“Yesterday evening I walked about Paris feeling quite another man. I even _sauntered_, and perhaps that is why my old love for the place is reawakened. Perhaps, too, the fact that Colonne intends to give my _Tempest_ at the next Sunday concert has something to do with it. Now I see my name on all the hoardings and posters I feel quite at home. I will confess that although I am pleased, yet I am also rather anxious. I know beforehand that it will not be well played, and will be hissed by the public--the invariable fate of all my compositions abroad. Therefore it would be better if the performance took place after I have left Paris. It cannot be helped, however. I shall have to endure some misery on Sunday, but not much, because I am only here as a bird of passage, and I know that the time is coming when I need not endure any more. “In any case, yesterday and to-day I have strutted through the streets of Paris like a cock, and comforted myself with the feeling that I need not work. You would never have recognised your brother in a new overcoat, silk hat, and elegant gloves....” _To N. F. von Meck._ “PARIS, _February_ 24_th_ (_March_ 8_th_), 1879. “Yesterday I saw _L’Assomoir_. It is interesting to sit through this piece, for it is highly entertaining to see washer-women getting up linen in the second scene, all the characters dead drunk in the sixth, and in the eighth, the death of a confirmed toper in an attack of _delirium tremens_. The play deals a double blow at that feeling for beauty which exists in us all. First, it is adapted from a novel written by a talented, but cynical, man who chooses to wallow in human filth, moral and physical. Secondly, to make it more effective and pander to the taste of the Boulevard public, a melodramatic element has been brought into the play which is not in keeping with the rest of it. In this way _L’Assomoir_ loses on the stage its chief merit--the wonderfully realistic presentment of everyday life. “But what do you think of Monsieur Zola, the high priest of the realistic cult, the austere critic who recognises no literary art but his own, when he allows perfectly unreal and improbable episodes and characters to be tacked on to his play--all for the sake of a royalty?” _To Modeste Tchaikovsky._ “PARIS, _February_ 26_th_ (_March_ 10_th_), 1879.