Le voyage dans la lune (operetta) but due to the need to raise the necessary money he did not take up the project. Eventually Albert Vizentini, the new directeur of the Gaîté, took up the idea, and Offenbach's contribution was limited to that of composer. Albert Vanloo and Eugène Leterrier, in association with Arnold Mortier (columnist at Figaro), wrote the libretto. They were hoping for a repeat of the success of the novels of Jules Verne (another, the novel "Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours", had been adapted for the stage at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin by Verne himself in 1874) and the
Les Vingt et un Jours d'un neurasthénique Les Vingt et un Jours d'un neurasthénique Les Vingt et un Jours d'un neurasthénique is an expressionist novel by the French writer Octave Mirbeau, published by Charpentier-Fasquelle in August 1901. It's a collage of fifty cruel tales already published in the press over the previous fifteen years. So Mirbeau unsettles traditional novelistic conventions, transgressing the code of fictional credibility and maintaining indeterminacy of its genre affiliation. A fictionalized rendering of the author’s sojourn a few years before at the Pyrenean spa of Luchon, the novel mirrors a vagrant plot in its episodic narrative. Mirbeau’s narrator, Georges Vasseur, moves from observation