to produce good music by comparing them to those of the Jockey Club to improve the breed of horses.  Their object was to enrol all who had won a name in the musical world, and I was obliged to become a member at a yearly subscription of two hundred francs.  Together with M. Gounod and other Parisian celebrities, I was nominated one of an artistic committee, of which Auber was elected president.  The society often held its meetings at the house of a certain Count Osmond, a lively young man, who had lost an arm in a duel, and posed as a musical dilettante.  In this way I also learned to know a young Prince Polignac, who interested me particularly on account of his brother, to whom we were indebted for a complete translation of Faust.  I went to lunch with him one morning, when he revealed to me the fact that he composed musical fantasies.  He was very anxious to convince me of the correctness of his interpretation of Beethoven’s Symphony in A major, in the last movement of which he declared he could clearly demonstrate all the phases of a shipwreck.  Our earlier general meetings were chiefly occupied with arrangements and preparations for a great classical concert, for which I also was to compose something.  These meetings were enlivened solely by Gounod’s pedantic zeal, who with unflagging and nauseating garrulity executed his duties as secretary, while Auber continually interrupted, rather than assisted the proceedings, with trifling and not always very delicate anecdotes and puns, all evidently intended to urge us to end the discussions.  Even after the decisive failure of Tannhauser I received summonses to the meetings of this committee, but never attended it any more, and sent in my resignation to the president of the society, stating that I should probably soon be returning to Germany.

With Gounod alone did I still continue on friendly terms, and I heard that he energetically championed my cause in society.  He is said on one occasion to have exclaimed:  ’Que Dieu me donne une pareille chute!’ As an acknowledgment of this advocacy I presented him with the score of Tristan und Isolde, being all the more gratified by his behaviour because no feeling of friendship had ever been able to induce me to hear his Faust.

I now came into touch with energetic protagonists of my cause at every turn.  I was particularly honoured in the columns of those smaller journals of which Meyerbeer had as yet taken no account, and several good criticisms now appeared.  In one of these I read that my Tannhauser was la symphonie chantee.  Baudelaire distinguished himself by an exceedingly witty and aptly turned pamphlet on this topic; and finally Jules Janin himself astonished me by an article in the Journal des Debats, in which, with burning indignation, he gave a somewhat exaggerated report, in his own peculiar style, of the whole episode.  Even parodies of Tannhauser were given in the theatres for the delectation of the public; and Musard could