He had some excuse for the sirens as the Academie des Sciences believed in them for a short time.
If what is called history is so near mythology as, many times, to be confounded with it, what about romance and the historical drama in which events, entirely imaginative, must of necessity find a place?
What about the long-drawn-out conversations in books and on the stage that are attributed to historical persons?
What about the actions attributed to them, which need not be true but only seem to be so?
The supernatural element is the only thing lacking to make such works mythological in every way.
Now the supernatural lends itself admirably to expression in music and music finds in the supernatural a wealth of resources.

But these resources are by no means indispensable.

What music must have above all are emotions and passions laid bare and set in action by what we term the situation.

And where can one find more or better situations than in history?
* * * * * From the time of Lulli until the end of the Eighteenth Century French opera was legendary, that is to say, it was mythological in character and was not, as has been pretended, limited to the depiction of emotion and the inner feelings in order to avoid contingencies.

The real motive was to find in fables material for a spectacle.