That is the testimony of my excellent comrade and affectionate friend, George Bizet—a friend and comrade who would have remained steadfast had not blind destiny torn him from us in the full bloom of his prodigious and marvelous talent.
Still in the dawn of life when he passed from this world, he could have compassed everything in the art to which he devoted himself with so much love.
CHAPTER XVI
FIVE COLLABORATORS
As is my custom, I did not wait for Manon's fate to be decided before I began to plague my publisher, Hartmann, to wake up and find me a new subject. I had hardly finished my plaint, to which he listened in silence with a smile on his lips, than he went to a desk and took out five books of manuscript written on the yellow paper which is well known to copyists. It was Le Cid, an opera in five acts by Louis Gallet and Edouard Blatt. As he offered me the manuscript, Hartmann made this comment to which I had nothing to reply, "I know you. I had foreseen this outburst."
I was bound to be pleased at writing a work based on the great Corneille's masterpiece, the libretto due to the fellow workers I had had in the competition for the Imperial Opera, La Coup de roi de Thulé, in which, as I have said, I failed to win the first prize.
I learned the words by heart, as I always did. I wanted to have it constantly in my thoughts, without being compelled to keep the text in my pocket, so as to be able to work at it away from home, in the streets, in society, at dinner, at the theater, anywhere that I might find time. I get away from a task with difficulty, especially when, as in this case, I am gripped by it.
As I worked I remembered that d'Ennery sometime before had entrusted to me an important libretto and that I had found a very moving situation in the fifth act. While the words did not appear sufficiently worth while to lead me to write the music, I wanted to keep this situation. I told the famous dramatist and I obtained his consent to interpolate this scene in the second act of Le Cid. Thus d'Ennery became a collaborator. This scene is where Chimène finds that Rodriguez is her father's murderer.
Some days later, as I was reading the romance of Guilhem de Castro, I came across an incident which became the tableau where the consoling apparition appears to the Cid as he is in tears—the second tableau in the third act. I was inspired to this by the apparition of Jesus to Saint Julien the Hospitalier.
I continued my work on Le Cid wherever I happened to be, as the performances of Manon took me to the provincial theaters where they alternated it with Hérodiade both in France and abroad.
I wrote the ballet for Le Cid at Marseilles during a rather long stay there. I was very comfortably established in my room, at the Hotel Beauveau, with its long latticed windows which looked out on the old port. The prospect was actually fairylike. This room was decorated with remarkable panels and mirrors, and when I expressed my astonishment at seeing them so well preserved, the proprietor told me that the room was an object of special care because Paganini, Alfred de Musset and George Sand had all lived there once upon a time. The cult of memories sometimes reaches the point of fetishism.