It was in 1888 (April 21) that "Germinal," the play based on his novel, was at last produced at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. There was then a lull in the political unrest of France; nevertheless the Censorship had insisted on multitudinous alterations in the piece, for fear lest "revolutionary passions" should be aroused. To all the changes and suppressions suggested by timorous politicians one may largely attribute the failure of the play. The expenses were one hundred and twenty pounds[4] a night, and at the fifth performance the receipts had fallen to one hundred and twelve pounds. Thus a change of programme soon became imperative. Zola naturally was vexed. "It is largely the fault of the newspapers," said he to Edmond de Goncourt; "they din into their readers' ears that only amusing plays are worth seeing. But the misfortune is that on account of this piece I have had to put my novel 'Le Rêve' on one side and have thus lost time." "Le Rêve" appeared in volume form in the autumn of 1888,[5] and subsequently, in conjunction with M. Louis Gallet, Zola drew from his story a libretto for his friend M. Alfred Bruneau, the composer, from whom the much-discussed opera "Le Rêve" came three years later.[6] Meantime Zola had written his novel, "La Bête Humaine," which was suggested in part, undoubtedly, by "Jack the Ripper" and the theory of "homicidal mania," and in part by the mysterious death of a certain French prefect, named Barrême, who had been found assassinated in a railway carriage. We know that Zola had contemplated a book on the railway world for several years, but had been at a loss how to utilize such a subject in fiction. The Barrême affair extricated him from his difficulty, and was clearly indicated as one of his sources of inspiration in the "puff preliminary" which "La Vie Populaire" printed before beginning to publish the story in November, 1889: "The principal episode of 'La Bête Humaine,'" said this announcement, "is a murder in a railway train; and there are so many points of similarity between the terrible scene depicted by Zola and the mysterious death of Prefect Barrême, that one may well inquire if the novelist, with an intuition superior to that of the police, has not supplied the most probable explanation of that dark affair." In a letter addressed to M. Charpentier in August, 1889, while he was writing "La Bête Humaine," at Médan, Zola said: