I shall have more to say on the subject of the “Colonel” before this tale is told. Now, with the contracts signed for the first American visit, we were on our honeymoon. Meanwhile, however, the picture of what I had agreed to bring was changing. Leonide Massine, his stint at the Roxy Theatre in New York completed, had met a former Broadway manager, E. Ray Goetz. Together they had succeeded in raising some money and planned with it to buy the entire Diaghileff properties. With this stock in hand, Massine caught up with de Basil, who was barnstorming through the Low Countries with his company in trucks and buses; and the two of them pooled resources. Although Massine’s purchase plan did not go through entirely, because much of the Diaghileff material had disappeared through lawsuits and other claims, nevertheless Massine was able to deliver a sizable portion of it. As the direct result of Massine’s appointment as artistic director, a number of things happened. First of all, Balanchine quit, and formed a short-lived company in France, _Les Ballets 1933_, the history of which is not germane to this story. Before he left, however, Balanchine had created three works for the de Basil-Blum Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo: _La Concurrence_, _Le Cotillon_, and _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_. Massine, as his first task, staged _Jeux d’Enfants_ and _Les Plages_; restaged three of his earlier works, _The Three-Cornered Hat_, _Le Beau Danube_ and _Scuola di Ballo_; and the first of his epoch-making symphonic ballets, _Les Présages_, to Tchaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony. These were combined with a number of older works from the Diaghileff repertoire, including the three Fokine masterpieces: _Les Sylphides_, _Prince Igor_, and _Petroushka_. Massine had strengthened the company. There were the former Diaghileff _régisseur general_, Serge Grigorieff, of long memory, as stage director; his wife, Lubov Tchernicheva, a leading Diaghileff figure, for dramatic roles; the last Diaghileff _ballerina_, Alexandra Danilova, to give stability to the three “baby ballerinas”: Baronova, Toumanova, and Tatiana Riabouchinska, the last from Kchessinska’s private studio, by way of Nikita Balieff’s _Chauve Souris_, where she had been dancing. There was the intriguing Nina Verchinina, a “different” type of dancer. There were talented lesser ladies: Eugenia Delarova, Lubov Rostova; a group of English girls masquerading under Russian names. Among the men, in addition to Massine, there were Leon Woizikovsky, David Lichine, Roman Jasinsky, Paul Petroff, Yurek Shabalevsky, and André Eglevsky.