So I lived again in Rome in the most pleasant thoughts of Marie Magdeleine. Naturally it was the topic of conversation on the ideal walks I took with Hébert in the Roman Campagna.
Hébert was not only a great painter but also a distinguished poet and musician. In the latter capacity he played in a quartet which was often heard at the Académie.
Ingres, also a director of the Académie, played the violin. Delacroix was asked one day what he thought of Ingres's violin playing.
"He plays like Raphael," was the amusing answer of this brilliant colorist.
So delightful was our stay in Rome that it was with regret that we left that city so dear to our memories and went back to Paris.
I had hardly got back to No. 46 Rue du General Foy—where I lived for thirty years—than I became absorbed in a libretto by Jules Adenis—Les Templiers.
I had hardly written two acts when I began to worry about it. The piece was extremely interesting, but its historical situations took me along the road already travelled by Meyerbeer.
Hartmann agreed with me; indeed my publisher was so outspoken about it that I tore into bits the two hundred pages which I had submitted to him.
In deep trouble, hardly knowing where I was going, I happened to think of calling on Louis Gallet, my collaborator in Marie Magdeleine. I came from this interview with him with the plan of Le Roi de Lahore. From the funeral pyre of the last Grand Master of the Templars, Jean Jacques de Molay, whom I had given up, I found myself in the Paradise of India. It was the seventh heaven of bliss for me.
Charles Lamoureux, the famous orchestra leader, had just founded the Concerts de l'Harmonie Sacrée in the Cirque des Champs Élysées, which to-day has disappeared. (What a wicked delight they take in turning a superb theater into a branch of the Bank or an excellent concert hall into a grass plot of the Champs Élysées!)