Arthur Saint -Léon's last years

So Saint-Léon came back to Paris in 1870 to savour his last and greatest triumph, Coppélia, which was created at the Opéra at the end of May.  No doubt he, and others too, looked forward to a long and fruitful association with the Opéra, but that was not to be.  For some years his health had been disintegrating, and it was a miracle that in his physical condition he could still produce a masterpiece so light-hearted and charming.  In his younger days he had enjoyed good health, suffering only from minor ailments such as rheumatism, for which he took the waters at Bath in 1847, and this had given him more than a fair share of energy.  As well as dancing and devising ballets, he concerned himself with all details of the production as well as musical matters, he coached his ballerinas, and he was capable of managing his own company.  If he grumbled about his "position of a galley slave", it was his life and he would surely have had it no other way.  But in 1866, exhausted by the demands made on him in Russia and frustrated at being unable to supervise the final rehearsals of La Source in Paris, his health began to fail.  It was a moral as well as a physical crisis.  "How I loathe my profession," he confessed to Nuitter.  Assailed by rheumatism, headaches and stomach trouble, he began to find his duties a burden.  By the winter of 1868-69 he was enduring "unbelievable pain" from "a complicated disease of the kidneys and the intestines," and for two and a half months he was able to sleep only for short periods crouched up in an armchair.  Depression and fatigue took a heavy toll, and in the last summer of his life, 1870, he was a man grown old before his time.

Two weeks after the first night of Coppélia he went, on doctor's advice, to Wiesbaden to take the waters.  The Franco-Prussian War broke out shortly after his return to Paris, and as the time for his return to St. Petersburg approached, news of heavy defeats and withdrawals was reaching Paris.  The end came with merciful suddenness.  He collapsed with a heart attack in the Café du Divan, in the Passaage de l'Opéra, on the evening of 2nd September 1870, and was dead before his friends could bring him back to his home in the rue de Laval, where he lived with Louise Fleury.

It was the end of an era in more sense than one.  The Opéra had just closed for the duration of the war, and would not reopen until the following year, after France's defeat, the fall of the Second Empire, and the holocaust of the Commune.  The great flowering of ballet, which had reached its peak under the influence of Romanticism in the 1830s and 1840s but had continued, with diminishing strength, until 1870, had passed.  The repertory of those years was to disappear as its ballets, with only one exception, were forgotten.  The exception was Coppélia, which has survived to enchant us still, one of the last brilliant flames of the Second Empire, reflecting all the confident gaiety of that vanished age, and a lively and fitting memorial to its creator, Arthur Saint-Léon.

from the introduction to Letters from a Ballet-Master: The Correspondence of Arthur Saint-Léon edited by Ivor Guest. 1981. Pages 33-5.