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She no longer said to him, as she had said in the early days of their love: "We shall meet, anyhow, to-morrow evening; there's a supper-party at the Verdurins'," but "We sha'n't be able to meet to-morrow evening; there's a supper-party at the Verdurins'." Or else the Verdurins were taking her to the Opera-Comique, to see Une Nuit de Cleopatre, and Swann could read in her eyes that terror lest he should ask her not to go, which, but a little time before, he could not have refrained from greeting with a kiss as it flitted across the face of his mistress, but which now exasperated him.
We only know that the rôle of the prophet's mother was originally intended for Madame Stoltz, but she had left the Opéra. Meyerbeer heard Madame Pauline Viardot at Vienna and found in her his ideal, so he created the redoubtable rôle of Fidès for her. The part of Jean was given to the tenor Roger, the star of the Opéra-Comique, and he played and sang it well.
My Rêverie, La Feuille de Peuplier and many other things first appeared there. They have been entirely forgotten, and rightly, for my work was very uneven. At the end of his career Halévy was constantly writing opera and opéra-comique which added nothing to his fame and which disappeared never to be revived after a respectable number of performances.
I now come to one whose entire dramatic career I have been able to follow the best talent the Opéra-Comique had to show, Mme. Dugazon. Never has such reality been seen upon the stage. The actress disappeared, and gave place to the actual Babet, Countess d'Albert, or Nicolette. Her voice was rather weak, but it was strong enough for laughter, for tears, for all situations, for all parts.
Camille du Locle, who was the manager of the Opéra-Comique at the time, could not put on Le Timbre d'Argent, and while he waited for better days, which never came, to do that, he offered me a one-act work. He proposed Louis Gallet as my collaborator, although I had not known him until then. "You were made to understand each other," he told me.
In this latter capacity, spared on the trial of the Hebertists, he is kept as a tool, for the reason, doubtless, that he is narrow, coarse and manageable, more compromised than anybody else, good for any job, without the slightest chance of becoming independent, unemployed in the army, having no prestige with true soldiers, a general for street parade and an interloper and lower than the lowest of the mob; his mansion, his box at the Opera-Comique, his horses, his importance at festivals and reviews, and, above all, his orgies make him perfectly content.
I want to find a little place there for myself, not in a desert with water and locusts and wild honey, but in a merry company of primitive beings, among the tinkling of guitars, the sighs of love, the moonlight, and such-like in short, in a quite ordinary opéra-comique, without any rescuing spectre of Schopenhauerian philosophy in the background."
But Meyerbeer liked to change the titles of his operas several times in the course of the rehearsals in order to keep public curiosity at fever heat. He had the notion of writing an opéra-comique in one act, and he asked his favorite collaborators, Jules Barbier and Michael Carré, for a libretto. They produced Dinorah in three scenes and with but three characters.
Camusot de Marville, a short and stout man, grown solemn since his promotion at the Court, admired Cicero, preferred the Opera-Comique to the Italiens, compared the actors one with another, and followed the multitude step by step.
Whilst I was walking along the Faubourg Saint Honore I suddenly perceived an open caleche, drawn by a pair of horses, bestriding one of which was a postillion arrayed in the traditional costume hair a la Catogan, jacket with scarlet facings, gold-banded hat, huge boots, and all the other appurtenances which one saw during long years on the stage in Adolphe Adam's sprightly but "impossible" opera-comique "Le Postillon de Longjumeau."
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