sande.... _Ne me touchez pas!_ became the cry of a terrified child,
a real protestation of innocence. _Je ne suis pas heureuse ici_, was
uttered with a pathos of expression which drove its helplessness into
our hearts. The scene at the fountain with Pelleas, in which Melisande
loses her ring, was played with such delicate shading, such poetic
imagination, that one could almost crown the interpreter as the creator,
and the death scene was permeated with a fragile, simple beauty as
compelling as that which Carpaccio put into his picture of _Santa
Ursula_, a picture indeed which Miss Garden's performance brought to
mind more than once. If she sought inspiration from the art of the
painter for her delineation, it was not to Rossetti and Burne-Jones that
she went. Rather did she gather some of the soft bloom from the
paintings of Bellini, Carpaccio, Giotto, Cimabue ... especially
Botticelli; had not the spirit and the mood of the two frescos from the
Villa Lemmi in the Louvre come to life in this gentle representation?

Before she appeared as Melisande in New York, Miss Garden was a little
doubtful of the probable reception of the play here. She was surprised
and delighted with the result, for the drama was presented in the late
season of 1907-08 at the Manhattan Opera House no less than seven times
to very large audiences. The singer talked to me before the event: "It
took us four years to establish _Pelleas et Melisande_ in the repertoire
of the Opera-Comique. At first the public listened with disfavour or
indecision, and performances could only be given once in two weeks. As a
contrast I might mention the immediate success of _Aphrodite_, which I
sang three or four times a week until fifty representations had been
achieved, without appearing in another role. _Pelleas_ was a different
matter. The mystic beauty of the poet's mood and the revolutionary
procedures of the musician were not calculated to touch the great public
at once. Indeed, we had to teach our audiences to enjoy it. Americans
who, I am told, are fond of Maeterlinck, may appreciate its very
manifest beauty at first hearing, but they didn't in Paris. At the early
representations, individuals whistled and made cat-calls. One night
three young men in the first row of the orchestra whistled through an
entire scene. I don't believe those young men will ever forget the way I
looked at them.... But after each performance it was the same: the
applause drowned out the