club, the Cercle de l'union artistique with a three-act opérette bouffe Le Service obligatoire written in collaboration with two other composers, and which according to Victorin de Joncières was acclaimed by the audience as undoubted proof of Chabrier's talent. Another attempt at operatic comedy, Fisch-Ton-Kan, with Verlaine and Lucien Viotti, was performed in March 1875 at the same club with Chabrier at the piano; five fragments survive. He did not set any poems by Villiers de L'Isle Adam or Verlaine, although the latter wrote a sonnet À Emmanuel Chabrier (published in Amour, 1888) as a remembrance of their friendship. There are several descriptions of Chabrier's piano-playing at around this time; many years later the composer Vincent d'Indy wrote, "Though his arms were too short, his fingers too thick and his whole manner somewhat clumsy, he managed to achieve a degree of finesse and a command of expression that very few pianists – with the exception of Liszt and Rubinstein – have surpassed." The composer and critic Alfred Bruneau said of Chabrier, "he played the piano as no one has ever played it before, or ever will…" The wife of the painter Renoir, a friend of the composer, wrote: Both Chabrier's parents died within the space of eight days in 1869. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and Commune, he continued in his official post as the ministry moved from Tours to Bordeaux then to Versailles. In 1873 he married Marie Alice Dejean, the granddaughter of Louis Dejean, who had gained his fortune as founder and manager of the Cirque d'été and the Cirque Napoléon. Alice and Chabrier had three sons, one of whom died at birth. Chabrier's friends in Paris included the composers Gabriel Fauré, Ernest Chausson, and d'Indy; painters including Henri Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, whose Thursday soirées Chabrier attended; and writers such as Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Jean Moréas, Jean Richepin and Stéphane Mallarmé. During the 1870s Chabrier began several stage works. The first to be completed was a three-act opéra-bouffe L'étoile (The Star), commissioned by the Bouffes-Parisiens, the spiritual home of Offenbach. He secured the commission through his many contacts in the world of arts and letters: he had met the librettists, Albert Vanloo and Eugène Leterrier through the painter Alphonse Hirsch, whom he had got to know as a member of Manet's set. The opera was modestly successful, running for 48 performances in 1877, but