During the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the gentlemen of the Jockey Club held numerous boxes at the Opera ("many little suspended salons" in Marcel Proust's phrase), where the required ballet expected in every opera was never in the first act, when the Jockey Club would habitually still be at dinner. One result was the famous fiasco of the "Paris "Tannhäuser"" of 1861, when Wagner insisted on inserting the requisite ballet into the first act, placing it immediately after the overture to get it out of the way. The second act, when the members of the Jockey Club arrived to view their favourites in the corps de ballet, was all but hissed off the stage. Wagner never permitted another production in Paris. Proust made his fictional character Charles Swann a member of the Jockey Club as a signal honor, given Swann's Jewish background.