he pleased, and that might elicit an echo from the group of his favorites, but the public remained unmoved, and Bonaparte had the humiliation to see this opera, notwithstanding his approbation, prove a complete failure.  He felt as nervous and excited as the composer himself, for he declared loudly and angrily that the French knew nothing about music, and that it was necessary to teach them that the Italians alone understood the art of composition.

To teach this to the French the opera of Proserpina was to be repeated until the mind of the public should have been educated to its beauty, and they had been forced to acknowledge it.  A decided warfare ensued between this opera and the public, each party being determined to have its own way; the authorities persevered in having the performance repeated, and the public kept away from it with equal obstinacy.  The latter, however, had the advantage in this case, for they could not be forced to attend where they were unwilling to go, and so they won the victory, and the authorities had to yield.

Paesiello, touched to the quick by the failure of Proserpina, resigned his position as leader, and left Paris to return to Italy.  The question now was, how to fill this important and honorable position.  The Parisians were excited about this nomination, and divided into two parties, each of which defended its candidate with the greatest zeal, and maintained that he would be the one who would receive Bonaparte’s appointment.  The candidates of these two parties were the Frenchman Mehul and the Italian Cherubini.  Those who formed the party of Cherubini calculated especially on Bonaparte’s well-known preference for Italian music.  They knew that, though he was much attached to Mehul, whom he had known before the expedition to Egypt, and had shown him many favors, yet he had often expressed his contempt for French music, and was committed against him by the very fact of his maintaining that the Italians alone understood the art of musical composition.

Mehul had for a long time endured in silence the criticisms of Bonaparte; he had patiently returned no answer when he repeated to him:  “Science, and only science—­that is all the French musicians understand; my dear sir, grace, melody, and joyousness, are unknown to you Frenchmen and to the Germans; the Italians alone are masters here.”

One day Mehul, having become tired of these constant discouraging remarks, resolved to let the first consul, who so often gave him bitter pills to swallow, have a taste of them himself.

He went, therefore, to his friend, the poet Marsollier, and begged him to write an extremely lively and extravagant piece, whose design would be absurd enough to make it pass as the work of some Italian pamphlet-writer, and at the same time he enjoined the most profound secrecy.