 After moving to Brussels at the start of the war, Lecocq had two substantial successes there in a row.The first, the opérette "Les cent vierges" (The Hundred Virgins), ran for months at the Théâtre des Fantaisies-Parisiennes; productions quickly followed in Paris, London, New York, Vienna and Berlin.The success of this piece led Eugène Humbert, the director of the Brussels theatre, to commission another from Lecocq.