My brain reeled at the terrible news. I would not have been more knocked out if some one had hit me over the head with a club. In an instant I learned the details of the appalling catastrophe. When I came to myself I could only say, "We are lost as far as _Bacchus_ is concerned at the Opéra. Our most precious support is gone." The anger his keen, fine criticism aroused against Catulle Mendes was a pretext for revenge on the part of the slaughtered. These fears were only too well justified by the doubts of which I have spoken and if, in the sequel, Catulle Mendes had been present at our rehearsals he would have been of great assistance. My gratitude to those great artists--Bréval, Arbell, Muratore, Gresse--is very great. They fought brilliantly and their talents inspired faith in a fine work. It was often planned to try to counteract the ill feeling. I thank Mm. Messager and Broussan for the thought although it came to nothing. I wrote an important bit of orchestration (with the curtain down) to accompany the victorious fight of the apes in the Indian forests with the heroic army of Bacchus. I managed to make real--at least I think I did--in the midst of the symphonic developments the cries of the terrible chimpanzees armed with stones which they hurled from the tops of the rocks. Mountain passes certainly don't bring good luck. Thermopylae and Ronceval as Roland and Leonidas learned to their cost. All their valor was in vain. While I was writing this music I went many times to the Jardin des Plantes to study the habits of these mammals. I loved these friends of which Schopenhauer spoke so evilly when he said that if Asia has her monkeys Europe has her French. The German Schopenhauer was not very friendly to us. Long before they decided, after many discussions, to start rehearsing _Bacchus_ (it did not appear until the end of the season of 1909) it was my good fortune to begin work on the music in three acts for _Don Quichotte_. Raoul Gunsbourg was exceedingly anxious to have both the subject and the cast at the Monte Carlo Opéra. I was in very bad humor when I thought of the tribulations _Bacchus_ had brought on me without there being anything with which I could reproach myself either as a man or as a musician. So _Don Quichotte_ came into my life as a soothing balm. I had great need of it. Since the preceding September I had suffered acute rheumatic pains and I had passed much more of my existence in bed than out of it. I had found a device which enabled me to write in bed. I put _Bacchus_ and its uncertain future out of my thoughts, and day by day I advanced the composition of _Don Quichotte_. Henri Cain, as is his way, built up very cleverly a scenario out of the heroic play by Le Loraine, the poet whose fine future was killed by the poverty which preceded his death. I salute that hero to art whose physiognomy resembled so much that of our "Knight of the Doleful Countenance."