In order to incite me to work more ardently (as if I had need of it) my publisher—he had improvised a scenario—engaged for me at the Reservoirs at Versailles, a vast ground floor apartment on the level of the gardens of our great Le Notre.
The room in which I was installed had a lofty ceiling with Eighteenth Century paneling and it was furnished in the same period. The table at which I wrote was the purest Louis XV. Hartmann had chosen everything at the most famous antiquarians.
Hartmann had special aptitude for doing his share of the work. He spoke German very well; he understood Goethe; he loved the German mind; he stuck to it that I should undertake the work.
So, when one day it was suggested that I write an opera on Murger's La Vie de Bohème, he took it on himself to refuse the work without consulting me in any way.
I would have been greatly tempted to do the thing. I would have been pleased to follow Henry Murger in his life and work. He was an artist in his way. Théophile Gautier justly called him a poet, although he excelled as a writer of prose. I feel that I could have followed him through that peculiar world he created and which he has made it possible for us to cross in a thousand ways in the train of the most amusing originals we had ever seen. And such gaiety, such tears, such outbursts of frantic laughter, and such courageous poverty, as Jules Janin said, would, I think, have captivated me. Like Alfred de Musset—one of his masters—he had grace and style, ineffable tenderness, gladsome smiles, the cry of the heart, emotion. He sang songs dear to the hearts of lovers and they charm us all. His fiddle was not a Stradivarius, they said, but he had a soul like Hoffman's and he knew how to play so as to bring tears.
I knew Murger personally, in fact so well that I even saw him the night of his death. I was present at a most affecting interview while I was there, but even that did not lack a comic note. It could not have been otherwise with Murger.
I was at his bedside when they brought in M. Schaune (the Schaunardo of La Vie de Bohème). Murger was eating magnificent grapes he had bought with his last louis and Schaune said laughing, "How silly of you to drink your wine in pills!"
As I knew not only Murger but also Schaunard and Musette, it seemed to me that there was no one better qualified than I to be the musician of La Vie de Bohème. But all those heroes were my friends and I saw them every day, so that I understood why Hartmann thought the moment had not come to write that so distinctly Parisian work, to sing the romance that had been so great a part of my life.
As I speak of that period which is already in the distant past, I glory in recalling that I knew Corot at Ville-d'Avray, as well as our famous Harpignies, who despite his ninety-two years is, as I write, in all the vigor of his immense talent. Only yesterday he climbed gaily to my floor. Oh, the dear great friend, the marvellous artist I have known for fifty years!
When the work was done, I went to M. Carvalho's on the twenty-fifth of May. I had secured Mme. Rose Caron, then at the Opéra, to aid me in my reading. The admirable artiste was beside me turning the pages of the manuscript and showing the deepest emotion at times. I read the four acts by myself, and when I reached the climax, I fell exhausted, annihilated.