who has eyes to see and ears to hear can find “a terrible example” in almost any of these plays, even the lightest.  For the congregation to which it was delivered there is a sermon in Toto chez Tata, perhaps the piece in which, above all others, the Muse seems Gallic and egrillarde.  That is a touch of real truth, and so of a true morality, where Tata, the fashionable courtesan, leaning over her stairs as Toto the school-boy bears off her elderly lover, and laughing at him, cries out, “Toi, mon petit homme, je te repincerai dans quatre ou cinq ans!” And a cold and cutting stroke it is a little earlier in the same little comedy where Toto, left alone in Tata’s parlor, negligently turns over her basket of visiting-cards and sees “names which he knew because he had learnt them by heart in his history of France.”  Still, in spite of this truth and morality, I do not advise the reading of Toto chez Tata in young ladies’ seminaries.  Young ladies in Paris do not go to hear Madame Chaumont, for whom Toto was written, nor is the Varietes, where it was played, a place where a girl can take her mother.

It was at the Varietes in December, 1864, that the Belle Helene was produced:  this was the first of half a score of plays written by MM.  Meilhac and Halevy for which M. Jacques Offenbach composed the music.  Chief among these are Barbe-bleue, the Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein, the Brigands and Perichole.  When we recall the fact that these five operas are the most widely known, the most popular and by far the best of M. Offenbach’s works, there is no need to dwell on his indebtedness to MM.  Meilhac and Halevy, or to point out how important a thing the quality of the opera-book is to the composer of the score.  These earlier librettos were admirably made:  they are models of what a comic opera-book should be.  I cannot well imagine a better bit of work of its kind than the Belle Helene or the Grande Duchesse.  Tried by the triple test of plot, characters and dialogue, they are nowhere wanting.  Since MM.  Meilhac and Halevy have ceased writing for M. Offenbach they have done two books for M. Charles Lecoq—­the Petit Duc and the Grande Demoiselle.  These are rather light comic operas than true operas-bouffes, but if there is an elevation in the style of the music, there is an emphatic falling off in the quality of the words.  From the Grande Duchesse to the Petit Duc is a great descent:  the former was a genuine play, complete and self-contained—­the latter is a careless trifle, a mere outline sketch for the composer to fill up.  The story—­akin in subject to Mr. Tom Taylor’s fine historical drama Clancarty—­is pretty, but there is no trace of the true poetry which made the farewell letter of Perichole so touching, or of the true comic force which projected General Bourn. Carmen, which, like Perichole, owes the suggestion of its plot and characters to Prosper Merimee, is little more than the task-work of the two well-trained play-makers:  it was sufficient for its purpose, no more and no less.