It would probably be a mistake to see in this piece any deliberate attempt to raise up the fallen woman. The play was only a dramatic version of a novel by the same author for which the subject had been furnished by the life and death of a certain Marie Duplessis—whose story Dickens, becoming acquainted with it during a visit to Paris, had at one time proposed to treat. _La Dame aux Camélias_ was in any case destined to achieve such popularity that for a time the class to which the heroine belongs became invested with unusual interest. Vice by being represented as consumptive lost all its grossness; but no sooner had the play attained its maximum of success than the discovery was made that it rested on a wrong moral basis. It “rehabilitated the courtesan;” and M. Théodore Barrière, assisted by the inevitable collaborateur, undertook to set matters right by exhibiting that objectionable personage in her true colors. The outcome of this undertaking was _Les Filles de Marbre_: too fine a name for them according to Théophile Gautier, who preferred as a substitute _Les Filles de Platre_. Instead of dying of love, complicated by phthisis, with claims to forgiveness based on her having “loved much,” the leading lady of M. Barrière’s piece reduced her lover to poverty and despair, unconsciously ruined his talent, and consciously insulted him when she could no longer extort money from him. The God this young woman avowedly worshipped was not love but gold. She was without pity, without remorse; nor did the author think fit to place in contrast with her a more amiable specimen of depravity—even as Dumas has placed side by side with his tender-hearted Marguerite Gauthier, the selfish and ignoble Prudence. Marco, the chief of the _Girls of Marble_, is doubtless a much more common character in the world than Marguerite Gauthier; and Balzac, who knew the world, had anticipated in only one of his characters—the unfortunate Coralie—all the best points in Marguerite Gauthier, whereas he had anticipated in half-a-dozen different characters, from Madame de Marneffe downward, the worst points in Marco. But though Marco may have been a good deal truer to nature than Marguerite Gauthier she was far less interesting; and the picture of a fallen woman saved by an access of genuine feeling was much more agreeable than that of a degraded one dragging to his destruction a miserably weak man.