GERMAINE GALLOIS OF THE MARIGNY
Before he gets half way down the village street of the first act, the commère, a statuesque fairy queen in silk tights, with real gems that are the talk of Paris, who has been hunting for him all over the town, suddenly comes upon him in the village square, and, touching him with her wand, makes him her protégé.
The compère may come upon the stage as an old roué, weighted with years and careworn. In this case, the good fairy immediately bestows upon him joyous youth and the satin apparel. She is running over with benefactions and, causing to appear suddenly a score of comely young grisettes and hard-working peasant girls who have been loitering around the town pump, arrayed in silk hose of assorted lengths, she urges him to select from these his mate. Just at this moment a plain little seamstress, in passing, runs into this barricade of village beauties, and at once becomes the victim of their badinage. Our youthful Crœsus, seeing her distress, straightway chooses her for his bride, amid the discontented reproaches of the rest of the girls and to the inward satisfaction of the good fairy.
Photo by Cautin & Berger, Paris
A COMMÈRE
The plain little seamstress turns out to be superlatively beautiful, and as naïve and witty as she is charming, especially if it is Lise Fleuron who plays the part.
It takes only a short time, in the second act, to clothe this stray Cinderella in a Paquin or a Worth creation, while her old gray and white clothes are neatly folded and laid away in the basket with which that very morning she had started early to market to buy a poulet and a salade for her sick grandmama. After this public shopping the happy pair is ready to start upon the honeymoon. Cinderella adds to her wardrobe a blue silk parasol, stuck in a rolled up traveling rug, while her happy companion decorates himself with a field-glass and dons an English shooting hat of impossible plaids.
In the third act they are joined by the good fairy and the revue passes before them. This is a hodgepodge of burlesques upon the topics of the day, ballets representing flowers and perfumes and the history of fashion, and choruses representing the different journals, the arts, inventions and manufactures. The costumes are superb and the massing of color exquisite.
Before the finale, an apotheosis of gorgeous color, with a stageful of kicking, giggling, romping gaiety, I catch a glimpse of the old baron. He has bowed to someone on the stage and is applauding vigorously. So, too, is the young vicomte with a scar across his cheek where a ball ploughed itself one chilly morning on the outskirts of Surennes, all on account of just such a cocotte as the good fairy who is now glancing under her stenciled eyelids at a swarthy little Italian in the front row.