The play was to begin at half-past five in the afternoon, but from early in the morning the doors were besieged by crowds, in which _cordons bleus_ elbowed Savoyards, and the classes and the masses began their long struggle. In the press three persons were suffocated--‘one more than for Scudéry,’ said caustic La Harpe. Great ladies sat all day in the dressing rooms of the actresses to be sure of securing seats, and duchesses were delighted to obtain a footstool in the gallery, a part of the house to which, as a rule, ladies never went. The theatre was lit by a new method. The famous Dazincourt played Figaro; and Molé, Almaviva. The author himself was in a private box between two abbés who had promised to administer ‘very spiritual succour’ in case of death. Then the curtain rose. ‘The “Marriage of Figaro,” said Napoleon, ‘was the Revolution already in action.’ As in the ‘Barber of Seville,’ the atmosphere and the clothes are Spanish, the spirit and essence wholly French. The story of Figaro, the servant who outwits his lord and wins Suzanne, whom his master has tried to steal from him, forms a plot simple enough. Count Almaviva, the master, is certainly one of the best representations of the great noble of the old régime ever put on the stage. Continually worsted in argument by his valet, and perpetually in the most ridiculous situations, he never loses the dignity of good breeding--as Beaumarchais himself puts it, ‘the corruption of his heart takes nothing from the _bon ton_ of his manners.’ Figaro is, of course, democracy with its wits awake at last, and stung to courage and action by centuries of wrongs. The Countess (the Rosina of the ‘Barber’) and Suzanne are the most charming and seductive reproductions of the eighteenth-century woman--‘spirituelles et rieuses,’ coquettish, graceful and gay. The chief fault of the play is the episode of Marceline, in which the playgoer wearily recognises two, too familiar friends--the long-lost mother and the mislaid baby with the usual convenient birth-mark on the right arm.