In London she appeared first in 1830 in Didelot’s ballet _Flore et Zéphire_ and made an instantaneous success. On nights when she was announced to appear the London theatre was literally besieged. Thackeray immortalized her in his ‘The Newcomes,’ saying, ‘you can never see anything so graceful as Taglioni.’ She received in London £100 a night, and insisted on handsome sums for her family, as well as £600 for her father as ballet master, £900 to her brother and sister-in-law, together with two benefit performances. She was so much the fashion of the hour that women wore Taglioni hats, gowns, and coats, and even a stage coach was called after her. With all her charm and refinement, Taglioni was in many respects an undeveloped girl emotionally, capricious and sentimental to her finger-tips. It is said that one evening when Perrot, her partner, happened to receive a greater amount of applause than she, she refused to continue the performance, and accused her surrounding stage people of having intrigued against her for malicious reason. She received immense sums of money, but she spent everything just as lavishly as it was received, not so much on herself as for her relatives, friends and the poor. She married Comte Gilbert des Voisins in 1832, but their married life was of short duration. There is a story that she met him some years later at a dinner at the Comte de Morny’s, when he had the effrontery to ask to be introduced to Maria Taglioni. She replied that she thought she had made the gentleman’s acquaintance in 1832, the year of her marriage. In 1837 she went to Russia and remained there for five years as prima _ballerina_ of the Imperial Ballet. Taglioni’s freedom and style had a great influence upon the development of the ballet at that juncture. Her dress, a long tunic of white silk muslin which reached almost to her ankles and fell in graceful folds from her figure, was the first of this kind. Through this she was able to reveal the plastic lines of her body, and thus made her movements free from the artificial stiffness that had prevailed before her. She was a reformer in many ways, and in this her father, as a practical ballet-master, was of material help. It was not until Fanny Elssler appeared in 1847 that Taglioni began to lose her hold upon the public. Little by little her art grew old-fashioned to the novelty-loving audiences, as the dancing of Elssler brought a new note of more romantic nature to the stage. Actually this change was nothing but a turn of public sentiment indicative of some new social fad. Trying to maintain her living by giving dancing lessons in various European capitals, she died in Marseilles in 1884, in great poverty, forsaken by all her previous adorers and frenzied audiences. II