a tavern sign.  He offers the company a toast, “To Marguerite!” and when Valentin attempts to resent the insult to his sister with his sword, it breaks in his hand as he tries to penetrate a magic circle which Mephistopheles draws around himself.  The men now suspect the true character of their singular visitor, and turn the cruciform hilts of their swords against him, to his intense discomfort.  With the return of the women the merrymaking is resumed.  All join in a dance, tripping it gayly to one waltz sung by the spectators and another which rises simultaneously from the instruments.  Marguerite crosses the market-place on her way home from church.  Faust offers her his arm, but she declines his escort—­not quite so rudely as Goethe’s Gretchen does in the corresponding situation.  Faust becomes more than ever enamoured of the maiden, whom he had seen in the vision conjured up in the philosopher’s study.

Mephistopheles is a bit amused at Faust’s first attempt at wooing, and undertakes to point the way for him.  He leads him into the garden surrounding the cottage in which Marguerite dwells.  Siebel had just been there and had plucked a nosegay for the maiden of his heart, first dipping his fingers in holy water, to protect them from the curse which Mephistopheles had pronounced against them while parading as a fortune-teller at the fair.  Faust is lost in admiration at sight of the humble abode of loveliness and innocence, and lauds it in a romance ("Salut! demeure chaste et pure"), but is taken aside by Mephistopheles, who gives warning of the approach of Marguerite, and places a casket of jewels beside the modest bouquet left by Siebel.  Marguerite, seated at her spinning-wheel, alternately sings a stanza of a ballad ("Il etait un Roi de Thule”) and speaks her amazed curiosity concerning the handsome stranger who had addressed her in the marketplace.  She finds the jewels, ornaments herself with them, carolling her delight the while, and admiring the regal appearance which the gems lend her.

Here I should like to be pardoned a brief digression.  Years ago, while the German critics were resenting the spoliation of the masterpiece of their greatest poet by the French librettists, they fell upon this so-called Jewel Song ("Air des bijoux,” the French call it), and condemned its brilliant and ingratiating waltz measures as being out of keeping with the character of Gretchen.  In this they forgot that Marguerite and Gretchen are very different characters indeed.  There is much of the tender grace of the unfortunate German maiden in the creation of the French authors, but none of her simple, almost rude, rusticity.  As created by, let me say, Mme. Carvalho and perpetuated by Christine Nilsson and the painter Ary Scheffer, Marguerite is a good deal of a grande dame, and against the German critics it might appositely be pleaded that there are more traces of childish ingenuousness in her rejoicing over the casket of jewels than in any of her other utterances.  The