Note 28 — Chapter VII

They did not kill the imagination in David's case, but they undermined his constitution. It was at that period that he fell in with the Saint-Simoniens, to the high priest of which, M. Enfantin, who eventually became the chairman of the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean Railway Company, he took me many years later. After their dispersion, the group to which he belonged went to the East, and it is to this apparently fortuitous circumstance that the world owes not only "Le Désert," "La Perle du Brésil," and "L'Eden," but probably also Meyerbeer's "Africaine." Meyerbeer virtually acknowledged that but for David's scores, so replete with the poetry of the Orient, he would have never thought of such a subject for one of his operas. M. Scribe, on the other hand, always maintained that the idea emanated from him, and that it dated from 1847, when the composer was given the choice between "La Prophète" and "L'Africaine," and chose the former. One might almost paraphrase the accusation of the wolf against the lamb in La Fontaine's fable. "M. Scribe, if you did not owe your idea to Félicien David, you owed it to Montigny, the director of the Gymnase, who in the thirties produced a play with a curious name, and a more curious plot, at the Ambigu-Comique."[28] One thing is certain, that "L'Africaine" was discarded, if ever it was offered, and would never have been thought of again but for Meyerbeer's intense and frankly acknowledged admiration of Félicien David's genius.