However, there it stood, this _affiche_; and there it stood the night I stumbled through the semi-obscurity of the well-known house to my _loge._ The criticisms of the new play had not been reassuring; a second Monna Vanna was not to be expected; a return to Maeterlinck's earlier manner was unthinkable, so I confess that I awaited the parting of the curtains with a fair amount of curiosity. I was not disappointed when the first scene disclosed a _loggia_ of a Renascence _palazzo_. This setting sounded the keynote--and a very beautiful, delicate note it was, for the author has been as careful in the mounting of this play as he was indifferent in his first essays. Signor Rovescalli of Milan had carried out the designs of Charles Doudelet with fidelity and taste. The Pinturicchio costumes are all from the same hands. Nothing--except the lighting--has been omitted that might add to the incarnation of this dream--for a dream play Joyzelle is, full of strange hypnotic action and phrases that haunt. The piece, which is called a Conte d'Amour, is in five short acts. It is confined to four characters, two of which carry the slight thread of story. In style it is midway between Maeterlinck's earlier manner and Monna Vanna. It might, if considered in historic sequence, have been written before Monna Vanna, and thus could have furnished the link between the static and the dynamic theatre of this poet. Coming after the Italian tragedy of hot blood, it seems like a casting back to an earlier manner. But it is not. There is more action than in any play,--Vanna excepted,--more than in Pelléas and Mélisande. There are passion and climax that come perilously nearer theatricalism than anything Maeterlinck has yet written, though he steers around the banal, avoiding it by a hair-breadth. Admirers of the dramatist's repressed style must have taken a deep breath as the episode of the attempted assassination developed into something quite unexpected. Joyzelle is little more than a series of situations, in which the heroine is tested by the stern old enchanter Merlin. When I called upon the poet at his picturesque little house in Passy, I asked him about The Tempest, which the critics one and all saw in his play. He smiled and replied that Shakespeare was a good point of departure. Could there be a better one? The resemblance is rather superficial. Prospero and Miranda are, in the mysterious island of Maeterlinck, Merlin and Lanceor--the latter the magician's son; and Joyzelle is, if you will, a female Ferdinand come to woo the youth.