Formerly known as the Café Dangest, the title it now bears has belonged to it only since the year 1830. Just round the corner stands the house of the well-known music publishers, Messrs. Brandus and Co., founded by Moritz Schlesinger, who, as a young man, brought out many of Beethoven's works, and was indeed one of Beethoven's first appreciators. During the _coup d'État_ of 1851 M. Brandus's hospitable residence was the scene of an outrage which threatened to become a tragedy on a large scale. He was entertaining a party of friends, among whom were M. Adolphe Saxe, the inventor of saxophones, and the eminent musical critic of the _Times_, the late Mr. J. W. Davison. The boulevards and many of the streets leading out of them were full of troops, for the most part in a state of great excitement, and some infantry soldiers at the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue Richelieu believed, or affected to believe, that shots had been fired at them from M. Brandus's windows. Possibly some bullets discharged by the soldiers themselves had glanced back from the house or one of the neighbouring houses, and fallen into the street. The troops, in any case, forced M. Brandus's door, and his servant, who went downstairs to remonstrate with the invaders, was at once shot dead. The soldiers then made their way into the room where M. Brandus and his guests were at table, arrested them, and brought them down to the boulevard with the intention of shooting them in a formal manner, as if by way of example. Fortunately, the general in command was an amateur of music and a personal friend of Adolphe Saxe: whom he particularly remembered, moreover, as having fought with courage against the insurgents during the sanguinary days of June, 1848. Saxe at once declared that the accusation made by the soldiers was entirely without basis, and the general did not hesitate to accept his assurance. He enjoined him, however, to hurry away as quickly as possible from the boulevard, which was about to be "swept" by a fusillade. Saxe and his friends managed narrowly to escape. The Opéra Comique Theatre, or Comédie Italienne, as it was more generally called, was founded originally in the Hôtel de Bourgogne; and it was only in 1783 that it was re-established on the boulevard to which the Comédie Italienne was to give its name. The Opéra Comique of France descends indeed in a straight line from the most ancient dramatic entertainments given in that country. These were introduced in the sixteenth century by natives of the land to which the French owe nearly all the lighter and more ornamental part of their civilisation, from opera and the drama to ices and confectionery: from architecture, pictures, and statues, to gloves, fans, gambling-houses, and masked balls.