Having at last, in this frame of mind, given my consent to fix the date of the first performance of my opera, I was now plagued in another direction in the most astonishing way.  Every one of my friends and partisans demanded a good seat for the first night; but the management pointed out that the occupation of the house on such occasions was entirely in the hands of the court and those dependent on it, and I was soon to realise clearly enough to whom these seats were to be allotted.  At present I had to suffer the annoyance of being unable to serve many of my friends as I should have liked.  Some of them were very quick to resent what they supposed to be my neglect of them.  Champfleury in a letter complained of this flagrant breach of friendship; Gasperini started an open quarrel because I had not reserved one of the best boxes for his patron and my creditor Lucy, the Receiver-General of Marseilles.  Even Blandine, who had been filled with the most generous enthusiasm for my work at the rehearsals she had attended, could not suppress a suspicion that I was guilty of neglecting my best friends when I was unable to offer her and her husband Ollivier anything better than a couple of stalls.  It needed all Emil’s sang-froid to obtain from this deeply offended friend a just appreciation of the honest assurance that I was in an impossible position, in which I was exposed to betrayal on all sides.  Poor Bulow alone understood everything; he suffered with me, and shirked no trouble to be of use to me in all these difficulties.  The first performance on the 13th of March put an end to all these complications; my friends now understood that it was to no celebration of my triumphs, as they supposed, to which they should have been invited.

I have already said enough elsewhere of the way in which this evening passed off.  I was justified in flattering myself that in the end a favourable view of my opera prevailed, inasmuch as the intention of my opponents had been to break up this performance completely, and this they had found it impossible to do.  But I was grieved the next day to receive nothing but reproaches from my friends, with Gasperini at the head of them, because I had allowed the occupation of the house at the first performance to be completely wrested out of my hands.  Meyerbeer, they urged, knew how to work such things differently; had he not, ever since he first appeared in Paris, refused to allow the production of a single one of his operas to take place without a guarantee that he himself should fill the auditorium, to the remotest corner?  As I had not looked after my best friends, such as M. Lucy, was not the ill-success of that evening to be ascribed to my own conduct?  Confronted with these and similar arguments, I had to spend the whole day in writing letters and in devoting myself to the most urgent efforts at propitiation.  Above all, I was besieged with advice as to how I might recover the lost ground at the subsequent performances.