Henry Roujon, my confrère at the Institute, was good enough at the banquet the following day, to read the speech I would have delivered myself had I not been obliged to stay in bed. To be read by Henri Roujon is both honor and success. Saint-Saëns was also invited to the fêtes and he too stayed in the palace. He lavished the most affectionate care on me constantly. The Prince himself deigned to visit me in my sick room and both told me of the success of the performance and of our Thérèse, Lucy Arbell. The doctor had left me quieter in the evening and he too opened my door about midnight. He doubtless did so to see how I was, but he also told me of the fine performance. He knew it would be balm of certain efficacy for me. Here is a detail which gave me great satisfaction. They had given _Le Vieil Aigle_ by Raoul Gunsbourg in which Mme. Marguerite Carré, the wife of the manager of the Opéra-Comique, was highly applauded. Albert Carré had been present at the performance and he met one of his friends from Paris and told him that he was going to put on _Thérèse_ at the Opéra-Comique with its dramatic creatrix. As a matter of fact four years after the première at Monte Carlo and after many other houses had performed the work, the first performance of _Thérèse_ was given at the Opéra-Comique on May 28, 1911. _L'Echo de Paris_ was so kind as to publish for the occasion a wonderfully got up supplement. As I write these lines, I read that the second act of _Thérèse_ is a part of that rare program of the fête offered to me at the Opéra on Sunday, December 10, 1911, by the organizers of the pious French popular charity, "Trente Ans de Théâtre," the useful creation of my friend, Adrian Bernheim, whose mind is as generous as his soul is great and good. A dear friend said to me recently, "If you wrote _Le Jongleur de Notre Dame_ with faith, you wrote _Thérèse_ with all your heart." Nothing could be said more simply, and nothing could touch me more. CHAPTER XXVI FROM ARIANE TO DON QUICHOTTE I never deliver a work until I have kept it by me for months, even for years. I had finished _Thérèse_--long before it was produced--when my friend Heugel told me that he had already made arrangements with Catulle Mendes to write a sequel to _Ariane_. Although to our way of thinking _Bacchus_ was a distinct work, it should form a whole with _Ariane_. The text for it was written in a few months and I took great interest in it. And yet--and this is entire accord with my character--hesitation and doubt often bothered me. Of all the fabulous stories of the gods and demigods of antiquity those which relate to the Hindu heroes are perhaps the least known. The study of the fables of mythology, which has had until recently only the interest of curiosity in even the most classical learning, has, thanks to the work of modern scholars, acquired a higher import as they have discovered its rôle in the history of religion.