The Author’s Reply to the Chorus of the Opéra

Summary

Ladies and Gentlemen,

You address me as “Cher maître”; I was on the point of replying “Dear slaves”, for I know how you’re deprived of both leisure and liberty. Wasn’t I once in a chorus myself? And in what a theatre—may God preserve you from such a place!

I know very well what hard labour you undergo, the hours of misery you suffer and the even more miserable salaries you put up with. Alas! I am no more ‘master’, no freer, no happier than you. You work, I work, we all work just to live; and you live, I live, we all live just to work. The Saint-Simonians claimed to know about job satisfaction, but they have kept their secret well; I can assure you it’s as unknown to me in my work as to you. I’ve stopped counting my hours of misery; they fall one after another, cold and monotonous, like the regular dripping of melting snow which weighs so heavily on the gloomy silence of winter nights in Paris.

As for my salary, don’t even mention it… .

I acknowledge the justice of your reproach concerning the dedication of Evenings with the Orchestra; as the book was about music and musicians I should have offered it to my musician friends in Paris. But I was on my way back from Germany when I had the notion of writing it; I was still under the influence of the warm and cordial welcome given me by the orchestra of the “civilised city”, and so little did I expect to find the least regard for my Evenings amongst the public that I thought of the dedication more as a means of assuring them some patronage than as any sort of flattery or compliment. Your regrets on this point seem to indicate that you hold a different opinion. In your view, some people may actually want to read my stuff … which means I may be wrong … which means I may be an imbecile! I’m overjoyed at the thought.

You tease me about my lectures on grammar. Yet I don’t exactly pretend to know much about French: on the contrary, I know perfectly well that everyone knows I don’t.