At Paris the circus-woman is the object of a much higher admiration than in London. Théophile Gautier, in his dramatic feuilletons, has frequently shown that he preferred the equestrian fairy of the circus to the sylph who dances at the opera. He goes into ecstasies over her agility, vigour, and courage, and is displeased with nothing but the drapery in which her lower limbs are enveloped, holding that, just as the most virtuous fashionable woman or actress takes care to exhibit her bare arms if they are beautiful, so the “écuyère” of the circus should be allowed to display the full symmetry and grace of her legs. The “écuyère” whom Balzac brings on the scene in his _Fausse Maîtresse_, Malaga by name, is an excellent type of the French circus-woman, who is nearly always without relatives, sometimes a foundling, sometimes a stolen child, and who, coming one knows not whence, goes, the idol of a day, one knows not where. “At the fair,” says the greatest of French novelists--or rather, one of his characters--“this delicious Columbine used to carry chairs on the tip of her nose--the prettiest little Greek nose I ever saw. Malaga, madame, is skill personified. Of Herculean strength, she only requires her tiny fist or diminutive foot to rid herself of three or four men. She is, in fact, the goddess of gymnastics. Careless as a gipsy, she says everything that enters her head; she thinks as much of the future as you do of the halfpence you throw to beggars, and sometimes sublime things escape from her. No one could ever persuade her that an old diplomatist is a beautiful youth; a million could not change her opinion. Her love is, for whoever inspires it, a perpetual flattery. Endowed as she is with really insolent health, her teeth are thirty-two exquisite pearls encased in coral.”