à la hausse. It is very true that very often the merriest entrechats or fancy figurings were interrupted by the diplomatic corps bringing all kinds of Job's messages from Belgium, Spain, England, and Italy, but they allowed no sign of disturbance to show itself, and danced while in despair all the more wildly, as did Aline, the Queen of Golconda, who swept on in her apparently absorbing, intoxicating waltz while the chorus of eunuchs continued to announce with shuddering voices one disaster after the other. All of this folk were dancing for their rentes or incomes; the more moderate they were, the wilder was their dance; and the fattest and most virtuous bankers whirled in the valse infernale—the infamous round of the nuns in Robert le Diable. Meyerbeer achieved also something unheard of by keeping captive or constant the fickle Parisians for a whole winter. The multitude still crowd to the Académie Royale de la Musique to see Robert le Diable; but the enthusiastic Meyerbeerians will pardon me when I say that many are attracted not so much by the music as by the political meaning of the opera libretto. Robert the Devil, son of a devil as reprobate as Philippe d'Egalité, and of a princess as pious as was the daughter of Penthièvre, is impelled to evil, or the Revolution, by the spirit of his father, and by that of his mother to good—
