“The Belleville Theatre.”—The light, mystic vapour which fills and exhales through Carrière’s pictures, like delicate bluish-white clouds of incense, does not, as a rule, exert a disturbing influence. In this picture, quite one of his most important ones, his brush seems to have betrayed him. He has grown more material than is usual with him. The “Belleville Theatre” is so densely enveloped in smoke that hardly anything can be distinguished amidst the clouds. Yet what splendid discoveries are to be made if you make a violent effort to penetrate the darkness, into which a venture may only be made with a diver’s helmet and an air-pipe! We see—or, rather, we surmise—the third and a part of the fourth gallery of the People’s Theatre. The suburban audience that fills these rows, gives itself unrestrainedly up to the magic of the spectacle. It lives not its own life, but that of the heroes in the piece. To this audience Hecuba is everything. The wide-opened eyes lost in reverie, the cheeks sunk sorrowfully in their hands, the shoulders contracted by fear, the bodies almost helplessly leaning on one another, betray the intensity with which these poor people have fled out of themselves into illusion. What is truth, what is deception, if a poetical word, and that, too, most likely the word of a wretched melodrama, can snatch away small trades-people and artisans—probably sore oppressed by the needs of existence and more than full of their own troubles—so far from all their griefs that they forget their misery and think they are vividly experiencing a new lot? That would be the Buddha philosophy of this amazing picture if we could but distinguish all it contains. Carrière has painted the profound doctrine of Maia and Nirvana. It is a pity he has covered it with so thick a veil that it remains impenetrable even to the eyes of the initiated.