I saw clearly from his attitude that he would never play our work.

About that time du Locle took over the management of the Opéra-Comique.
He saw that Perrin, who was his uncle, had decided not to stage _Le
Timbre d'Argent_ and asked me for it.

This meant another metamorphosis for the work and new and considerable
work for the musician. And this work was by no means easy. Until this
time Barbier and Carré had been as close friends as Orestes and Pylades,
but now they had a falling out. What one proposed, the other
systematically refused. One lived in Paris; the other in the country. I
went from Paris to the country and from the country to Paris trying to
get these warring brothers to agree. This going to and fro lasted all
summer, and then the temporary enemies came to an understanding and
became as friendly as ever.

We seemed to be nearly at the end of our troubles. Du Locle had found a
wonderful dancer in Italy on whom we depended, but the dancer turned out
not to be one at all. She was a _mime_, and did not dance.

As there was no time to look for another dancer that season du Locle, to
keep me patient, had me write with Louis Gallet _La Princesse Jaune_,
with which I made my debut on the stage. I was thirty-five! This
harmless little work was received with the fiercest hostility. "It is
impossible to tell," wrote Jouvin, a much feared critic of the time, "in
what key or in what time the overture is written." And to show me how
utterly wrong I was, he told me that the public was "a compound of
angles and shadows." His prose was certainly more obscure than my music.

Finally, a real dancer was engaged in Italy. It seemed as though nothing