Meyerbeer, even more than anyone, tried not to lose his ideas and the study of their transformation is extremely interesting. One day Nuitter, the archivist at the Opera, learned of an important sale of manuscripts in Berlin. He attended the sale and brought back a lot of Meyerbeer's rough drafts which included studies for a _Faust_ that the author never finished. These fragments give no idea what the piece would have been. We see Faust and Mephistopheles walking in Hell. They come to the Tree of Human Knowledge on the banks of the Styx and Faust picks the fruit. From this detail it is easy to imagine that the libretto is bizarre. The authorship of this amazing libretto is unknown, but it is not strange that Meyerbeer soon abandoned it. From this still-born _Faust_, Scribe, at the request of the author, constructed _Robert le Diable_. An aria sung by Faust on the banks of the Styx becomes the _Valse Infernale_. The necessity of utilizing pre-existing fragments explains some of the incoherence of this incomprehensible piece. It also explains the creation of Bertram, half man, half devil, who was invented as a substitute for Mephistopheles. The fruit of the Tree of Human Knowledge became the _Rameau Veneree_ in the third act, and the beautiful religious scene in the fifth act, which has no relation to the action, is a transposition of the Easter scene. So Scribe should not be blamed for making a poor piece when he had so many difficulties to contend with. He must have lost his head a little for Robert's mother was called Berthe in the first act and Rosalie in the third. However, the answer might be that she changed her name when she became religious. Later, Scribe was put to another no less difficult test with _L'Etoile du Nord_. When Meyerbeer was the conductor at the Berlin Opera, he wrote on command _Le Camp de Silesie_ with Frederick the Great as the hero and Jenny Lind as the musical star. As we know, Frederick was a musician, for he both composed music and played the flute, while Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, was a great singer. A contest between the nightingale and the flute was sure to follow or theatrical instinct is a vain phrase. But in the piece Scribe created, Peter the Great took Frederick the Great's place and to give a motive for the grace notes in the last act it was necessary for the terrible Tsar, a half savage barbarian, to learn to play the flute.