The whole story of this first visit to Paris is sordid, squalid, miserable to a degree; and I don’t know that we can be surprised.  When Wagner sailed from Pillau he had not had a single work of any importance performed.  Nay, more, he had not written a work of any importance. Die Feen had never been given; Das Liebesverbot had been given—­under ridiculous circumstances and with the most disastrous results; his symphony had been played, but by this time score and parts had probably disappeared.  Mendelssohn had received them in Leipzig and never once referred to them.  Anyhow, none of these things were striking enough to have attracted much attention even in Germany; and they certainly would have excited no interest in busy, bustling Paris—­the home of the Rossini and Meyerbeer opera, of quadrilles, vaudevilles and the rest.  But for the happy, or rather unhappy, chance 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