In his youth Belasco was an omnivorous reader (as he continues to be), but his favorite reading was that of History, and among historical characters that specially enthralled his imagination was Mary, Queen o’ Scots. Indeed, he has, in conversation, given me the impression that, from an early age, his mind has been deeply interested in the study of those famous women of history whose conduct of life is shown to have been governed by their appetites and passions. That taste seems morbid, but it is readily explicable. Such women have been, are, and always will be a direct spring of tense, dramatic, romantic situations and tragic events, and sometimes their experience involves incidents and culminates in catastrophes which make a strong appeal to persons who possess, as Belasco does, a highly emotional temperament. _Queen Guinevere_, in Tennyson’s pathetic “Idyl,” remarks that “the low sun makes the color.” Such women as Malcolm’s Queen Margaret of Scotland or Mme. Roland, probably, would be viewed by Belasco with merely languid respect or indifference. Such a woman as Navarre’s Marguerite de Valois, or Queen Catherine the Second of Russia, or the irresistible siren Barbara Villiers, or that all-conquering captivator Arabella Stuart,--whose image lives, perpetual, in sculpture and, as Brittania, on the coins of Great Britain,--would, on the contrary, provide for him an exceedingly interesting study. It is not, therefore, altogether surprising that when Belasco had established Mrs. Leslie Carter as a successful star it pleased him to select for public illustration in a drama one of the most depraved and dissolute feminine characters that hang on the fringes of history,--the shameless hussy who, about 145 years ago, was picked out of the streets of Paris, and under the auspices of the most notorious titled blackguard of his time wedded to a complaisant degenerate, in order that she might succeed Mme. Pompadour as the mistress of King Louis the Fifteenth of France. Marie Jeanne Becu (1746-1793), who began life in Paris as a milliner, became a courtesan, under the name of Mlle. Lange, was later a lure for a gambling house, then, ennobled as the “Countess du Barry,” was installed as the mistress of the corrupt King Louis the Fifteenth,--whom practically she ruled for five years,--and finally was slaughtered in the Reign of Terror, is the theme of one of the most pictorial, popular, and successful of Belasco’s plays. His selection of a story of that remarkable female’s adventures for dramatic exploitation was not, however, wholly spontaneous. In 1899, aware that a successor to the torrid termagant of the Paris music-halls would presently be required for Mrs. Carter’s use, he began to cast about for a play with a central character suited to her personality and method. Not finding anything which he deemed satisfactory in the numerous dramas, old as well as new, by many authors, which he examined, he