished for some time; the material for it was all ready, and in consequence I could promise it to him and wait two years more. I offered it to him.