What _La Sylphide_ was to Taglioni and _El Diablo Cojuelo_ to Elssler, the ballet of _Giselle_ was to Grisi. It was the work of three famous men: Heine furnished the subject, Gautier wrote the scenario and Adolphe Adam composed the music. The scene was laid among the mountains, at the season of the gathering of the grapes. At the vintage fête Giselle danced with such unwearied zest that her mother said to her: “Luckless child, you will dance yourself to death, and when you die you will become a will-o’-the-wisp. You will go to the ball at midnight in a robe of moonshine and with bracelets of dew-pearls on your cold white feet. You will entice lost travellers into the fatal circle and you will lead them, all warm and breathing, into the icy waters of the lake. You will be a vampire of the dance!” Grisi’s most marvellous dance was her dance of death and resurrection as a fairy-spirit. Giselle sickened with despair of love until she lost her reason. Her madness did not take the form of an Ophelia-like melancholy. She began to dance, she danced ever more swiftly and furiously. As she danced, a gleam of reason came to her; she remembered her sorrow and, resolving to end it and her life together, she ran upon the point of a sword. Wounded to death she went on dancing swooningly, and after some last disordered steps died in a marvellous kind of choregraphic agony. In the next act came her no less wonderful dance of resurrection. After she is dead, her grave in the forest is discovered by the fairy troop. She is awaked by magic from her long sleep. She rises and dances with a tottering motion like one still dazed with dream. Gradually her limbs forget the contraction of the grave-clothes; the cool air of the night and the light of the moon restore her gaiety; delightedly she takes possession of space and abandons herself to the ecstasy of her new fairy life. Grisi made of the ballet a true poem, a kind of choregraphic elegy, full of tender charm. More than one spectator who had never expected to be moved by a _rond-de-jambe_ or _arabesque_ was surprised by tears. Henceforth the part was impossible for any other dancer and the name of Carlotta became inseparable from that of _Giselle_. The perfect art of these three dancers, Taglioni, Elssler and Carlotta Grisi, raised the ballet during the term of their fame to the highest degree of excellence which it had ever reached. To their names must be added those of Fanny Cerito, who was known in Italy as the “fourth Grace,” and Lucille Grahn, who according to some critics combined the ideal form of Taglioni with the realism of Elssler and the sprightliness of Carlotta Grisi. These two dancers would probably have been without a rival in any less brilliant epoch than that of the marvellous forties.