s one of love and self-sacrifice, touching here and
there on the preserves of _L'Africaine_ and _Lakme_, the whole
concluding with the voluntary immersion of Natoma in a convent.
Fortunately, the writer of the book remembered that Miss Garden had
danced in _Salome_ and he introduced a similar pantomimic episode in
_Natoma_, a dagger dance, which was one of the interesting points in the
action. The music suited her voice; she delivered a good deal of it
almost _parlando_, and the vapid speeches of Mr. Redding tripped so
audibly off her tongue that their banality became painfully apparent.

The story has often been related how Massenet, piqued by the frequently
repeated assertion that his muse was only at his command when he
depicted female frailty, determined to write an opera in which only one
woman was to appear, and she was to be both mute and a virgin! _Le
Jongleur de Notre Dame_, perhaps the most poetically conceived of
Massenet's lyric dramas, was the result of this decision. Until Mr.
Hammerstein made up his mind to produce the opera, the role of Jean had
invariably been sung by a man. Mr. Hammerstein thought that Americans
would prefer a woman in the part. He easily enlisted the interest of
Miss Garden in this scheme, and Massenet, it is said, consented to make
certain changes in the score. The taste of the experiment was doubtful,
but it was one for which there had been much precedent. Nor is it
necessary to linger on Sarah Bernhardt's assumption of the roles of
Hamlet, Shylock, and the Duc de Reichstadt. In the "golden period of
song," Orfeo was not the only man's part sung by a woman. Mme. Pasta
frequently appeared as Romeo in Zingarelli's opera and as Tancredi, and
she also sang Otello on one occasion when Henrietta Sontag was the
Desdemona. The role of Orfeo, I believe, was written originally for a
_castrato_, and later, when the work was refurbished for production at
what was then the Paris Opera, Gluck allotted the role to a tenor. Now
it is sung by a woman as invariably as are Stephano in _Romeo et
Juliette_ and Siebel in _Faust_. There is really more excuse for the
masquerade of sex in Massenet's opera. The timid, pathetic little
juggler, ridiculous in his inefficiency, is a part for which tenors, as
they exist to-day, seem manifestly unsuited. And certainly no tenor
could hope to make the appeal in the part that Mary Garden did. In the
second act she found it difficult to entirely conceal the suggestion