Students of French opera will have observed that in the nineteenth century librettists worked more often in pairs than on their own. The names seem to fall naturally into couples: Scribe and Delavigne, St-Georges and Bayard, Brunswick and de Leuven, Barbier and Carré, Cormon and Crémieux, Meilhac and Halévy, Blau and Milliet, Claretie and Cain. This curious phenomenon presents a number of immediate riddles. How could that nation of staunch individualists suddenly show such unwonted collaborative gifts? What started the fashion and what brought it to an end? And in any given collaboration who did what and for whom?

I have little light to shed on these questions except to observe that literary collaboration was the order of the day, especially in the theatre. The myriad vaudevilles and comedies that sustained boulevard theatres in nineteenth-century Paris were frequently the work of two or more authors. Dumas's immense output, like Scribe's, would have been unthinkable without an army of assistants. In the sphere of opera the phenomenon of collaboration has only been studied in the case of Scribe, and while it would be valuable to examine it more broadly, I am concerned here with just one of these collaborations, that of Barbier and Carré, librettists of Gounod's masterpiece Faust.