After that I often worked with Claretie over the wire. The Ariane thread also took my voice to Perséphone, I should say ... Thérèse, whom I let hear in this way this or that vocal ending, so as to have her opinion before I wrote down the notes. One beautiful spring day I went to revisit the Garden at Bagatelle and its pretty pavilion, then still abandoned, which the Comte d'Artois had built under Louis XVI. I fixed thoroughly in my memory that delightful little chateau which the triumphant Revolution allowed to be exploited for picnic parties after despoiling its oldtime owner of it. When he got it back under the Restoration, the Comte d'Artois called it Babiole, Bagatelle or Babiole it's all the same; and this same pavilion was occupied almost to our own time by Sir Richard Wallace, the famous millionaire, philanthropist and collector. Later on I wanted the scenery of the first act of _Thérèse_ to reproduce it exactly. Our artiste (Lucy Arbell) was especially impressed with the idea. It is well known that her ancestry makes her one of the descendants of the Marquis of Hertford. When the score was finished and we knew the intentions of Raoul Gunsbourg, who wanted the work for the Monte Carlo Opéra, Mme. Massenet and I were informed that H. S. H. the Prince of Monaco would honor our modest home with his presence, and with the chief of his household, the Comte de Lamotte d'Allogny, would lunch with us. We immediately invited my collaborator and Mme. Claretie and my excellent publisher and Mme. Heugel. The Prince of Monaco with his deep simplicity was good enough to sit near a piano I had got in for the occasion and listen to passages from _Thérèse_. He learned the following detail from us. During the first reading Lucy Arbell, a true artist, stopped me as I was singing the last scene, where Thérèse gasps with horror as she sees the awful cart bringing her husband, André Thorel, to the scaffold and cries with all her might, _"Vive le Roi_!" so as to ensure that she shall be reunited with her husband in death. Just then, our interpreter, who was deeply affected, stopped me and said in a burst of rapture, "I can never sing that scene through, for when I recognize my husband who has given me his name and saved Armand de Clerval, I ought to lose my voice. So I ask you to _declaim_ all of the ending of the piece." Only great artists have such inborn gifts of instinctive emotion. Witness Mme. Fidès Devriès who asked me to re-write the aria of Chimène, _"Pleurez mes yeux_." She found that while she was singing it she thought only of her dead father and almost forgot her friend, Rodriguez. A sincere touch was suggested by the tenor, Talazac, the creator of Des Grieux. He wanted to add _toi_ before _vous_ which he uttered on finding Manon in the seminaire of Saint Sulpice. Does not that _toi_ indicate the first cry of the old lover on seeing his mistress again?