, or thrilling them with terror at his will; in a word,
completely magnetizing them. Not a discord in his diatonic scale. You
were forced to admit that every gesture, every movement of a facial
muscle, had a true purpose, a _raison d'etre_. It was a triumphant
demonstration.

The life of this great master and teacher, hereafter to be known as the
founder of the Science of Dramatic Art, crowded with strange
vicissitudes and romantic episodes, forms a record full of interest.

Francois Delsarte was born at Solesmes, Department of the North, France,
in 1811. His father was a physician, and his mother a woman of rare
abilities, who taught herself to speak and write several languages.

Shortly after the battle of Waterloo a detachment of the allied troops
was passing through Solesmes, in the midst of a dead and sullen silence,
when the commandant's quick ear caught the sound of a childish voice
crying, "Vive l'Em-pe-weur! Vive Na-po-le-on!" Every one smiled at the
juvenile speaker's audacity, except the stern officer whose name has,
unfortunately, escaped the infamous celebrity it deserved. By his
orders, a platoon of soldiers sought out the child's home and burned it
to the ground; and thus little Francois Delsarte became the innocent
cause of the ruin of his family.

The atrocities committed during the White Terror, of which this incident
is an example, though passed over by history, are not forgotten by the
survivors of that cruel period. The leaders in the second terror could
not plead the ignorance of Robespierre's followers in excuse of their
excesses, for they were nobles, magistrates, priests and officers of
rank.

Delsarte's early years were passed in the midst of cruel privations and
domestic troubles, for even love forsook a home blighted by poverty. His
father, naturally proud and imperious, irritated by straitened
circumstances, out of which there seemed no issue, crushed by the weight
of obligations to others, lost heart and hope, became morose, sceptical
and bitter, and treated his wife and family with such harshness and
injustice, that Delsarte's mother was finally compelled to abandon her
husband. She fled with her two boys to Paris, hoping there to make her
talents available. All her efforts, however, were fruitless, and she
found herself on the verge of starvation.

One evening, as she sat with her two boys in her wretched room, tortured
by their questions after their father, she could not suppress h