mended to ignorant innocence or to fragile virtue. They are not
meant for young men and maidens. They are not wholly free from the taint
which is to be detected in nearly all French fiction. The mark of the
beast is set on not a little of the work done by the strongest men in
France. M. Meilhac is too clean and too clever ever to delve in
indecency from mere wantonness: he has no liking for vice, but his
virtue sits easily on him, and though he is sound on the main question,
he looks upon the vagaries of others with a gentle eye. M. Halevy, it
seems to me, is made of somewhat sterner stuff. He raises a warning
voice now and then--in _Fanny Lear_, for instance, the moral is pointed
explicitly--and even where there is no moral tagged to the fable, he who
has eyes to see and ears to hear can find "a terrible example" in almost
any of these plays, even the lightest. For the congregation to which it
was delivered there is a sermon in _Toto chez Tata_, perhaps the piece
in which, above all others, the Muse seems Gallic and _egrillarde_. That
is a touch of real truth, and so of a true morality, where Tata, the
fashionable courtesan, leaning over her stairs as Toto the school-boy
bears off her elderly lover, and laughing at him, cries out, "Toi, mon
petit homme, je te repincerai dans quatre ou cinq ans!" And a cold and
cutting stroke it is a little earlier in the same little comedy where
Toto, left alone in Tata's parlor, negligently turns over her basket of
visiting-cards and sees "names which he knew because he had learnt them
by heart in his history of France." Still, in spite of this truth and
morality, I do not advise the reading of _Toto chez Tata_ in young
ladies' seminaries. Young ladies in Paris do not go to hear Madame
Chaumont, for whom _Toto_ was written, nor is the Varietes, where it was
played, a place where a girl can take her mother.

It was at the Varietes in December, 1864, that the _Belle Helene_ was
produced: this was the first of half a score of plays written by MM.
Meilhac and Halevy for which M. Jacques Offenbach composed the music.
Chief among these are _Barbe-bleue_, the _Grande Duchesse de
Gerolstein_, the _Brigands_ and _Perichole_. When we recall the fact
that these five operas are the most widely known, the most popular and
by far the best of M. Offenbach's works, there is no need to dwell on
his indebtedness to MM. Meilhac and Halevy, or to point out how
important a thing the quality of the opera-bo