Beaumarchais had been much impressed by the genius of Gluck. He met him one evening in the _foyer_ of the Opera, and spoke to him so clearly and so well about music that the great composer said to him: "You must surely be M. de Beaumarchais." They agreed to write an opera together, and some years afterwards, when Gluck had left Paris for Vienna, the poet sent the composer the _libretto_ of _Tarare_. Gluck wrote to say that he was delighted with the work, but that he was now too old to undertake the task of setting it to music, and would entrust it to his favourite pupil, Salieri. Gluck benefited French opera in two ways. He endowed the Académie with several master-pieces, and moreover, destroyed, or was the main instrument in destroying, its old _répertoire_, which after the works of Gluck and Piccinni was found intolerable. It was now no longer the fashion to exclude foreign composers from the first musical theatre in France, and Gluck and Piccinni were followed by Sacchini and Salieri. Strange to say, Sacchini, when he first made his appearance at the Académie with his _Olympiade_, was deprived of a hearing through the jealousy of Gluck, who, on being informed, at Vienna, that the work in question was in rehearsal, hurried to Paris and had influence enough to get it withdrawn. Worse than this, when the _Olympiade_ was produced at the Comédie Italienne, with great success, Gluck and his partisans put a stop to the representation by enforcing one of the privileges of the Académie, which rendered it illegal for any other theatre to perform operas with choruses or with more than seven singers on the stage. * * * * * [Sidenote: GLUCK.] No work by Sacchini or Salieri was produced at the Académie until after the theatre in the Palais Royal was burnt down, in 1781. In this fire, which took place about eighteen months after Gluck had retired from Paris, and five months after the production of Piccinni's _Iphigenia in Tauris_, the old _répertoire_ would seem to have been consumed, for no opera by Lulli was afterwards played in France, and only one by Rameau,--_Castor and Pollux_, which, revived in 1791, was not favourably received. * * * * *