These references to contrast of styles, to Scott, and to Spanish dances are particularly interesting as illuminating the change which was coming over the Ballet about 1820-1830. Mere technique as the chief aim of Ballet was beginning to fail. It had become too academic and needed the infusion of a new spirit of grace and freedom. It came in a sudden craze for national dances, particularly Slav and Spanish, and in the craze for Scott and all his works, which undoubtedly became an influence on Opera and Ballet, as they did on the forces which led to the growth of the great Romantic movement, of which Hugo was to be hailed as leader and of which the effects passing on through the Art and Literature of the ’fifties, ’sixties, and ’seventies, can still perhaps be traced to-day. Much of the popularity of the Spanish and Slav dances during the early part of the nineteenth century was due to their frequent performance by Pauline Duvernay, Pauline Leroux and the Elsslers. There were two Elsslers, sisters, the elder of whom, Thérèse, was born in 1808, and Fanny in 1810, both at Vienna. Thérèse was less brilliant a dancer than her sister--whom she “mothered” always--but had a charming personality. She eventually gave up the stage to marry, morganatically, Prince Adalbert of Prussia, and was afterwards ennobled. [Illustration: Fanny Elssler (_From an old engraving_).] [Illustration: Carlotta Grisi (_From a lithograph_).] At the outset of her career Fanny achieved distinction, or had it thrust upon her, by becoming an object of the “grande passion,” on the part of l’Aiglon, the Duc de Reichstadt, Napoleon’s ill-fated son. But it was said that the rumour was only put about by her astute manager, in order to get the young dancer talked about, and as an advertisement the manœuvre succeeded admirably. Both sisters, after acquiring a favourable reputation in Germany, came to London, and it was here, in 1834, that Véron, the manager of the Paris Opera, came over to tempt them to appear in Paris with a salary of forty thousand francs, twenty thousand each. Thinking to impress the young Viennese with an example of Parisian magnificence, Véron gave a dinner-party in their honour at the Clarendon, in Bond Street, to which the best available society was invited, and the menu, the wine and the equipage were of unparalleled quality. At dessert an attendant brought a silver salver piled high with costly presents for the ladies of the company--pearls, rubies, diamonds, superbly set--a miniature Golconda. But somehow it all fell a trifle flat. The Elssler girls, true to their simple German training, drank only water with their dinner, and with dessert merely accepted, the one a hatpin, and the other a little handbag; and they would not agree to sign their contract until the day of Véron’s departure!