Women always gain the day, whenever they plead in favor of the unknown and the lowly, and Auber was then both unknown and lowly. Madame Planard pleaded so well in this particular instance that her protégé obtained from Planard two pieces instead of one to set to music. The first was a piece in one act, entitled “Le Testament et le Billet Doux,” which unfortunately met with a much less favorable reception from the public than “Le Séjour Militaire,” and that had been a failure. The next venture was “La Bergère Châtelaine,” in three acts, and it made ample amends for all previous mortifications. Its success was unanimous and brilliant. None too soon indeed. Had the author lost this opportunity his future as a composer would have been irretrievably ruined, for no poet would have entrusted him with a libretto. At the time when Auber produced “La Bergère Châtelaine,” the turning-point in his artistic career, he was thirty-eight years of age, just a year younger than Rossini when he closed his with that immortal masterpiece “Guillaume Tell.” Planard, having witnessed the failure of “Le Testament,” would have liked to take back the libretto of “La Bergère Châtelaine” which he had handed over to Auber some time before. But now he was very happy to have another of his pieces, in three acts, entitled “Emma,” set to music by the composer. This work was represented at the Théâtre Feydeau in 1821, and was an extraordinary success. The high road to fortune was now open, and for more than forty years the composer’s career was one long series of triumphs, which continued to the last day of his life. One might have thought, after the complete success of the two last comic operas upon which Auber and Planard collaborated, that they would have continued to work together for a long time; but it was not so. Scribe had just then attained his brilliant position as a writer of vaudevilles. Fate had decided that there should be a partnership between him and Auber, a partnership which of all the combinations that ever existed between word-writer and musician was the happiest and most lasting. What was the secret of the union of these two minds, these two talented beings who were so well constituted to understand each other that they seem to have been born the one for the other, to work together for their common glory and to the great delight of the public who applauded them so well? It was in this wise.