And at first it seemed as if the completion of his opera would be accomplished with perfect ease. He covered piles of music paper with great celerity, and when his power of invention suddenly ceased it did not frighten him, for he remembered that, even in his best days, the inspiration had suffered such moments. He proposed while waiting for a fresh impulse, to polish that which was already written; but when he came to examine it, it was a chaos, which even he himself could not understand. Whole bars were wanting, the accompaniment was perfectly incoherent. Here and there certainly, were places of striking beauty, quite isolated however, like splendid ruins in heaps of rubbish.
Another thing disquieted him. Many of the technical signs of orchestration had escaped him, he could no longer write a regular score. He spent the whole night in looking over a work on composition. Next morning he began his work anew.
To carry out with perfect clearness one miserable little phrase caused him the most painful effort. The faculty of concentration seemed lost to him. But he shirked no pains, no fatigue--"Patience! Patience! It will all come!" he said to himself, and at the same time his tears fell on the paper.
He imposed the most fearful privations upon himself in order to eke out his means to the farthest possible extent. He moved from the orange-yellow room to an attic--he ate once a day.
He grew grey, his hands trembled and he stammered in his speech. The children on the hill, whither he crept, of an afternoon, for air, all knew him and tripped in a friendly way up to the bench where he cowered, muttering to himself, a note-book on his knees, a pencil in his hand, and wished him good-day. He stroked their cheeks, took them on his lap and rejoiced that they were not afraid of him. He would gladly have told them stories--but the words would not come.
One day he brought his violin up to the Buttes Montmartre. Anxious to please the children's taste, he played them little dances. His fingers had grown stiff since he had so suddenly renounced the inspiring indulgence of drink. The bow wavered in his trembling hand. He was ashamed before the children. But for them his playing was exactly right. Soon a large audience had assembled around him. Some of the little people gazed at him with earnest attention, their heads slightly thrown back, their hands clasped behind them--others danced gaily with one another.
This pleased him. He held up his head before the children. He felt as if he would like to improvise; then it seemed to him as if the tune that sprung from under his fingers was strangely familiar--it was the same which he had played nearly thirty years before in the circus on the "Sablon."
And now every day he shuffled with his violin up to the shabby garden. The poor children's applause had become a necessity.
* * * * *
He grew more and more intimate with the Tenor. The latter, after having been refused at the opera--thanks to a vile conspiracy--had arrived at the practical conviction that this Grand Opera was a decaying institution, with which he would scorn to have any relations, and had accepted an engagement in a café chantant of the Faubourg Montmartre, where he earned a comfortable subsistence.