advances right up to Isabelle's
bed, and shouts for the third time in a voice that makes the chandelier
ring again, 'Isa-belle!' Isabelle says, 'I don't think that I can have
imagined that. There really is some one in the room. I'm terribly
frightened, and don't quite know what to do,' so she gets out of bed,
and anxiously scans the stalls and boxes over the footlights for signs
of an intruder. Finding no one there but the audience, she then
searches the gallery fruitlessly, and getting a sudden inspiration, she
looks behind her, and, to her immense astonishment, finds her lover
standing within a foot of her." This, as told with Levasseur's
inimitable drollery, was excruciatingly funny.

Robert is an expensive opera to put on, for, owing to hideous
jealousies at the Paris Opera, Meyerbeer was compelled to write two
prima-donna parts which afforded the rival ladies exactly equal
opportunities. In the same way Halevy, the composer of La Juive, had to
re-arrange and transpose his score, for Adolphe Nourrit, the great
Paris tenor, in 1835, when the opera was first produced, was jealous of
the splendid part the bass had been given, the tenor's role being quite
insignificant. So it came about that La Juive is the only opera in
which the grey-bearded old father is played by the principal tenor,
whilst the lover is the light tenor. Mehul's Biblical Joseph and his
Brethren is the one opera in which there are no female characters,
though "Benjamin" is played by the leading soprano. In both the
Prophete and Favorita the contralto plays the principal part, the
soprano having a very subsidiary role. Meyerbeer wrote the part of the
Prophet himself specially for Roger, the great tenor, and that of
"Fides" for Mme. Viardot. By the way, the famous skating scene in the
Prophete was part of the original production in Paris of 1849, and yet
we think roller-skating an invention of yesterday.

I had German lessons from a Professor Hentze. This old man was the
first example of a militant German that I had come across. He was
always talking of Germany's inevitable and splendid destiny. Although a
Hanoverian by birth, he was a passionate admirer of Bismarck and
Bismarck's policy, and was a furious Pan-German in sentiment. "Where
the German tongue is heard, there will be the German Fatherland," he
was fond of quoting in the original. As he declared that both Dutch and
Flemish were but variants of Low German, he included Holland and
Belgium in