For the moment the point was to compensate Schlesinger for the fifty francs agreed upon, and he proposed that I should do this by writing articles for his Gazette Musicale.

As I was not expert enough in the French language for literary purposes, my article had to be translated and half the fee had to go to the translator.  However, I consoled myself by thinking I should still receive sixty francs per sheet for the work.  I was soon to learn, when I presented myself to the angry publisher for payment, what was meant by a sheet.  It was measured by an abominable iron instrument, on which the lines of the columns were marked off with figures; this was applied to the article, and after careful subtraction of the spaces left for the title and signature, the lines were added up.  After this process had been gone through, it appeared that what I had taken for a sheet was only half a sheet.

So far so good.  I began to write articles for Schlesinger’s wonderful paper.  The first was a long essay, De la musique allemande, in which I expressed with the enthusiastic exaggeration characteristic of me at that time my appreciation of the sincerity and earnestness of German music.  This article led my friend Anders to remark that the state of affairs in Germany must, indeed, be splendid if the conditions were really as I described.  I enjoyed what was to me the surprising satisfaction of seeing this article subsequently reproduced in Italian, in a Milan musical journal, where, to my amusement, I saw myself described as Dottissimo Musico Tedesco, a mistake which nowadays would be impossible.  My essay attracted favourable comment, and Schlesinger asked me to write an article in praise of the arrangement made by the Russian General Lwoff of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, which I did as superficially as possible.  On my own impulse I then wrote an essay in a still more amiable vein called Du metier du virtuose et de l’independance de la composition.

In the meantime I was surprised in the middle of the summer by the arrival of Meyerbeer, who happened to come to Paris for a fortnight.  He was very sympathetic and obliging.  When I told him my idea of writing a one-act opera as a curtain raiser, and asked him to give me an introduction to M. Leon Pillet, the recently appointed manager of the Grand Opera, he at once took me to see him, and presented me to him.  But alas, I had the unpleasant surprise of learning from the serious conversation which took place between those two gentlemen as to my future, that Meyerbeer thought I had better decide to compose an act for the ballet in collaboration with another musician.  Of course I could not entertain such an idea for a moment.  I succeeded, however, in handing over to M. Pillet my brief sketch of the subject of the Flying Dutchman..

Things had reached this point when Meyerbeer again left Paris, this time for a longer period of absence.

As I did not hear from M. Pillet for quite a long time, I now began to work diligently at my composition of Rienzi, though, to my great distress, I had often to interrupt this task in order to undertake certain pot-boiling hack-work for Schlesinger.