revolutionary minister, joined us in a state of complete collapse, declaring that the row in the theatre was more than she could bear.  No one seemed able to tell me exactly how the third act had been got through.  As far as I could make out, it resembled the turmoil of a battle thick with the smoke of gunpowder.  I invited my friend Truinet to visit me the next morning, so that with his help I might compose a letter to the management withdrawing my work and, as author, forbidding any further performance of the same, as I did not wish to see my singers abused instead of myself by a section of the public from whom the Imperial administration seemed unable to protect them.  The astonishing thing about the whole matter was that in thus interfering I was guilty of no bravado, for a fourth and fifth performance of the opera had been already arranged, and the management protested that they were under obligations to the public, who still continued to crowd to this opera.  But through Truinet I contrived to have my letter published the next day in the Journal des Debats, so that at last, though with great reluctance, the management gave their consent to my withdrawal of the piece.

Thereupon the legal action taken on my behalf by Ollivier against Lindau also came to an end.  The latter had put in a claim on my author’s rights in the libretto, in which he said he was entitled to a share as one of the three collaborators.  His counsel, Maitre Marie, based his plea on a principle which I was said to have established myself, namely that the point of chief importance was not the melody, but the correct declamation of the words of the libretto, which obviously neither Roche nor Truinet could have ensured, seeing that neither of them understood German.  Ollivier’s argument for the defence was so energetic that he was almost on the point of proving the purely musical essence of my melody by singing the ‘Abendstern.’  Completely carried away by this, the judges rejected the plaintiff’s claim, but requested me to pay him a small sum by way of compensation, as he seemed really to have taken some part in the work at the beginning.  In any case, however, I could not have paid this out of the proceeds of the Paris performances of Tannhauser, as I had decided with Truinet, on withdrawing the opera, to hand over the whole of the proceeds from my author’s rights, both for libretto and music, to poor Roche, to whom the failure of my work meant the ruin of all his hopes for the amelioration of his position.

Various other connections were also dissolved by this outcome of affairs.  During the past few months I had busied myself with an artistic club which had been founded, chiefly through the influence of the German embassies, among an aristocratic connection for the production of good music apart from the theatres, and to stimulate interest in this branch of art among the upper classes.  Unfortunately, in the circular it had published it had illustrated its endeavours