He declared that if he had not had the consolation in those doleful hours of knowing that I had, at any rate, got my Dutchman finished, and that a prospect of success was thus opened to the little circle of friends, his misery would have been hard indeed to bear.  Despite my own great trouble, I begged him to share our fire and work in my room.  He smiled at my courage in trying to help others, especially as my quarters offered barely space enough for myself and my wife.  However, one evening he came to us and silently showed me a letter he had received from Villemain, the Minister of Education at that time, in which the latter expressed in the warmest terms his great regret at having only just learned that so distinguished a scholar, whose able and extensive collaboration in Didot’s issue of the Greek classics had made him participator in a work that was the glory of the nation, should be in such bad health and straitened circumstances.  Unfortunately, the amount of public money which he had at his disposal at that moment for subsidising literature only allowed of his offering him the sum of five hundred francs, which he enclosed with apologies, asking him to accept it as a recognition of his merits on the part of the French Government, and adding that it was his intention to give earnest consideration as to how he might materially improve his position.

This filled us with the utmost thankfulness on poor Lehrs’ account, and we looked on the incident almost as a miracle.  We could not help assuming, however, that M. Villemain had been influenced by Didot, who had been prompted by his own guilty conscience for his despicable exploitation of Lehrs, and by the prospect of thus relieving himself of the responsibility of helping him.  At the same time, from similar cases within our knowledge, which were fully confirmed by my own subsequent experience, we were driven to the conclusion that such prompt and considerate sympathy on the part of a minister would have been impossible in Germany.  Lehrs would now have a fire to work by, but alas! our fears as to his declining health could not be allayed.  When we left Paris in the following spring, it was the certainty that we should never see our dear friend again that made our parting so painful.

In my own great distress I was again exposed to the annoyance of having to write numerous unpaid articles for the Abendzeitung, as my patron, Hofrath Winkler, was still unable to give me any satisfactory account of the fate of my Rienzi in Dresden.  In these circumstances I was obliged to consider it a good thing that Halevy’s latest opera was at last a success.  Schlesinger came to us radiant with joy at the success of La Reine de Chypre, and promised me eternal bliss for the piano score and various other arrangements I had made of this newest rage in the sphere of opera.  So I was again forced to pay the penalty for composing my own Fliegender Hollander by having to sit down and write out arrangements of Halevy’s opera.  Yet this task no longer weighed on me so heavily.  Apart from the wellfounded hope of being at last recalled from my exile in Paris, and thus being able, as I thought, to regard this last struggle with poverty as the decisive one, the arrangement of Halevy’s score was far and away a more interesting piece of hack-work than the shameful labour I had spent on Donizetti’s Favorita.