s Fack Lorn, and is a hundred times
described by others and described by himself as Williams. He is
admirably played; but two English travelling ladies are beyond
expression ridiculous, and there is something positively vicious in
their utter want of truth. One 'set,' where the action of a whole act is
supposed to take place in the great wooden verandah of a Swiss hotel
overhanging a mountain ravine, is the best piece of stage carpentering I
have seen in France. Next week we are to have at the Ambigu _Paradise
Lost_, with the murder of Abel, and the Deluge. The wildest rumours are
afloat as to the un-dressing of our first parents." Anticipation far
outdoes a reality of this kind; and at the fever-pitch to which rumours
raised it here, Dickens might vainly have attempted to get admission on
the first night, if Mr. Webster, the English manager and comedian, had
not obtained a ticket for him. He went with Mr. Wilkie Collins. "We were
rung in (out of the cafe below the Ambigu) at 8, and the play was over
at half-past 1; the waits between the acts being very much longer than
the acts themselves. The house was crammed to excess in every part, and
the galleries awful with Blouses, who again, during the whole of the
waits, beat with the regularity of military drums the revolutionary tune
of famous memory--Ca Ira! The play is a compound of _Paradise Lost_ and
Byron's _Cain_; and some of the controversies between the archangel and
the devil, when the celestial power argues with the infernal in
conversational French, as 'Eh bien! Satan, crois-tu donc que notre
Seigneur t'aurait expose aux tourments que t'endures a present, sans
avoir prevu,' &c. &c. are very ridiculous. All the supernatural
personages are alarmingly natural (as theatre nature goes), and walk
about in the stupidest way. Which has occasioned Collins and myself to
institute a perquisition whether the French ever have shown any kind of
idea of the supernatural; and to decide this rather in the negative. The
people are very well dressed, and Eve very modestly. All Paris and the
provinces had been ransacked for a woman who had brown hair that would
fall to the calves of her legs--and she was found at last at the Odeon.
There was nothing attractive until the 4th act, when there was a pretty
good scene of the children of Cain dancing in, and desecrating, a
temple, while Abel and his family were hammering hard at the Ark,
outside; in all the pauses of the revel. The Deluge i