In all the literature on the subject of music there are no more delightful volumes to be met with than those of J. B. Weckerlin, called “Musiciana,” “Nouveau Musiciana,” and “Dernier Musiciana.” These books are made up of anecdotes, personal and otherwise. From Bourdelot’s “Histoire de la Musique” Weckerlin culled the following: “An equerry of Madame la Dauphine asked two of the court musicians to his home at Versailles for dinner one evening. They sang standing opposite the mantelpiece, over which hung a great mirror which was broken in six pieces by the force of tone; all the porcelain on the buffet resounded and shook.” Weckerlin also recalls a caprice of Louis XI, who one day commanded the Abbé de Baigne, who had already invented many musical instruments, to devise a harmony out of pigs. The Abbé asked for some money, which was grudgingly given, and constructed a pavilion covered with velvet, under which he placed a number of pigs. Before this pavilion he arranged a white table with a keyboard constructed in such a fashion that the displacing of a key stuck a pig with a needle. The sounds evoked were out of the ordinary, and it is recorded that the king was highly diverted and asked for more. Auber’s enthusiasm for his own music, usually concealed under an indifferent air, occasionally expressed itself in strange fashion. Mme. Damoreau recounted to Weckerlin how, when the composer completed an air in the middle of the night, even at three or four o’clock in the morning, he rushed to her apartment. Dragging a pianoforte to her bed, he insisted on playing the new song over and over to her, while she sang it, meanwhile making the changes suggested by this extraordinary performance. More modern instances come to mind. Maria Gay is not above nose-blowing and expectoration in her interpretation of Carmen, physical acts in the public performance of which no Spanish cigarette girl would probably be caught ashamed. Yet it may be doubted if they suit the music of Bizet, or the Meilhac and Halévy version of Merimée’s creation.... A story has been related to me--I do not vouch for the truth of it--that during a certain performance of _Carmen_ at the Opéra-Comique in Paris a new singer, at some stage in the proceedings, launched that dreadful French word which Georges Feydeau so ingenuously allowed his heroine to project into the second act of _La Dame de chez Maxim_, with a result even more startling than that which attended Bernard Shaw’s excursion into the realms of the expletive in his play, _Pygmalion_. It is further related of this performance of _Carmen_, which is said to have sadly disturbed the “traditions,” that in the excitement incident to her début the lady positively refused to allow Don José to kill her. Round and round the stage she ran while the perspiring tenor tried in vain to catch her. At length, the music of the score being concluded, the curtain fell on a Carmen still alive; the _salle_ was in an uproar.