The Fair of St. Germain was open from February 3rd to Easter Sunday; the Fair of St. Laurent began at the end of June and closed in October, so that for the greater part of the year both offered opportunities for amusement of a less expensive and more popular sort than did the aristocratic Comédie Française and Comédie Italienne; in fact, so popular were they that, on suppression of the Comédie Italienne, the aristocracy themselves patronised the foreign troupes of the Theatres of the Fair. From the dawn of the eighteenth century, however, this very popularity became a source of worry to the managers of the troupes at the Fairs, for it involved the jealousy of the Comédie Française and the still youthful Opera; and the attempts of grandiose Authority to smother these minor theatres (which had public sympathy wholly on their side) and the amazing resource shown by their managers in meeting each fresh legal thunderbolt by some new and more hilarious evasion, is a veritable comedy in itself, but must not detain us now. All we need to consider at the moment is that, despite attempts to suppress them there _were_ these troupes, at the Theatres of the Fair, from before 1702, when Watteau came to Paris, until after 1721, the date of his death. There was the troupe of Madame Jeanne Godefroy, widow of Maurice Von der Beck, from 1694 to 1709; that of Christopher Selles, from 1701 to 1709; that of Louis Nivelon (who, by the way, was a theatrical visitor to London), from 1707 to 1771; that of Saint-Edmé from 1711 to 1718; and, most important of all, that of Constantini, known as Octave, from 1712 to 1716. Thus from the time he arrived in Paris Watteau could, for a few pence, have seen any of these companies, and in view of the fact that the first thing any young man up from the country usually does is to see the “sights” of the town, and more especially in view of the fact that soon after his arrival Watteau was in the studio of Gillot--popular engraver of such popular subjects, and himself a lover of the stage--what was more probable than that Antoine _did_ include the Theatres of the Fair among the sights he saw, and so was influenced to choose, as some of the earlier subjects of his brush, the Italian players he _could_ see there. CHAPTER XV WATTEAU’S DEBT TO THE STAGE