Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/80

70 to the management of the Théâtre Lyrique. Then Bizet, recognising as suddenly that he had made a mistake, withdrew the score and burned it.

M. Charles Pigot, who is chiefly responsible for this story, goes on to say that the libretto was the work of MM. Louis Gallet and Edouard Blau. But in that he is not correct, for Gallet himself tells us that he knew Bizet only ever so slightly at the time, and that neither to him nor to Blau is due a single line of this "Ivan".

Then there were "Griselidis," of which, in a letter dated February of 1871, Bizet speaks as très avancée; "Clarisse Harlowe"; and the "Calendal", of M. Sardou, to each of which he referred in the same year as à peine commenèe. There was also an opera in one act written by M. Carvalho, and actually put into rehearsal at the Opéra Comique. But none of these saw the light, and I have little doubt they all met their fate on a certain eventful day, shortly before he died, when Bizet remorselessly destroyed a whole pile of manuscript. And in truth these early works had little value of themselves. They were but so many rungs of the ladder by which he climbed to the heights of "Djamileh,"; of "L'Arlésienne," and of "Carmen." No musician ever took longer to know himself than did Georges Bizet. His period of hesitation, of vacillation, was unduly protracted. For why, it is hard to tell; but one cannot help feeling that the terrible lutte pour la vie had a deal to do with it. Those early years in Paris were very hard ones. "Believe me," he wrote from le Vésinet (always a favourite spot with him), "believe me, it is exasperating to have one's work interrupted for days to write solos de piston. But what would you? I must live. I have just rushed off at a gallop half-a-dozen melodies for Heugel. I trust you may like them. At least I have carefully chosen the verses. Rh