Only great men act like that!
Events, however, decreed otherwise, and the thousand pages of orchestration were for thirty years a well from which I drew many a passage for my subsequent works.
I was beaten, but not broken.
Ambroise Thomas, the constant, ever kind genius of my life, introduced me to Michel Carré, one of the collaborators on Mignon and Hamlet. The billboards constantly proclaimed his successes and he entrusted me with a libretto in three acts which was splendidly done, entitled Méduse.
I worked on this during the summer and winter of 1869 and during the spring of 1870. On the twelfth of July of that year the work had been done for several days, and Michel Carré made an appointment to meet me at the Opéra. He intended to tell the director, Emile Perrin, that he must put the work on and that it would pay him to do so.
Emile Perrin was not there.
I left Michel Carré, who embraced me heartily and said, "Au revoir. On the stage of the Opéra."
I went to Fontainebleau where I was living, that same evening.
I was going to be happy....
But the future was too lovely!