But if some of her more jealous colleagues may have found Camargo too dark for their taste--“swarthy,” said some--you may in turn criticise her critics and see for yourself what she was like if you go to view her portrait by Lancret, in the Wallace collection in Hertford House. Marie-Anne de Cupis de Camargo was born at Brussels early in April, and baptised in the parish of St. Nicholas--it is well to be exact in matters of such importance!--on the 15th of that month, in 1710. She was the daughter, and first child, of a gentleman who had “seen better days”--and, through his daughter, was to see them again. At the time of her birth he was a teacher of music and dancing, and was employed by, or dependent on, the Prince de Ligne. Through her father the little dancer claimed descent from an exalted Roman family, which from time to time had given a bishop, an archbishop, and a cardinal to Holy Church; while on her mother’s side she was descended from a famous and ancient Spanish house. Romance was ever ready to find in the earliest years of a popular star predictions of future fame, and it is probably only romance that tells how Camargo danced, on hearing a violin played, when she was but six months old! It is rather more certain, though, that her first lessons were from her father, and that under his tuition she did well enough, by the time she was nearly ten, to deserve the patronage of the Princesse de Ligne, when that lady paid the expenses of some few months’ study under the then famous Mlle. Prévôt. Even so she must have been remarkably precocious, for before she was eleven she had returned to Brussels finished enough to achieve a remarkable success on her first appearance. An auspicious _début_ was followed by an engagement at Rouen, but, through no fault of Marie-Anne be it said, the manager failed. As the Camargo luck would have it, however, there was a new director at the _Académie Royale_ in Paris, by name Francine, and from him the little dancer received the welcome chance of appearing at the Opera, where she made her Paris _début_ on May 5th, 1726, in “Les Caractères de la Danse,” and achieved an instant and emphatic success. Over the new-comer the impressionable capital fairly lost its head, and soon every fashion--shoes, hats, fans, coiffures, everything--was “_à la Camargo_,” of which craze relics survive, for even to-day we have Camargo shoes. Such a threatened eclipse of her own popularity not unnaturally made poor Prévôt--now about forty-six, and having been before the public over twenty years--furiously jealous, and for the next year or so Marie-Anne’s progress was made difficult by intrigue, and ere Paris set its seal of favour on her art by imitating her fashions, the young dancer had to find herself more than once occupying the comparative obscurity of the “back row.”