. . . nobody in our time had such a nose for a profit, nor such greyhound speed at running it down.
—Mémoires, Philarète chasles

Winning the war, they say, is easier than winning the peace. Although the Académie Royale de Musique—the Paris Opéra—somehow survived the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath, the first years of the Bourbon Restoration posed a different type of threat. The Opéra was one of France’s most famous institutions, but generations of financial mismanagement and institutional politicking had produced their usual consequences. It was, in Ernest Newman’s phrase, “hoary with iniquities, cynical with long experiences of human cupidity and folly.”

Not that it was lacking in resources—from 1826 it had plenty of good singers, dancers, stage designers, and orchestral players. It had one of Europe’s best conductors and the extraordinary danseuseMarie Taglioni. There were even a few big successes—but nothing seemed to jell. Although dependent on government subsidies almost since its inception, its losses were eye-wateringly large. Though it had the most expensive tickets in Paris, a performance schedule that required other theaters to close when the Opéra was open, and two large subsidies, the Opéra still lost over a million francs in 1830 when the average unskilled worker earned a little over 300 francs and an orchestral musician 1,200 francs. A profit at the Opéra was the rarest of things—since its founding in 1669, only one of its forty-three directors had