CHAPTER XI
MY DÉBUT AT THE OPERA
Death, which by taking away my mother had stricken me in my dearest affections, had also taken her mother from my dear wife. So we lived the next summer at Fontainebleau in a sorrowful house of mourning.
Remembrance of the dear departed still hung over us, when I learned on the fifth of June of the death of Bizet. The news came like a thunder clap. Bizet had been a sincere and affectionate comrade, and I had a respectful admiration for him although we were about the same age.
His life was very hard. He felt the spirit within him, and he believed that his future glory would outlive him. Carmen, famous for forty years, appeared to those called upon to judge a work which contained good things, although it was somewhat incomplete, and also—what did they not say at the time?—a dangerous and immoral subject.
What a lesson on too hasty judgments!...
On returning to Fontainebleau after the gloomy funeral I tried to take up my life again and work on Le Roi de Lahore on which I had already been busy for several months.
The summer that year was particularly hot and enervating. I was so depressed that one day when a tremendous storm broke I felt almost annihilated and let myself fall asleep.
But if my body was lulled to sleep, my mind remained active; it seemed never to stop working. Indeed my ideas seemed to profit from this involuntary rest imposed by Nature to put themselves in order. I heard as in a dream my third act, the Paradise of India, played on the stage of the Opéra. The intangible performance had, as it were, filled my mind. The same phenomenon happened to me on several subsequent occasions.
I never would have dared to hope it. That day and those which followed I began to write the rough draft of the instrumental music for that scene in Paradise.