Someone once described Paris as the city where music is loved least and where most comic operas are produced in the whole world. The first propo sition is hardly sustainable. Clearly music is still loved more in Paris than in Constantinople, Ispahan, Canton, Nagasaki and Baghdad. But nowhere, in truth, are comic operas concocted in such prodigious quantity and of such good quality as in Paris.

What becomes of these innumerable productions is a mystery which I’ve not yet been able to unravel. If they were burnt, they would turn to ashes, and could be made into potash for commercial use. But I’m told there’s no question of delivering them to the flames; on the contrary, they’re carefully preserved—masses of music paper, orchestral parts, vocal parts, solo parts and full scores, which once cost so much to fill with notes but whose value a few years later is no greater than that of the dead leaves heaped up in the depths of the woods in winter.

Where are they hidden, these piles of paper? Where are the granaries, the warehouses, the cellars to stack them in? Are they in Paris, where the price of land is so high and the authors of comic operas themselves have such difficulty finding lodgings? Information is as lacking on this subject as about sparrows.

What becomes of the Paris sparrows? All the researches of scholars have so far been unable to throw any light on this question, yet it’s not without importance—more so indeed than the comic opera question. For supposing a pair of these tuneful birds lives for five years, each pair producing two broods a season, and each brood consisting of at least four chicks, that makes four extra pairs a year; and with these pairs breeding in their turn while their parents continue to breed for four more years, by the end of a mere hundred years they must have given birth to an anthill of sparrows to make the imagination boggle: it would long ago have covered the entire surface of the earth. It can be proved mathematically, which proves once again that proofs prove nothing, for despite all such algebraic demonstrations, we can see that the sparrow population of Paris is no greater today than it was in the time of King Dagobert.