He was the same in all things: "I have no comrades," he said, "only friends." And there is one sentence that he wrote from Rome that might well be held up to the _gamins_ of the French Conservatoire. "Je ne veux rien faire _de chic_; je veux avoir des _idées_ avant de commencer un morceau." In August of his second year Bizet left Rome on a visit to Naples. He carried a letter to Mercadente. On his return good news and bad awaited him. Ernest Guiraud, his good friend and quondam fellow-student in the class of Marmontel, has just been proclaimed Prix de Rome. And this at the very moment Bizet was to leave the Villa; for the Academy would have it that their musical _pensionnaires_ should pass the third year in Germany. The prospect was entirely repugnant to Bizet. So he went to work against it, directing his energies in the first place against Schnetz, "the dear old director" as they called him. Schnetz, owning to a soft spot for his young _pensionnaire_, was overcome, and through him I fancy the powers that were in Paris. However, Bizet was permitted to remain in his beloved Rome. Delighted, he wrote off to Marmontel: "I am daily expecting Guiraud, and words cannot express how glad I shall be to see him. Would you believe it, it is two years since I have spoken with an intelligent musician? My colleague Z---- bores me frightfully. He speaks to me of Donizetti, of Fesca even, and I reply to him with Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Gounod." This last year spent with Guiraud was perhaps the happiest of his life. At the close of it the two set off together on a ramble through the land, with fancy for their only guide. They had got so far as Venice when news of his mother's dangerous illness called Bizet to her side. He arrived in time to say farewell, and he never returned to Italy. Of work done at the Villa, "Vasco de Gama" is the only tangible sample; "but I have not wasted my time," he wrote, "I have read a good many volumes of history, and ever so much more literature of all kinds. I have travelled, I have learned something of the history of art, and I really am a bit of a connoisseur in painting and sculpture. All I want now, on my return, are _trois jolis actes_ for the Théâtre Lyrique." And shortly we find him in full swing with "Les Pêcheurs des Perles." It was produced on the 30th September of 1863, and had some eighteen representations. "La Jolie Fille de Perth," which followed it four years later, had, I think, twenty-one. In between these two works, we are told, Bizet, in a fit of violent admiration for Verdi, strove to emulate him in an opera entitled "Ivan le Terrible." It is said to have been completed and handed to the management of the Théâtre Lyrique. Then Bizet, recognising as suddenly that he had made a mistake, withdrew the score and burned it.