The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-02-04


made the acquaintance not long since, Of
q dashing young Frenchman, who, with a
very fair stock of brains and very good heart,
yet was foolish enough to plume himself on
being "a man about town." He was pos
sessed of good looks and reasonable for
tune, was inveterately lazy, and just about as
moral as Frenchmen on the average are
The intimacy with which that fellow knew
Paris from palace to garret, was wonderful;
and managed, during the brief period was
accidentally thrown with him, to CLEAN much
of which was not informed before.
Among other haunts Paul was especially
fond of the green-room and its divinities.
His position and money gave him ready ac-
cess to them; and implicitly believe that he
was on easy terms with half the ballet-corps
of the metropolis 1t was his description of
these ballet-g girls, their profession, their mode
of life, their character, and their training,
which particularly struck me; and he SO freely
impaired his information that have quite
stock of it in my head, which am anxious to
put to paper. Well, thanks to Monsieur Paul,
I arrived at the knowledge of this fact, that
the Paris ballet-girls, in their motives for
pursuing the saltatory art, in their mode
of life, in their characters, and in
their morals, are as various as all the
rest of laboring and ambitious mankind;
that virtue and good motives are not
wanting, though they are vastly overweighed
by their opposites; and that in each ballet girl
there is an individual, different life quite re-
cognizable from all the others. 1t is mis-
take, it appears, to consider the ballet-girls as
usually ignorant and low-born; many are very
decently educated, the children of 'poor, but
respectable parents, and very few have been
born so low in life as to have been set to
| manual labor; SO that their company--though,
| if man has any notions of morality at all
| (Which many Frenchmen have not, it is ex-
| cessively corrupting-is not always coarse or
| unrelieved by the graces of wit and sprightly
| conversation One has her villa at Montreuil
| another her cottage in Switzerland, where
| they pass the summer months and indulge in
romantic retirement with their lovers-for all
have lovers. Among the gay and brilliant
throng which one sees on the afternoon of a
| spring or summer day, whirling in every sort
| of vehicle up and down the Champs Elysees,
| and in and out among the enchanting paths
of the Bois de Boulogne, many are actresses
and dancers who rival the first ladies of
Paris in dress and equipage, and who fear
| lessly brave the sneers of the 6eGU-n10l1de in
| thus mixing with them in the democratic
| pleasures of riding They may be seen, too,
on their ''off- nights, seated, in all the glory
| of satin and peach and rouge, in the stage
| boxes of other theatres, smiling graciously
on their sister performers on the stage, and
aiming their mother-of-pearl lorgnettes at the
more striking figures of the audience before
them. They are prominent at the races and
reviews, always paying well for the best
places, and always appearing Ia the very top
of the fashion. They are careless and reck-
less in money matters; their generous
salaries melt as fast as they come, and
their lovers seldom issue from the connection
without very material loss of fortune.
Paul told me of one who had, six or eight
years ago, been one of the widest and most
reckless of her ORDER who was now very
proper landlady of thirty, keeps a highly re-
spectacle hotel in the region of the Chaussee
d'Antin, and sticks smartly to her new voca-
ton.
mo one would ever guess, said he, ''that
she had ever been anything except the keeper
of an hotel" -.
Another. after a career of dissipation and
prodigal expenditure, had all of sudden
been dismissed from her theatre for careless
dancing, and married a young mercer, who
had long tried to get her, settling steadily
down to the assistance of her husband in his
business.
But these cases are very rare; the usual
road of these poor creatures after their day of
success is very steep inclined plane; they
commit suicide, or become inebriates, or in
sane, or adopt the worst of all professions. 1
have myself seen poor old woman long
crazed, feeble in body going about the streets
one, and singing, in horribly cracked voice.
snatches of the old songs of forty years ago.
She was once they tell me, renowned singer
in Paris, and sung more than once before old
King Charles the Tenth in the Tuileries; had
led dissipated and reckless life; had lost her
reason; and now imagined herself still the
favorite of the multitude, and the songs
she sings the delight of all who hear them
People give her sou here and there, and
pass pitying on; and the moving wreck still
fails to warn the other thoughtless ones from
the rock on which it shattered. Many of
these actresses and dQnseuSeS come to the
ground gently" They avoid the abyss of
utter destruction, and yet do not have to
find another way of getting livelihood. 1t
is mostly the very proud and sensitive who,
like Lucifer, fall utterly But some who have
enjoyed first class reputation, and have been
the heroines of the Paris stage, see the fool
ishness of that pride which destroys and when
their star ls dimped, and others take their
wonted place, do not rush off in despair
and kill themselves or plunge in degradation
These, looking at their position in a common
sense way, when they have to give up the
best places, take the best they can get keep
ing steadily at their profession. For instan ee,
the principal actress of a threatre becomes a
trihe pdSsee, rival comes along, and she is
ousted Well, if she is one of the sensible
sort of whom / speak, she goes out into one
of the provincial French cities, plays the
frst-class roles to which she has become ac.
customed in Paris, and is announced as the
distinguished Madame Soandso, from such
/ Paris theatre" r4
On her past reputation she is able to keen
lant .nfa L.,