hance of meeting Meyerbeer in Boulogne, he would have
entered the city without a line to any one of position. His money, as
I have just said, gave out almost at once, and thenceforth he had to
keep the wolf from the door by slaving at any odd jobs which would
bring in a few pence. On more than one occasion he was reduced,
literally, to his last penny. With marvellous resiliency of spirits he
managed not only to pull through, but to complete _Rienzi_, then to
write one great opera and begin planning two very great ones. We have
accounts--mostly written long after the event--of merry meetings and
suppers; but against them we must set the dozens of despairing letters
and scribbled notes in which he complains of his luck and his lot.
Yet, I say, how can we feel surprise? Why, he could not even play the
piano well enough to give an opera-director any fair notion of his
music; and perhaps that is just as well, so far as Paris was
concerned, for the taste of the day was such that the better his
compositions were understood the less they were liked. Halle remarks
that when he talked of his operatic dreams at this time he was
commonly regarded as being a little, or more than a little, "off his
head."

It became evident at the outset that all hopes anent the opera must
fall to the ground. He met Scribe, the omnipotent libretto-monger of
the day, and of course nothing came of it. The spectacle of _Rienzi_
was on far too large a scale for the work to be possible at the
Renaissance, so, much against the grain, he offered Antenor Joly _Das
Liebesverbot_. He waited two months for a decided refusal or a
qualified acceptance, but heard nothing. At last a word from Meyerbeer
seemed to have settled the matter. One Dumersau, who translated the
words into French, was very enthusiastic about the music and made Joly
enthusiastic too; everything looked bright for the moment, and Wagner
moved from the slum where he had been living to an abode a little less
slum-like, in the Rue du Helder. On the day he moved the Renaissance
went bankrupt again. I say again, because Joly became bankrupt
punctually every three months--a fact which explains Meyerbeer's
readiness to help him in that quarter. In desperation he seized the
chance of earning a little money by writing the music for a vaudeville
production, _La Descente de la Courtille;_ but here again his luck was
out: a more practised hand took the job from him. He composed what he
considered simple s