Maître Pierre

The project's progress is documented in five letters by Gounod to Paul Poirson [fr], the scenarist for Cinq-Mars, and in an 1878 interview with the critic Eduard Hanslick. The question of how Abelard's castration would be handled was a subject of ribald speculation in the press; when Hanslick pressed it Gounod explained that he was murdered at the end of the fourth act, his ghost visiting Héloïse in the last act.