My first works were put on in the provinces with old scenery, and I was compelled to hear the stage manager say things like this:
"For the first act we have found an old background from _La Favorita_; for the second two sets from _Rigoletto_," etc., etc.
I recall an obliging director who on the eve of a first performance, knowing that I lacked a tenor, offered me one, but warning me, "This artist knows the part, but I ought to tell you that he is always flat in the third act."
Which reminds me that in the same house I knew a basso who had a strange pretension, still more strangely expressed, "My voice," said our basso, "goes down so far that they can't find the note on the piano."
Oh, well, they were all valiant and honest artists. They did me service and had their years of success.
But I see that I am loitering on the way in telling of these old times. I have to tell of the new work which was in rehearsal in Monte Carlo--I mean _Thérèse_.
One summer morning in 1905 my great friend, Georges Cain, the eminent and eloquent historian of Old Paris, got together the beautiful, charming Mme. Georges Cain, Mlle. Lucy Arbell, of the Opéra, and a few others to visit what had once been the convent of the Carmelites in the Rue de Vaugirard.
We had gone through the cells of the ancient cloister, seen the wells into which the blood stained horde of Septembrists had thrown the bodies of the slaughtered priests, and we had come to the gardens which remain so mournfully famous for those frightful butcheries. Georges Cain stopped in the middle of his recital of these dismal events, and pointed out to us a white figure wandering alone in the distance.
"It is the ghost of Lucile Desmoulins," he said. Poor Lucile Desmoulins so strong and courageous beside her husband on his way to the scaffold where she was so soon to follow him!
It was neither shade nor phantom. The white figure was very much alive! It was Lucy Arbell who had been overcome by deep emotion and who had turned away to hide the tears.
A few days afterwards I was lunching at the Italian Embassy. At dessert the kindly Comtessa Tornielli told us, with that charming grace and delightful eloquence which were so characteristic of her, the story of the ambassdorial palace, Rue de Grenelle.