[Illustration: POPULAR BATHING AT LIDO] round about this luminous center other visions of hashish radiate forth: “Thamar”--a Cleopatra in Georgian style, a symphony in blue major; “The Blue God”, a Hindu fairy=tale; “Peri”, more recently, “Alladin”, and, only the other day, “The Adoration.” Astonishment takes hold of one as one tells the large pearls on this necklace that is worthy of the funeral=pile of Sardanapalus. Turn over the pages of the ballets that I have cited and look for the sketches; if you are in possession of the magic word of Ali=Baba, force open the sesame of the Museum of Decorative Arts in which are jealously guarded the most beautiful of these sketches; and you will find how justified was the saying of the late Joséfin Péladan, “Bakst, the Delacroix of the Costume.” Consider the wisely arranged orgy of “Sheherazade”, (for Bakst has this supreme gift that great masters possess, of being concerned about the smallest button on a legging at the same time that they are getting a whole army to march) and in this whole eruption of vigorous colors you will not observe the slightest suggestion of white. There is, nevertheless, in the work of Bakst a whole corner, enveloped in sunshine, in which the white--shining and serene, virginal and fresh--dominates resolutely. The sensual within him is duplicated by the romantic. We saw this come to the fore for the first time in the “Fairy of the Dolls”; Schumann’s “Carneval” revealed the “white Bakst” to the Parisians. They never grew tired of these adorable puppets, sentimental and crafty, who glide over the floor to the musical text of Schumann like the dolls on the cover of a music box. Harlequin and Pierrot, Chiarina or Colombine--they are not merely endless masks costumed in the styles of 1830, with furbelows and coiffures in ringlets; they are the incarnations of that playful and exquisite Viennese spirit; they are the descendants of Mozart and of Haydn. And the cut of their hazy cambrics, their whole bearing is in “Biedermayer” style--that quaint and charming style of bourgeois romanticism in the Germany of old. In order not to crush these fragile and delicate beings with the four walls of reality, as they flitted like butterflies about the stage. Bakst removed all stationary decoration: a background of drapery, a couch set off against this background--that was all. Nothing encumbers the view nor impedes the imagination of the spectator as he is enticed by the graceful or ironical episodes of the play to picture to himself a ball room or a boudoir or a park.