Il est doux, il est bon (Hérodiade)

Massenet took Flaubert's novella Hérodias as his basis, in a libretto by Paul Milliet and Henri Grémont. Auguste Vaucorbeil of the Paris Opéra refused it — he liked the music, he said, but the book needed an author who knew how to build a play — so the premiere was given at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels on 19 December 1881. Paris heard it in 1884 at the Théâtre des Nations, with the three De Reszke siblings. The treatment departs sharply from the version later made familiar: here Salomé loves John the Baptist, does not know Hérodiade is her mother, and kills herself.