In my opinion, if Rossini committed suicide as far as his art was concerned, he did so because he had nothing more to say. Rossini was a spoiled child of success and he could not live without it. Such unexpected hostility put an end to a stream which had flowed so abundantly for so long. The success of his _Soirees Musicales_ and his _Stabat_ encouraged him. But he wrote nothing more except those slight compositions for the piano and for singing which may be compared to the last vibrations of a sound, as it dies away. Later--much later--came _La Messe_ to which undue importance has been attributed. "_Le Passus_," one critic wrote, "is the cry of a stricken spirit." La Messe is written with elegance by an assured and expert hand, but that is all. There are no traces of the pen which wrote the second act of _Guillaume Tell_. Apropos of this second act, it is not, perhaps, generally known that the author had no idea of ending it with a prayer. Insurrections are not usually begun with so serious a song. But at the rehearsals the effect of the unison, _Si parmi nous il est des Traitres_, was so great that they did not dare to go on beyond it. So they suppressed the real ending, which is now the brilliant entrancing end of the overture. This finale is extant in the library at the Opera. It would be an interesting experiment to restore it and give this beautiful act its natural conclusion. CHAPTER XIX JULES MASSENET Massenet has been praised indiscriminately--sometimes for his numerous and brilliant powers and sometimes for merits he did not have at all. I have waited to speak of him until the time when the Academie was ready to replace him,--that is to say, put some one in his place, for great artists are never replaced. Others succeed them with their own individual and different powers, but they do not take their places nevertheless. Malibran has never been replaced, nor Madame Viardot, Madame Carvalho, Talma and Rachel. No one can ever replace Patti, Bartet or Sarah Bernhardt. They could not replace Ingres, Delacroix, Berlioz, or Gounod, and they can never replace Massenet.