“Wonderful, wonderful, my darling!” Fokine was murmuring. “Such a beautiful performance; and to think you did it all in such a short period, with so very few rehearsals; and the really amazing thing is that you portrayed the character of the creature precisely as it is in my mind!” In the love, the adoration, the romance of Michel and Vera Fokine, there was the greatest continuous devotion between man and wife that it has been my privilege to know. Fokine’s American ballet creations have been lost. Perhaps it is as well. For the closing chapter of the life of a truly great artist they were sadly inferior. Towards the end of his career, however, he staged some fresh, new works in France for René Blum’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, including _Les Elements_, _Don Juan_, and _L’Epreuve d’Amour_. Then, for de Basil’s Original Ballet Russe, _Cinderella_, or since he used the French, _Cendrillon_, to a commissioned score by Baron Frederic d’Erlanger, which might have been better. But choreographically _Cendrillon_ was a return to the triumphant Fokine. There was also his triumphant re-staging of _Le Coq d’Or_. Perhaps his last really great triumph was his collaboration with Serge Rachmaninoff on _Paganini_, a work that takes rank with Fokine’s finest. Fokine restaged _Les Sylphides_ and _Carnaval_ for Ballet Theatre’s initial season. When Ballet Theatre was under my management, he created _Bluebeard_, in 1941, for Anton Dolin. In 1942, I was instrumental in having German Sevastianov engage Fokine to stage the nostalgic tragedy, _Russian Soldier_, to the music of Prokofieff. While in Mexico, in the summer of 1942, working on _Helen of Troy_, for Ballet Theatre, Fokine contracted pleurisy, which developed into pneumonia on his return to New York, where he died, on 22nd August. For a dancer, he was on the youthful side. He was born in Mannheim-am-Rhine, Germany, 26th April, 1880, the son of Ekaterina Gindt. According to the official records of the St. Petersburg Imperial School, his father was unknown. He was adopted by a merchant, Mikhail Feodorovitch Fokine, who gave him his name. In 1898, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Imperial School. In 1905, he married Vera Petrovna Antonova, the daughter of a master of the wig-maker’s Guild, who had graduated from the School the year before. At the funeral service at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral, in New York, were assembled all of the dance world in New York in mid-summer, to do him honor.