Reliance on Laloy

On 11 January 1919 Emma continued to urge Louis Laloy to help her. Gallimard wanted to add more writings of Debussy to those originally included in Monsieur Croche antidilettante, but she was determined to keep to the plans as Debussy had conceived them. She echoed her request for Laloy to write a preface to this edition and to speed up his own revised biography of Debussy, expressing her instinctive dislike of Godet, ‘le Suisse’, with whom she was only corresponding with feigned affection for the sake of her husband. Although fearful of pestering Laloy, she then sent a telegram addressed to the Opéra, where he worked as Secretary General. When he did not reply to this she turned to Chouchik in her anxiety. She was suffering mentally and physically and a week later both she and Chouchou were ill with tracheitis.

Transfer of Debussy's body to Passy

In January 1919 there was no apparent progress in Emma's battle for a plot in the cemetery at Passy even though she told Laloy that she had shown the concession she had been given to the head of the Bureau des Inhumations. Again she referred to Widor as if he could bring influence to her case, upset at his ‘incomprehensible’ response.

Maurice Dumesnil wrote that it was Magdeleine Greslé who volunteered to attend to obtaining the plot at Passy on Emma's behalf and managed to persuade officials, who originally insisted that the cemetery was unused and no plots could be sold. At long last, towards the end of February, Emma told Caplet that she had received permission to purchase a plot and that she would shortly be meeting the surveyor there. On 10 March Emma informed him that on Wednesday 12 March she was going to Père-Lachaise at nine o’clock in the morning to take her ‘poor, good Maître’ to the Passy cemetery, saying she had only told him and Pasteur Vallery-Radot. However, Jean Roger-Ducasse was also present. Despite his familiarity with the family, his comments were ambivalent: