_Chrisotine._--"Sing! sing! I should like to see a man of the world endeavour to entertain company with mere talk in the old style. He would be looked upon as one of a by-gone period. The servants would laugh at him."
_Chrisotine._--"All persons of any importance imitate the court. It is only in the Rue St. Denis and St. Honoré and on the Bridge of Notre Dame that the old custom is still kept up. There people buy and sell without singing. But at Gauthier's, at the Orangery; at all the shops where the ladies of the court buy dresses, ornaments and jewels, all business is carried on in music, and if the dealers did not sing their goods would be confiscated. People say that a severe edict has been issued to that effect. They appoint no Provost of Trade now unless he is a musician, and until M. Lulli has examined him to see whether he is capable of understanding and enforcing the rules of harmony."
The above scene, be it observed, is not the work of an ignorant detractor of opera, of a brute insensible to the charms of music, but is the production of St. Evrémond, one of the very first men, on our side of the Alps, who called attention to the beauties of the new musical drama, just established in Italy, and which, when he first wrote on the subject, had not yet been introduced into France. St. Evrémond had too much sense to decry the Opera on account of such improbabilities as must inevitably belong to every form of the drama--which is the expression of life, but which need not for that reason be restricted exclusively to the language of speech, any more than tragedy need be confined to the diction of prose, or comedy to the inane platitudes of ordinary conversation. At all events, there is no novelty, and above all no wit, in repeating seriously the pleasantries of St. Evrémond, which, we repeat, were those of a man who really loved the object of his good-natured and agreeable raillery.
Indeed, most of the men who have written things against the Opera that are still remembered have liked the Opera, and have even been the authors of operas themselves. "_Aujourd'hui ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit on le chante_," is said by the Figaro of Beaumarchais--of Beaumarchais, who gave lessons in singing and on the harpsichord to Louis XV.'s daughters, who was an enthusiastic admirer of Gluck's operas, and who wrote specially for that composer the libretto of _Tarare_, which, however, was not set to music by him, but by Salieri, Gluck's favourite pupil. Beaumarchais knew well enough--and _Tarare_ in a negative manner proves it--that not only "what is not worth the trouble of saying" cannot be sung, but that very often such trivialities as can with propriety be spoken in a drama would, set to music, produce a ludicrous effect. Witness the lines in St. Evrémond's _Les Opéras_--