affected by this display....  For my part, I am certain that people applaud the outcries of an actress at the opera as they would the feats of a tumbler or rope-dancer at a fair....  Imagine this style of singing employed to express the delicate gallantry and tenderness of Quinault.  Imagine the Muses, the Graces, the Loves, Venus herself, expressing themselves this way, and judge the effect.  As for devils, it might pass, for this music has something infernal in it, and is not ill adapted to such beings.”

From this and similar accounts it will be seen that opera in France during the latter part of the eighteenth century had, notwithstanding Jean Jacques’s garrulous sarcasms, advanced a considerable way toward that artificial perfection which characterizes it now.  Music was a topic of discussion, which absorbed the interest of the polite world far more than the mutterings in the politi-cal horizon, which portended so fierce a convulsion of the social regime.  Wits, philosophers, courtiers, and fine ladies joined in the acrimonious controversy, first between the adherents of Lulli and Rameau, then between those of Gluck and Piccini.  The young gallants of the day were wont to occupy part of the stage itself and criticise the performance of the opera; and often they adjourned from the theatre to the dueling-ground to settle a difficulty too hard for their wits to unravel.  The intense interest appertaining to all things connected with music and the theatre noticeable in the French of to-day, was tenfold as eager a century ago.  Passionate curiosity, even extending to enthusiasm, with which that worn-out and utterly corrupt society, by some subtile contradiction, threw itself into all questions concerning philosophy, science, literature, and art, found its most characteristic expression in its relation to the music of the stage.

It was at this strange and picturesque period, when everything in politics, society, literature, and art was fermenting for the terrible Hecate’s brew which the French world was soon to drink to the dregs, that there appeared on the stage one of the most remarkable figures in its history, a woman of great beauty and brilliancy, as well as an artist of unique genius—­Sophie Arnould.  Her name is lustrous in French memoirs for the splendor of her wit and conversational talent; and Arsene Houssaye has thought it worthy to preserve her bon-mots in a volume of table-talk, called “Arnouldiana,” which will compare with anything of its kind in the French language.  For a dozen years prior to the Revolution Sophie Arnould was a queen of society as well as of art; and in her elegant salon, which was a museum of art curios and bric-a-brac, she held a brilliant court, where men of the highest distinction, both native and foreign, were proud to pay their homage at the shrine of beauty and genius.  There might be seen D’Alembert, the learned and scholarly, rough and independent in manner, who deserted the drawing-rooms of the great