The Sun.
London, England, 1861-04-02 00:00:00

ADELPIII.

The new piece, " Magloire, the Prestigiator,"
produced at this theatre last night, is taken
,avowedly from the French. It is a version of a
piece called " L'Escamoteur," by M. Dennery, pro-
duced in Paris last year. What is called the
" Prologue" opens in 1814, in a farmhouse on the
way to Paris, where Count d'Arcy (Mr. Billington),
an officer in the French army, receives the intelli-
gence that his young wife has lost her reason,
owing to the death of her child and false news of his
having been killed in one of the battles in which
the French opposed the march of the allied armies
on the capital. The Countess, in her frenzy, had
escaped, and was not to be found. To the same
house there has arrived a wayfaring woman, Marie
Duval (Miss Kate Kelly), with her infant. To her
is given the cradle and some of the clothes of the
deceased child of the Count, and it is duly installed
therein; The mother is dying of consumption, and
writes a letter which is to be delivered to her daugh-
ter when she miles of age. While left alone with
her child the Countess d'Arcy enters the house, and
seizes .the infant, mistaking it for her own. A scene
ensues which is not merely *ithin a step but within
an inch of passing from th©i sublime tot the ridicu-
lous. A maniac and a dying woman struggling for
the possession of a stage baby was a perilous situa-
tion, when that which was meant to be represented
was something most intense. The danger, how-
ever, was escaped, and the matter ended by the ,
real mother suffering her child to be adopted by
the Count ; an arrangement which is satisfactory,
as the mother dies just as the Countess recovers
her reason, in consequence of the restoration of her
husband and the suppositious recovery of her
child. Before the next act an interval of seven-
teen years has occurred. The fictitious daughter of
the house of D'Arcy is sought in marriage by her
cousin, Jules Lanieres (Mr. D. Fisher), whom she
does not affect, and by Albert de Viellecourt (Mr.
Eburne), whom she loves. Here Magloire (Mr.
Webster) comes on the scene, and exhibits himself
in one of those bits of character in which he excels.
Nothing can be more perfect than his assumption
of the mountebank and juggler—a personage with
which the-French are more familiar than we are.
The Count D'Arcy having thought it right to re-
veal the secret of Cecile's (Miss Henrietta Simms)
birth to her affianced lover, is overheard by Jules
Lanieres; who, for a large bribe, prevails on Mag-
loire to pretend to be the father of the girl, and by
means of forged papers to claim and finally to bear
her away from her supposed parents. Subsequently
the letter left by her mother is sent to her, and by
that Magloire discovers that she is in reality his
daughter, by a wife who had left him for his bru-
tality, and passed under a feigned name on that
journey to the house of her friends in the course of
which she died. The juggler is struck with re-
morse, and becomes deeply, selfishly devoted to his
daughter, whom, in consequence of an attempt at
her abduction by Lanieres, he secretes in a lonely
cottage. He tries in vain to win her affections, and
finding that her strong regret and sorrow at part-
ing from those whom she had always known as her
parents—to say nothing of her lover—is well nigh
destroying her, he sends for those personages, and
having exposed the villany of Lanieres, in an agony
of self-devotion declares that the story which he
had originally trumped up was the real one, that he
is not in fact the father of Cecile ; a subterfuge
which makes everyone but himself extremely happy
and contented, while he in sadness and sorrow de-
parts to renew his old' trade of a mountebank.
The chief, if not the whole, of the action and the
interest of the piece rested on Mr. Webster, whose
skilful delineation of the varied phases of the charac-
ter of Magloire, ranging from the careless, jolly, pro-
fessional cheat—not in the criminal, but the fortune-
telling sense of the word—who, however, shrinks
continually and painfully from the acts of actual
imposture which he has been tempted to commit, up
to the passionately devoted father, who foregoes
every feeling and every hope to secure that happi-
ness for his child which he finds at length that it is
not in his own power to confer upon her. As we
have hinted, there were moments when the chances
of success were rather doubtful, but on the whole
the piece went well, and at its close the verdict was
most decidedly in its favour, and with reason. After-
wards Miss Julia Daly made her re-appearance at
this theatre, in the piece of " Our Female American
Cousin."