career as a conductor began to advance when he was invited to conduct Die Walküre at Marseille. As a composer the early 1890s brought him mixed fortunes. Madame Chrysanthème, staged at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in 1893, was a setting of Pierre Loti's story of a betrayed geisha, a theme that later inspired Puccini's Madama Butterfly; it was politely rather than enthusiastically received. Mirette, produced by Carte at the Savoy Theatre in 1894, was Messager's first opera written expressly for the London stage and was the only original Savoy opera by a French composer. To assist him in what was for him (at the time) an unfamiliar idiom, Messager enlisted the help of the songwriter Dotie (Alice Maude) Davis (1859–1938), known professionally as Hope Temple. She became Messager's second wife in 1895. According to Bernard Shaw, Messager, concluding from the reception of La Basoche in London that it was unwise to offer the British public anything too intelligent, decided that the new opera was going to be as commonplace as possible. It ran for 41 performances, was withdrawn and revised, and then ran for another 61 performances. Messager vetoed any production in Paris. His next opera, a serious work, Le Chevalier d'Harmental (1896), was unsuccessful, and for a while he and his new wife withdrew to the English countryside near Maidenhead, Berkshire. From 1897 Messager's career revived. He later recalled that he had received by post an unsolicited libretto: This was the opérette Les P'tites Michu, which was presented to great acclaim at the Bouffes-Parisiens. Its 1905 English adaptation in London ran for 401 performances. Soon afterwards he was appointed musical director of the Opéra-Comique, and in the commercial theatre had another outstanding success with Véronique (1898). In 1898 Messager's only child from his second marriage, Madeleine Hope Andrée (d. 1986) was born. From that year to 1904 Messager's work at the Opéra-Comique left him little time for composition, particularly after 1901, when he also spent May to July at the Royal Opera House in London. He turned down W. S. Gilbert's offer of a collaboration, and wrote only two stage works between 1898 and 1914. His international fame as a composer nevertheless grew, with productions of Les P'tites Michu and Véronique in countries including Britain, Spain, Switzerland, Germany and the US. Unusually for the London stage at the time, Véronique was given in French in 1903. An English