Taglioni lived long enough to taste all the bitterness of the discarded favourite. When she became too old to practise her art, and other less gifted but more youthful dancers usurped her place, she passed swiftly into oblivion. At the last, the dancer who had been wont to receive the homage of kings and princes, and the adulation of the public of two continents, remained without a friend. She lost all her fortune and in her distress was compelled to give lessons in dancing and deportment. “It was a sad sight,” says Henri Bauer, “to see her, a white-haired old lady, escorting a bevy of English schoolgirls in Hyde Park in the winter, at Brighton in the summer, or, accompanied by a little old Italian, teaching dances and court curtseys to the proud daughters of the gentry.” “I would be young again to dance,” she said to a friend who had asked her if she would like to live her life all over again, “I would be young again to dance--but not from any love of life, not to repeat any other experiences and pleasures.” Marie Taglioni died at Marseilles in 1884. The passion for the ballet in the nineteenth century reached its climax in the amazing rivalry between Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. The appearance of the Austrian dancer brought about a schism in the cult of Taglioni. It was fought out with all the fury of the _odium theologicum_. The two claimants to the sceptre of the dance divided the world into rival camps. And how shall posterity, to whom both are little more than shadowy names, make a just award? Fanny Elssler was born in Vienna in 1810. Her father was Haydn’s copyist and factotum, and the composer interested himself greatly in the beginnings of her career. It began early, for at the age of six she was dancing at a little Viennese theatre in one of the _ballets d’enfants_ then in vogue. She was first taught in the old, stereotyped style of ballet-dancing which was revolutionised by Taglioni and fell into disfavour about 1830. Her studies were completed in Italy, where she passed a great part of her life. She first came into note at Naples and danced her way through Italy to Berlin and London. Paris she reserved for her latest conquest. It was when she was dancing at Her Majesty’s Theatre that Véron, the director of the Paris opera, saw Elssler and immediately secured her for the next operatic season. The English at this time, in spite of their enthusiasm for ballet, appear to have lacked the artistic perception to discover a dancer for themselves. A great reputation abroad was the only royal road to success on the London stage. And so it was that they failed to discover what a genius they had in their midst until it was too late and the new dancer was being acclaimed in Paris as a serious rival to the incomparable Taglioni.