It is also interesting to note how much these audiences will permit from the stage in the direction of suggestiveness, and what would be called elsewhere "outraged propriety." This is furnished them to the highest degree by Yvette Guilbert. It seems that as this artist became less of a novelty, she recognized that it would be necessary for her to increase the audacity of her songs if she meant to hold her original place in the interest of her audiences, and she has now reached a point in daring which seems hardly possible for her or any one else to pass. No one can help delighting in her and in her line of work, in her subtlety, her grace, and the absolute knowledge she possesses of what she wants to do and how to do it. But her songs are beyond anything that one finds in the most impossible of French novels or among the legends of the Viennese illustrated papers. These latter may treat of certain subjects in a too realistic or in a scoffing but amusing manner, but Guilbert talks of things which are limited generally to the clinique of a hospital and the _blague_ of medical students; things which are neither funny, witty, nor quaint, but simply nasty and offensive. The French audiences of the open-air concerts, however, enjoy these, and encore her six times nightly. At Pastor's Theatre last year a French girl sang a song which probably not one out of three hundred in the audience understood, but which she delivered with such appropriateness of gesture as to make her meaning plain. When she left the stage there was absolute silence in the house, and in the wings the horrified manager seized her by the arms, and in spite of her protests refused to allow her to reappear. So her performance in this country was limited to that one song. It was a very long trip to take for such a disappointment, and the management were, of course, to blame for not knowing what they wanted and what their audiences did not want, but the incident is interesting as showing how widely an American and a French audience differs in matters of this sort.