Sans doute. Il vous faudra trois voix: un dessus, une haute-contre et une basse, qui seront accompagnés d’une basse de viole, d’un téorbe et d’un clavecin pour les basses continues, avec deux dessus de violon pour jouer les retournelles. M. JOURDAIN Il faudra mettre aussi une trompette marine. La trompette marine est un instrument qui me plaît, et qui est très harmonieux. LE MAÎTRE DE MUSIQUE Laissez-nous gouverner les choses. In spite of Molière’s just, or unjust ridicule, the marine trumpet figured in the royal band of Louis XV. Several names of artists who played this instrument at the French court are recorded in the _État de la France_ for 1702, and among them we find Danican Philidor, a favourite musician of Louis, “le bien aimé” (?) and as rampant a chess player as was his contemporary Diderot. Whether from motives of economy or because the marine trumpet was looked upon as “no great shakes” (as our Yankee cousins say), all players of that instrument at the French court were also performers on a species of hautbois--now obsolete--called the Cremorne. How these virtuosi managed to juggle notes out of both instruments at the same time, history does not relate, but in the face of such a feat as that achieved by Don Jumpedo, who nightly jumped down his own throat at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket some hundred years ago, all things seem possible. England was not behind France in her use of the marine trumpet. Gay King Charles would have all things at court in accordance with the French fashion, and the marine trumpet doubtless found its way to the British coast in the company of truffles, perruques, pirouettes, and long-ear’d puppy dogs. Whether it was bundled in with the Cremorne, as was its fate in France, or ignored, as in Italy, is not recorded, but its advent was apparently announced in the following stirring advertisement published in _The London Gazette_ for 4th February 1674:--“A rare concert of Trumpets Marine, never before heard of in England. If any persons desire to come and hear it they may repair to the Fleece Tavern near St James’ about two of the clock in the afternoon every day in the week except Sundays. Every concert shall continue one hour and so begin again. The best places are one shilling and the other sixpence.” The marine trumpet was not only a means of drawing the public, but it apparently had a market value of its own, for we find in Thomas Shadwell’s play, _The Miser_, of that period, that a certain loan includes a “Bolona lute, a roman Arch lute, 2 gittars, a Cremona Violin, a Lyra Viol, 1 Viol da Gambo, and a Trumpet-Marine, very fit for you if you be a lover of musick.” [Illustration: Fig. 9.--MARINE TRUMPET]