By Christmas week, all Moscow knew that a Gregoriev opera, _The Boyar_--"written by the man who had been too drunk to conduct his symphony in the previous October, you know"--(as good an advertisement as any, and costing nothing)--was to be produced at the Grand Theatre, at eight o'clock on the evening of January 1, 1868; the evening's ballet, "Rêve d'Été" being by the same composer. Ivan's friends were in a state of high excitement at a prospective success of which Merelli seemed very sure. But they suddenly discovered that the composer himself had not the slightest intention of being present to hear his work. For three days they besieged Ivan with expostulation, incredulity, persuasion. All in vain. When, twenty minutes after the hour on the night named, the curtain rose, disclosing to the chorus a house packed to the doors, the composer's box--reserved for him--contained only the two Rubinsteins, Balakirev, Kashkine, and Laroche. Ostrovsky, the librettist, was behind the scenes, still on his knees before the Menschikov, in a mad endeavor to obtain her promise to abstain from the French habit of adding an _e_ to the end of every word.
Ivan, deserted even by Sósha, who had a seat in the topmost gallery of the opera-house, sat before his dying fire, enduring the last throes of that long struggle for recognition which, he believed in the depths of his soul, was finally to end, to-night. It is seldom, indeed, that there does not linger, however unwelcomed, one little shred of hope for the success of one's own work. But with Ivan there now remained not even this. The struggle of the past weeks, the glaring imperfections that had crowded yesterday's dress rehearsal, had brought him despair unutterable. Up to yesterday afternoon, all had been hopelessly wrong. And the last thing he had heard, on the previous day, as he fled the theatre, had been the loud echoes of the latest quarrel between Mesdames Menschikov and Castello, in which the former sat alternately reviling her companion and wailing that her voice, on the morrow, would be a mere hoarse shred. This Ivan did not doubt:--and the first important solo of the first act, whereby he had planned to capture and hold the interest of the audience, depended wholly upon her!--Moreover, Finocchi's costumes, finished barely in time for the dress-rehearsal, had been discovered to be hopeless anachronisms, which the ridiculous little man had violently refused to have altered in the least.--And the result of Merelli's last, special appeal, Ivan had not cared to learn.