Surpassed only by the _Belle Hélène_ is the _Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein_. It is nearly fifteen years since all the world went to Paris to see an Exposition Universelle and to gaze at the "sabre de mon père," and since a Russian emperor, going to hear the operetta, said to have been suggested by the freak of a Russian empress, sat incognito in one stage-box of the little Variétés Theatre, and glancing up saw a Russian grand duke in the other. It is nearly fifteen years since the tiny army of Her Grand-ducal Highness took New York by storm, and since American audience after audience hummed its love for the military and walked from the French Theatre along Fourteenth street to Delmonico's to supper, sabring the waiters there with the venerated weapon of her sire. The French Theatre is no more, and Delmonico's is no longer at that Fourteenth-street corner, and Her Highness Mademoiselle Tostée is dead, and M. Offenbach's sprightly tunes have had the fate of all over-popular airs, and are forgotten now. _Où sont les neiges d'antan?_
It has been said that the authors regretted having written the _Grande Duchesse_, because the irony of history soon made a joke on Teutonic powers and principalities seem like unpatriotic satire. Certainly, they had no reason to be ashamed of the literary quality of their work: in its class it yields only to its predecessor. There is no single figure as fine as Calchas--Général Boum is a coarser outline--but how humorous and how firm is the drawing of Prince Paul and Baron Grog! And Her Highness herself may be thought a cleverer sketch of youthful femininity than even the Hellenic Helen. It is hard to judge the play now. Custom has worn its freshness and made it too familiar: we know it too well to criticise it clearly. Besides, the actors have now overlaid the action with over-much "business." But in spite of these difficulties the merits of the piece are sufficiently obvious: its constructive skill can be remarked; the first act, for example, is one of the best bits of exposition on the modern French stage.
Besides these plays for music, and besides the more important five-act comedies to be considered later, MM. Meilhac and Halévy are the authors of thirty or forty comic dramas--as they are called on the English stage--or farce-comedies in one, two, three, four, and even five acts, ranging in aim from the gentle satire of sentimentality in _La Veuve_ to the outspoken farce of the _Réveillon_. Among the best of the longer of these comic plays are _Tricoche et Cacolet_ and _La Boule_. Both were written for the Palais Royal, and they are models of the new dramatic species which came into existence at that theatre about twenty years ago, as M. Francisquc Sarcey recently reminded us in his interesting article on the Palais Royal in _The Nineteenth Century_. This new style of comic play may be termed realistic farce--realistic, because it starts from every-day life and the most matter-of-fact conditions; and farce, because it uses its exact facts only to further its fantasy and extravagance. Consider _La Boule_. Its first act is a model of accurate observation; it is a transcript from life; it is an inside view of a commonplace French household which incompatibility of temper has made unsupportable. And then take the following acts, and see how on this foundation of fact, and screened by an outward semblance of realism, there is erected the most laughable superstructure of fantastic farce. I remember hearing one of the two great comedians of the Théâtre Français, M. Coquelin, praise a comic actor of the Variétés whom we had lately seen in a rather cheap and flimsy farce, because he combined "la vérité la plus absolue avec la fantasie la plus pure." And this is the merit of _La Boule_: its most humorous inventions have their roots in the truth.