As there was no theatre in Fontainebleau large enough to hold the huge audience, the concert was given in the Ménage d’Artillerie, which had been hastily converted into a concert hall. It proved excellent for this purpose, except that as soon as we began playing, hundreds of birds, which had had undisturbed possession of the rafters and of the musical privileges of this building for years, were evidently disturbed and angered by our intrusion. They suddenly flew out from their nests and burst into shrill songs of protest, which mingled, not without interesting results, with the harmonies of the “New World Symphony,” played by special request of the sous-préfet, M. Fragnaud, who is himself an excellent amateur oboe player. In the front rows of the audience were hundreds of school-children who had been dressed “en Américaine,” with enormous bows and sashes composed of the American stars and stripes. That there were several hundred of these I can testify, as I had to shake hands with every one of them after the concert. The following day, before leaving for Belgium, I received the welcome news that a rather disagreeable matter concerning our three concerts at the Paris Opéra had been most amicably settled. The Opera House, which is the property of the French Government, had been offered to us by the Ministère des Beaux Arts “free of rent,” but we were to pay for the actual expenses of light, heat, and service incurred. When I first arrived in Paris our local manager informed us that the Director of the Opera, who holds a lease of the building, intended to charge us thirty thousand francs for his “expenses.” This seemed to me excessive, and I remonstrated with M. Leon, the Director of the Beaux Arts. The Director of the Opera, who had lost millions of francs at the opera during the war, was a man of wealth to whom the opera was more or less of a personal toy, but he evidently wished to recoup somewhat on us, for he argued that, inasmuch as he might have given opera performances on the days and hours when we had our concerts, we should be charged with the pro-rata expense of his singers, orchestra, chorus, and ballet. This argument, however, did not seem valid to us, as since time immemorial there had never been any opera performances on those days of the week. I presented our case to M. Leon and told him that as I had never had any dealing or arrangement with the Director of the Opera but only with the Ministère des Beaux Arts, I was compelled to leave the matter entirely in their hands. We were their guests, and if they felt that we should pay thirty thousand francs for “expenses” we would most certainly do so. The results were most satisfactory, but not entirely unexpected by me, and the sum which we finally paid was a perfectly fair amount.