The Carnival of the Animals on 2 April at the home of Pauline Viardot with an audience including Franz Liszt, a friend of the composer, who had expressed a wish to hear the work. There were other private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent festival of , but Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image. He relented only for the famous cello solo "The Swan", which forms the penultimate movement of the work, and which was published in 1887 in an arrangement by the composer for cello and solo piano
Maltese Carnival women. He was reported to the Grand Master, who admitted that he did not know what was happening in Malta. However the knight was arrested and he and another seven young knights, who was misbehaved during the last Carnival, were expelled from the island. Grand Master Marc'Antonio Zondadari introduced the game of "kukkanja" (cockaigne) to carnival in 1721: on a given signal, the crowd assembled in Palace Square converged on a collection of hams, sausages and live animals hidden beneath leafy branches outside the guard house. The provisions became the property of those who, having seized them, were able to