ly handsome.
So graceful too, that her manner of rising, curtseying, laughing, and
going out after him, was pleasanter than the pleasantest thing I have
ever seen done on the stage." The opera Dickens himself saw a week
later, and wrote of it as "most charming. Delightful music, an excellent
story, immense stage tact, capital scenic arrangements, and the most
delightful little prima donna ever seen or heard, in the person of Marie
Cabel. It is called _Manon Lescaut_--from the old romance--and is
charming throughout. She sings a laughing song in it which is received
with madness, and which is the only real laughing song that ever was
written. Auber told me that when it was first rehearsed, it made a
great effect upon the orchestra; and that he could not have had a better
compliment upon its freshness than the musical director paid him, in
coming and clapping him on the shoulder with 'Bravo, jeune homme! Cela
promet bien!'"

At dinner at Regnier's he met M. Legouvet, in whose tragedy Rachel,
after its acceptance, had refused to act Medea; a caprice which had led
not only to her condemnation in costs of so much a night until she did
act it, but to a quasi rivalry against her by Ristori, who was now on
her way to Paris to play it in Italian. To this performance Dickens and
Macready subsequently went together, and pronounced it to be hopelessly
bad. "In the day entertainments, and little melodrama theatres, of
Italy, I have seen the same thing fifty times, only not at once so
conventional and so exaggerated. The papers have all been in fits
respecting the sublimity of the performance, and the genuineness of the
applause--particularly of the bouquets; which were thrown on at the most
preposterous times in the midst of agonizing scenes, so that the
characters had to pick their way among them, and a certain stout
gentleman who played King Creon was obliged to keep a wary eye, all
night, on the proscenium boxes, and dodge them as they came down. Now
Scribe, who dined here next day (and who follows on the Ristori side,
being offended, as everybody has been, by the insolence of Rachel),
could not resist the temptation of telling us, that, going round at the
end of the first act to offer his congratulations, he met all the
bouquets coming back in men's arms to be thrown on again in the second
act. . . . By the bye, I see a fine actor lost in Scribe. In all his
pieces he has everything done in his own way; and on that same night he