"Dance and dancer powerfully seized my attention. It was not the classical dance which we still see in our great ballets, where, just as in classical tragedy, only sprawling unities and artificialities reign; it was not those danced Alexandrines, those declamatory springs, those antithetic capers, that noble emotion which pirouets round on one foot, so that one sees nothing except heaven and petticoats, ideality and lies! There is, indeed, nothing so odious to me as the ballet at the Paris Grand Opera, where the traditions of that classical dance are retained in their purest forms, while in the rest of the arts, in poetry, in music, and in painting, the French have overturned the classical system. It will be, however, difficult for them to bring about a similar revolution in the art of dancing; they will need, as in their political revolution, to have recourse to terrorism, and guillotine the legs of the obdurate dancers. Mademoiselle Laurence was no great dancer; the joints of her feet were not very supple, her legs were not exercised in all possible dislocations, she understood nothing of the art of dancing as Madame Vestris teaches it, but she danced as nature commands to dance: her whole being was in harmony with her _pas_; not only her feet but her whole body danced; her face danced--she was often pale, almost deathly pale, her eyes opened to an almost ghostly size, desire and pain quivered on her lips, and her black hair, which enclosed her brows in smooth oval, moved like a pair of fluttering wings. It was, indeed, no classical dance, but also no romantic dance, in the sense of a young Frenchman of the Eugène Renduel school. This dance had nothing mediæval, nor Venetian, nor hump-backed, nor Macabrian about it; there was neither moonshine nor incest in it. It was a dance which did not seek to answer by outward movements, but the outward movements seemed words of a strange speech which strove to express strange things. But what did this dance express? I could not understand, however passionately this speech uttered itself. I only guessed sometimes that it spoke of something intensely sorrowful. I, who so easily seized the meaning of all appearances, was nevertheless unable to solve this danced riddle; and that I groped in vain for the sense of it was partly the fault of the music, which certainly pointed intentionally to false roads, cunningly sought to lead me astray, and always disturbed me. Monsieur Turlutu's triangle often tittered maliciously. Madame, however, beat upon her drum so wrathfully, that her face glowed forth from the black cloud of cap like a blood-red northern light.