What was said was done; rare promptness for the stage. The first performance was on October 31, 1906. Catulle Mendes, who had often been severe on me in his criticisms in the press, had become my ardent collaborator, and, something worth noting, he appreciated joyfully the reverence I had brought to the delivery of his verses. In our common toil, as well as in our studies with the artists at the playhouse, I delighted in his outbursts of devotion and affection and in the esteem in which he held me. The performances followed each other ten times a month, a unique fact in the annals of the theater for a new work, and this went on up to the sixtieth performance. Apropos of this, they asked Lucy Arbell, our Perséphone, how many times she had sung the work, feeling sure that her answer would be wrong. "Why," she exclaimed, "sixty times!" "No," replied her questioner, "you have sung it one hundred and twenty times, for you are always encored in the aria of the Roses." I owed that sixtieth performance to the new directors, Mm. Messager and Broussan, and that seems to be the last of a work which started off so brilliantly. What a difference, I say again, between the manner in which my works have been mounted for some years and the way they were put on when I was beginning! My first works were put on in the provinces with old scenery, and I was compelled to hear the stage manager say things like this: "For the first act we have found an old background from _La Favorita_; for the second two sets from _Rigoletto_," etc., etc. I recall an obliging director who on the eve of a first performance, knowing that I lacked a tenor, offered me one, but warning me, "This artist knows the part, but I ought to tell you that he is always flat in the third act." Which reminds me that in the same house I knew a basso who had a strange pretension, still more strangely expressed, "My voice," said our basso, "goes down so far that they can't find the note on the piano." Oh, well, they were all valiant and honest artists. They did me service and had their years of success. But I see that I am loitering on the way in telling of these old times. I have to tell of the new work which was in rehearsal in Monte Carlo--I mean _Thérèse_. CHAPTER XXV SPEAKING OF 1793 One summer morning in 1905 my great friend, Georges Cain, the eminent and eloquent historian of Old Paris, got together the beautiful, charming Mme. Georges Cain, Mlle. Lucy Arbell, of the Opéra, and a few others to visit what had once been the convent of the Carmelites in the Rue de Vaugirard.