The sea voyage came just in time to give him local color for this weird nautical opera. Three times the vessel was tossed by violent storms, and once the captain was obliged to seek safety in a Norwegian harbor. The sailors told Wagner their version of the "Flying Dutchman" legend, and altogether these adventures were the very thing he wanted at the time, and aided him in making his opera realistic, both in its text and its music, which imitates the howling of the storm winds and "smells of the salt breezes." So for once our young musician had a streak of luck. But it did not last long. He found Paris a very large city, and with very little use for him. He made the most diverse efforts to support himself, nearly always without success. Once it seemed as if his hopes were to be fulfilled. The Théâtre de la Renaissance accepted his "Novice of Palermo;" but at the last moment there was the usual bankruptcy of the management,--the fourth that affected him! Then he wrote a Parisian Vaudeville, but it had to be given up because the actors declared it could not be executed. The Grand Opera, on which he had fixed his eye, was absolutely out of the question. He was brought to such straits that he offered to sing in the chorus of a small Boulevard theatre, but was rejected. His wife pawned her jewels; on several occasions it is said that she even went into the street to beg a few pennies for their supper. It was doubtless during these years of starvation that Wagner acquired those gastric troubles which in later years often prevented him from working more than an hour or two a day. A few German friends occasionally gave a little pecuniary aid, but the only regular source of income was musical hackwork for the publisher Schlesinger, who gladly availed himself of Wagner's skill in having him make vocal scores of operas, or arrange popular melodies for the piano and other instruments. Wagner also wrote stories and essays for musical periodicals, for which he received fair remuneration; but his attempt to compose romances and become a parlor favorite failed. Nobody wanted his songs, and he finally offered them to the editor of a periodical in Germany for two dollars and a half to four dollars apiece. This may seem ludicrously pathetic; but then had not poor Schubert, a little more than a decade before this, sold much better songs for twenty cents each! Meyerbeer no doubt aided Wagner, but considering his very great influence in Paris, he achieved surprisingly little for him. The score of "Rienzi" had been completed in 1840, and in the spring of the next year, Wagner went to Meudon, near Paris, and there composed the music of "The Flying Dutchman," in seven weeks, but neither of these operas seemed to have the least chance to appear on the boards of the Grand Opera. The best their author could do was to sell the libretto of "The Flying Dutchman" for one hundred dollars, reserving the right to set it to music himself.