le native strain and our cultivated innocence, as the American and
English had been directly addressed to them. To the Cirque d'Ete, the
Cirque d'Hiver, the Theatre du Cirque we were on occasion conducted--we
had fallen so to the level of circuses, and that name appeared a
safety; in addition to which the big theatre most bravely bearing it,
the especial home at that time of the glittering and multitudinous
_feerie_, did seem to lift the whole scenic possibility, for our eyes,
into a higher sphere of light and grace than any previously disclosed. I
recall Le Diable d'Argent as in particular a radiant revelation--kept
before us a whole long evening and as an almost blinding glare; which
was quite right for the _donnee_, the gradual shrinkage of the Shining
One, the money-monster hugely inflated at first, to all the successive
degrees of loose bagginess as he leads the reckless young man he has
originally contracted with from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, till at
last he is a mere shrivelled silver string such as you could almost draw
through a keyhole. That was the striking moral, for the young man,
however regaled, had been somehow "sold"; which _we_ hadn't in the least
been, who had had all his pleasures and none of his penalty, whatever
this was to be. I was to repine a little, in these connections, at a
much later time, on reflecting that had we only been "taken" in the
Paris of that period as we had been taken in New York we might have come
in for celebrities--supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of
the histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of the
richest romanticism and adding to its richness--who practised that
braver art and finer finish which a comparatively homogenous public,
forming a compact critical body, still left possible. Rachel was alive,
but dying; the memory of Mademoiselle Mars, at her latest, was still in
the air; Mademoiselle Georges, a massive, a monstrous antique, had
withal returned for a season to the stage; but we missed her, as we
missed Dejazet and Frederic Lemaitre and Melingue and Samson; to say
nothing of others of the age before the flood--taking for the flood that
actual high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the general alien and
polyglot, in stalls and boxes, which I remember to have heard Gustave
Flaubert lament as the ruin of the theatre through the assumption of
judgeship by a bench to whom the very values of the speech of author and
actor were v