Back in Paris Bizet found that his mother's health was not critical, but she was frail and lived less than a year longer, dying on 8 September 1861. He also found that his neighbourhood was being torn apart by the rebuilding of Paris led by Baron Haussmann, Préfet de la Seine. The musicians’ ghetto of narrow streets north of the Opéra was never the same again after the broad new Rue Lafayette drove a swath straight as an arrow down from the stations, the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est, to the huge new opera house now under construction at the head of the (new) Avenue de l’Opéra.

He went back to living with his parents in the Rue Laval and found the adjustment to life back in Paris very difficult. Ernest Reyer recalled:

He was permitted to spend the fourth year of the Prix de Rome in Paris, so he had a modest income at least until the end of 1861. According to Marmontel he taught piano, harmony and singing at this time, but there are no details of this. His most pressing obligation was his third submission for the Prix de Rome, which he presented in October 1860. It consisted of two movements of the symphony he had been contemplating on his travels, and an overture entitled La chasse d’Ossian, now lost, which was in all probability a version of the symphony's first movement. The submission, as a whole, was well received by the Academy in its report, but there is no evidence that he composed any more music until June 1862 when he embarked on the comic opera La guzla de l’émir. What he was certainly doing was transcribing operas for the publisher Choudens.