October 1921, he found work as a secretary at the Guimet Museum. For some six years he studied composition with Charles Koechlin, whom he credits with helping him understand music within its own context and find his own voice. In 1923, together with three other admirers of Satie's music (Henri Clicquot-Pleyell, Roger Désormière, Maxime Jacob), Sauguet formed the 'School of Arcueil', named after the location of Satie's home. With his support, they had their first concert on 25 October 1923 at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. In 1924 Erik Satie introduced Sauguet to Serge Diaghilev, the flamboyant impresario of the Ballets Russes, and he wrote his first ballet, Les Roses (Roses) that year. In 1927 Diaghilev's company produced the ballet La Chatte (The Cat) with music by Sauguet, which premiered in Monte Carlo on April 30. The story is about a young man who falls in love with a cat, which assumes a human form through the intervention of Aphrodite. As they make love, the cat-woman sees a mouse and cannot resist chasing it, whereupon she changes back into a cat. The work was choreographed by the young George Balanchine. Sauguet gained his greatest popularity with his ballets, of which he wrote over twenty. The best of these, and the work by which he is most known outside France, was Les Forains (1945) about a talented, slightly tattered, but ultimately hopeful travelling circus troupe. He also wrote numerous works for radio, television, stage, and film, and a large quantity of chamber and other instrumental works, including solos for harmonica and musical saw, but his particular talent was vocal music. He worked ten years on La chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1936) - based on Stendhal's novel - an opera that had a reputation in France as his most important work. Internationally, however, it was considered to be short on emotion and drama. Other operatic works include La Contrebasse (1930), La Gageure Imprévue (1942), Les Caprices de Marianne (1954) and Boule de Suif (1978). The war period brought a change to Sauguet's work, which had previously been marked by his high spirits. He used his reputation during this time to help his Jewish friends but lost the oldest-established among them, Max Jacob, who died in the Drancy internment camp. At the war's end he completed his Symphony No. 1, known as Expiatoire (Expiatory), in tribute to the war's innocent victims. This