Her historians have not always been kind. A contemporary wrote: “_La Guimard a des caprices entre nous. On ne peut compter sur elle.... Son arrogance n’a pas de nom.... Ce que la Guimard veut, bon gré, mal gré, il faut qu’on le veuille._” And there you have it! “What Guimard wishes, willy-nilly one must wish.” That is a touch that tells; the words ring true. Intriguing, capricious--masterful! What wonder, then, that she came to rise by her own buoyancy, of manner and morals, and sought the rarefied, but, in the days of Louis XV, far from inaccessible atmosphere of Court circles. Guimard made her _début_ at the Opera in May, 1762, as Terpsichore in a ballet called “Les Caractères de la Danse,” and achieved a triumph. From that time until she retired from the stage she was practically without a rival in the affections of the Parisian audiences. One testimony to her popularity is found in the promptitude with which she was nicknamed. Guimard, if not beautiful in face, had, nevertheless, a beautiful figure, was quite unusually graceful, carried herself nobly, was altogether a commanding and magnetic personage, but for all her beauty of figure Guimard was amazingly slim. Seeing her in a classical ballet dancing as a nymph between two fauns--impersonated by the celebrated male-dancers Vestris _père_ and Dauberval--Sophie Arnould said it reminded her of “two dogs fighting for a bone.” Another of her footnotes on Guimard was her description of her as “Le Squelette des Grâces,” which also had the saving grace of being partly a compliment, and it was by this nickname that Madeleine was generally known throughout Paris. To judge from this insistence on Madeleine’s thinness one might imagine that she could not be as attractive, certainly hardly as graceful as has been said. But such nicknames are, though emphasising some special characteristic, usually only marks of popularity, and that Guimard really was graceful can be gathered from the summing-up of Noverre who had seen her dance for years and knew, as only a great ballet-master could, what he was talking about when he said that “... from her _début_ to her retirement she was always graceful, naturally so. She never ran after difficulties. A lovable and noble simplicity reigned in her dance; she designed it with perfect taste, and put expression and sentiment into all her movements.” Of her performance in Gardel’s ballet, “La Chercheuse d’Esprit,” in which she played the title-_rôle_, a contemporary wrote that “her eloquent silences surpassed the vivid, easy and seductive diction of Mme. Favart;” and he mentions one point that is of interest when he remembers that the struggle that Noverre had had to achieve some reform of costume on the opera-stage, namely, that Guimard, “following the example of Mme. Favart, discarded the panniers and the cuirasse of conventional costume.”