Camille SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921)

Autograph Letter Signed (“C. Saint-Saëns”) to an unidentified friend and librettist, declining his libretto while expressing admiration of it.
2½ pages 8vo in French on mourning paper, n.p., 18 February 1891.    
Trans: “This scenario on Marcellus is absolutely ravishing, but honestly, when I am preparing to revive Proserpine, when I consider Phryné, can I take on yet another amorous courtesan? It is frightening how many whores I already have in my theatre, Proserpine, Delilah, the Duchesse d’Etampes, Anne de Boleyn, a whole gallery of bankrupt virtue.
What a shame you didn’t offer me Marcellus ten years ago!
All my thanks to your father for his letter I now know everything I needed to know. 
I have not yet been able to read your comedies you can imagine how little time I have to myself for my own distraction.”
A very amusing letter, listing Saint-Saëns’s many women of dubious virtue in his operas. Unfortunately the one who appeared in the work offered to him, Marcellus, does not appear to have been accepted by any other composer. In view of Saint-Saëns’s reaction, it is most likely that the libretto concerned Marcus Claudius Marcellus, nephew of  Emperor Augustus, who married Augustus’s daughter Julia. Julia’s reputation for promiscuity rivalled that of Messalina, hence her “bankrupt virtue”.
Of the heroines (or anti-heroines) mentioned here, Delilah is the one who is best known to today’s audiences, from his sumptuous Samson and Delilah.
The Duchesse d’Etampes, mistress of Francois I of France, appears in his Ascanio, as a murderously jealous woman.
Proserpine, title character of his 1887 opera, is not the mythological daughter of Ceres, but a Renaissance courtesan. Saint-Saëns appears to have been especially pleased with his more modern approach to the score, but sadly it is a rarity today. 
Phryné, a famous courtesan of ancient Greece who was acquitted of a charge of impiety by the jury, seduced by her beauty. In contrast to the other scandalous and tragic women, Phryné is a comic opera, which is unfortunately not well-known to the modern repertoire, although at the time it proved one of his most successful operas. Although the subject had been suggested to Saint-Saëns some years earlier, it did not receive its premiere until 1893.
Anne Boleyn (Saint-Saëns here gives her the French “de”) may not deserve to be included among the women of easy virtue, but as a protagonist in his 1883 opera Henry VIII, dealing with the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, this is understandable.
It is seldom that a letter appears giving such a catalogue of operas which are seldom, if ever, heard today and which may prove to be unjustly neglected. 
Saint-Saëns seems to have had problems with his pen, as, under his signature, the page shows some offsetting from the opposite page, as well as some large ink-blots to the last (blank) page.

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