_Le Pavillon d’Armide_ is a link with the old conventional ballet. The fable is full of unreason. The pavilion is a spacious apartment in an old French château, deriving its name from the personage who forms the subject of a piece of Gobelin tapestry on the wall. To this castle comes one night a storm-belated traveller. He is hospitably entertained by the wicked marquis, the owner of the castle, who is an amateur magician of considerable attainments. After admiring the pictured figure of Armide, he falls asleep. As he sleeps the figures on the tapestry come to life, and he is transported in dream to the Court of Armide, where her captive knights dance in a chain of roses. He conceives a grand passion for the princess, and the king, whom he does not recognise to be the wizard marquis, blesses their union. The magic Court vanishes and the traveller wakes to find himself still in the bare, dawn-lit chamber. When the marquis enters to ask how he has slept he recognises with horror that he is none other than the king in the dream. And yet it was not wholly a dream, for at the same time he finds the actual golden scarf which Armide had given to him in plighting her troth. He knows himself to have been the victim of a fatal enchantment, and thereupon somewhat irrelevantly dies. M. Fokine has made of this irrational fable the framework of a number of dances which display the perfect unity and discipline of the dancers. But Nijinsky, as the servant of the traveller, and Karsavina, as Armide, are scarcely given adequate scope for their originality and faculty of interpretation. The thing is good of its kind--it is the perfection of the traditional _ballet d’action_--but it has been done before. The most satisfying feature of the performance is a dance of seven buffoons, of whom the premier buffoon is M. Rosai. Incidentally they execute several steps which technically are among the most difficult in the dancer’s repertory. But the chief merit of their display is its grotesque wit, the mimicry of the half-human antics of marionettes, executed with a faultless rhythmical precision. The decoration was devised by M. Benois and, at all events [Illustration: WASLAW NIJINSKY IN _Le Pavillon d’Armide_ _Photograph: Gerschel_]