The Carnival of the Animals and xylophone. From the beginning, Saint-Saëns regarded the work as a piece of fun. On 9 February 1886 he wrote to his publishers Durand in Paris that he was composing a work for the coming Shrove Tuesday, and confessing that he knew he should be working on his Third Symphony, but that this work was "such fun" (). He had apparently intended to write the work for his students at the École Niedermeyer, but it was first performed at a private concert given by the cellist Charles Lebouc on Shrove Tuesday, 9 March 1886. A second (private) performance was given
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein public, and for unknown reasons decided to attribute authorship to Mary Shelley, thus helping to begin a "hoax" that has persisted up to the present. Lauritsen maintains that revisions to "Frankenstein" made in 1823 and 1831 weakened the work, and that while it was ostensibly Mary Shelley who revised "Frankenstein" into its 1831 form, it may primarily have been revised by the political philosopher William Godwin. Lauritsen argues that handwriting alone cannot be used to determine the actual author of "Frankenstein". The drafts and manuscripts are incomplete and in the final stages. Moreover, portions of the novel were dictated by