not contemplate a long stay.  Apart from this probably deceptive impression, I soon noticed the great change that had taken place in the home life of the family.  The grandmother was laid up with a broken leg, which at her age was incurable.  Ollivier had taken her into his very small flat for more efficient nursing and care, and we all met for dinner at her bedside in the tiny room.  Blandine had greatly changed since the previous summer, and wore a sad and serious expression, and I fancied that she was enceinte.  Emile, although dry and superficial, was the only one who gave me any sound advice.  When the fellow Lindau sent me a letter through his lawyer demanding the compensation awarded him by the law for his imaginary co-operation in the translation of Tannhauser, all that Emile said on reading the letter was, ‘Ne repondez pas,’ and his advice proved as useful as it was easy to follow, for I never heard anything more of the matter.  I sorrowfully made up my mind not to trouble Ollivier any more, and it was with an inexpressibly sad look that Blandine and I parted.

With Czermak, on the other hand, I entered into almost daily intercourse.  I used to join him and the Truinet family of an evening at the Taverne Angiaise, or some other equally cheap restaurants which we hunted out.  Afterwards we generally went to one of the smaller theatres, which, owing to pressure of work, I had not troubled about on my former visits.  The best of them all was the Gymnase, where all the pieces were good and played by an excellent company.  Of these pieces a particularly tender and touching one-act play called Je dine chez ma Mere remains in my memory.  In the Theatre du Palais Royal, where things were not now so refined as formerly, and also in the Theatre Dejazet, I recognised the prototypes of all the jokes with which, in spite of poor elaboration and unsuitable localisation, the German public is being entertained all the year round.  Besides this I occasionally dined with the Flaxland family, who still refused to despair of my eventual success with the Parisians.  For the present my Paris publisher continued to issue the Fliegender Hollander as well as Rienzi, for which he paid me tifleen hundred francs as a small fee, which I had not bargained for on the first edition.

The cause of the almost cheerful complacency with which I managed to regard my adverse situation in Paris, and which enabled me afterwards to look back on it as a pleasant memory, was that my libretto of the Meistersinger daily increased its swelling volume of rhyme.  How could I help being filled with facetious thoughts, when on raising my eyes from the paper, after meditating upon the quaint verses and sayings of my Nuremberg Meistersinger, I gazed from the third-floor window of my hotel on the tremendous crowds passing along the quays and over the numerous bridges, and enjoyed a prospect embracing the Tuileries, the Louvre, and even the Hotel de Ville!