opera.  ’La Nonne Sanglante’ (1854), his next work, was a failure; but in ’Le Medecin malgre lui’ (1858), an operatic version of Moliere’s comedy, he scored a success.  This is a charming little work, instinct with a delicate flavour of antiquity, but lacking in comic power.  It has often been played in England as ‘The Mock Doctor.’  Sganarelle is a drunken woodcutter, who is in the habit of beating his wife Martine.  She is on the look-out for a chance of paying him back in his own coin.  Two servants of Geronte, the Croesus of the neighbourhood, appear in search of a doctor to cure their master’s daughter Lucinde, who pretends to be dumb in order to avoid a marriage she dislikes.  Martine sends them to the place where her husband is at work, telling them that they will find him an able doctor.  She adds that he has one peculiarity, namely, that he will not own to his profession unless he is soundly thrashed.  Under the convincing arguments of the two men, Sganarelle admits that he is a doctor, and follows them to their master’s house.  Leandre, Lucinde’s lover, persuades Sganarelle to smuggle him into the house as an apothecary.  The two young people with Sganarelle’s help contrive an elopement, but when the marriage is discovered, Geronte visits his wrath upon the mock doctor, and is only pacified by the news that Leandre has just inherited a fortune.

The year 1859 saw the production of ‘Faust,’ the opera with which Gounod’s name is principally associated.  The libretto, by MM.  Barbier and Carre does not of course claim to represent Goethe’s play in any way.  The authors had little pretension to literary skill, but they knew their business thoroughly.  They fastened upon the episode of Gretchen, and threw all the rest overboard.  The result was a well-constructed and thoroughly comprehensible libretto, with plenty of love-making and floods of cheap sentiment, but as different in atmosphere and suggestion from Goethe’s mighty drama as could well be imagined.

The first act shows us Faust as an old man, sitting in his study weary and disappointed.  He is about to end his troubles and uncertainty in death, when an Easter hymn sung in the distance by a chorus of villagers seems to bid him stay his hand.  With a quick revulsion of feeling he calls on the powers below, and, rather to his surprise, Mephistopheles promptly appears.  In exchange for his soul, the devil offers him youth, beauty, and love, and, as an earnest of what is to come, shows him a vision of the gentle Margaret sitting at her spinning wheel.  Faust is enraptured, hastily signs the contract, and hurries away with his attendant fiend.