The only _Marguerite_ I have ever seen since that resembled hers was Mme Calve's, and the French artist seemed studied and conscious beside Margarita. You see, she _was_ young, she _was_ sincere and ingenuous, she _was_ slender and beautiful--and she had a fresh and lovely voice, well trained, into the bargain. She would never have made a great coloratura soprano. Neither her voice nor her temperament inclined to this. She belonged, properly speaking, to the advance guard of the natural method, the school of intelligence and subtle dramatic skill. I cannot imagine Margarita a stout, tightly laced, high-heeled creature, advancing to the footlights, jewelled finger-tips on massive chest, emitting a series of _staccato_ fireworks interspersed with trills and scales apropos of nothing in this world or the next. Such performances constituted Roger's main objection to the opera, and though he was considered Philistine once, it is amusing to see how the tide of even popular opinion is setting his way, now. So in the great final trio, Margarita did not show at her best, perhaps; the situation seemed strained, unreal, and the final shriek a little high for her. But oh, what a lovely creature she was, alone in her cell! What lines her supple figure gave the loose prison robe, what poignant, simple, cruelly deserted grief, poured from her big, girlish eyes! And I do not believe anyone will ever again make such exquisite pathos of the poor creature's crazed return to her first meeting with her lover. So clearly did she picture to herself this early scene that we all saw it too, and lived it over again with the poor child. _"Ni belle, ni demoiselle ..."_ [Illustration: IT WAS AFTER THE GARDEN LOVE-SCENE THAT SHE WON HER RECALLS] It was the whole of love betrayed, abandoned, yet loving and forgiving, that little phrase; and I staunchly insist that the good Papa Gounod deserves credit for it, sentimentalist though he be! It was after the garden love-scene that she won her recalls, over and over again. Above the great sheaf of hot-house daisies I sent up to the footlights she bowed and bowed and bowed again and smiled, and the jewels flashed on her white shoulders and the yellow braids shook at her deep, triumphant breaths, as she beamed out over us all, the wonderful, all-embracing smile of the born artist, that cannot be taught. Part of that brilliant smile came straight into my misted eyes, back in the loge, and so extraordinary is the power of such a success, so completely does that row of footlights cut off the victor from us who applaud below, that I, even I, who had literally taught this girl some of the ordinary reserves of decent society, who had found her a savage (socially speaking) only two years ago, now bowed low to her, dazed, humble as the man beside me who never saw her before. How they pounded and cried, those amusing, sophisticated, babyish Parisians!