already familiar, there would be no burlesque. A so-called composer who takes Rubinstein's "Melody in F" and converts it into rag-time by filling it full of syncopations, is not doing it in the expectation that people will credit him with writing something original, but because he thinks people will be amused with the odd change he has made in something they knew already. The same thing is well known in literature. Perhaps not many of our readers care for Kipling's cynical little poem beginning

If the led striker call it a strike,

Or if the public call it a war

which is an obvious and intentional burlesque on Emerson's "Brahma":

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he's slain

yet no one has ever accused him of plagiarism on that account.

It is said that an Oxford professor was once led to dip into "Alice in Wonderland" because it was actually written (though as a pastime and under the nom-de-plume of Lewis Carroll) by a fellow professor of mathematics. After a few pages, he remarked that while it seemed well-written, he could not make out just what the author intended to prove! For fear this perhaps somewhat discursive little essay may leave a similar doubt in the minds of certain readers, I will take occasion here to explain that it is written in the hope, not indeed of converting cultured musicians to a liking for popular music, but for the purpose of replacing an unreasoning and indiscriminate dislike by an intelligent and sympathetic understanding. At least we may commend to them the words of Terence:

Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.

A PASTEL BY LA TOUR: MARIE FEL

A

By J.-G. PROD'HOMME

MONG the admirable pastels by Quentin de La Tour, rescued, after a century and a half of tribulation, from German pillage amidst these likenesses of abbés, financiers, farmers of revenue, philosophers, artists, ladies of fashion, done in crayons by the "painter to the King," and now sheltered by our Parisian Louvre till such time as they may be restored to the Musée Lecuyer of Saint-Quentin, there is a feminine face which attracts one like an enigma. In this gallery of the most final end of the eighteenth century, it sets one dreaming of some fair Levantine or Circassian slave, with its ardent oriental eyes like twin halves of an almond and of heart-thrilling warmth, its rather long and slightly upturned nose, its fairly large mouth surmounting a chin of regular curve which makes the contour of the face a perfect oval. The unpowdered hair is hardly concealed by a bluish gauzedoubtless a coiffure for the Opéra-which is slightly inclined toward the right temple and held in place by a golden ribbon set off, close to the left temple, by a red flower, at the point where the headdress crosses the forehead obliquely.

This portrait, into which the artist threw all the passion that he felt, during the last thirty years of his life, for his "divinity," is that of Marie Fel, who, both in the theatre and on the concertstage, was the cantatrice most acclaimed by the Parisian amateurs of the eighteenth century, together with her comrade and quasicompatriot, Pierre de Jélyotte. It was Cahuzac who wrote in Diderot's Encyclopedia:

At the present time, we rejoice in a chanteur and a chanteuse who have carried taste, precision, expression and facility in singing to a pitch of perfection which, before them, had neither been anticipated nor thought possible. To them art owes its greatest advancement; for it was doubtless to the possibilities which M. Rameau divined in their brilliant and flexible voices that opera is indebted for those notable numbers wherewith this illustrious composer has enriched French song. Minor musicians at first revolted against it; sundry amateurs of the earlier style, because they knew no other, opposed the adoption of certain difficult and brilliant features of Italian song by a language which they considered unsuited for them; some narrow-minded folk, whom every innovation alarms, and who fancy in their self-complacency that

the very limited scope of their knowledge is the nec plus ultra of artistic strivings, trembled for the taste of the nation. But the nation laughed at their fears and disregarded their feeble outcry; carried away by delight, it listened enravished, and its enthusiastic plaudits were divided between the composer and the executants. The talents of a Rameau, a Jéliote and a Fel were, of a truth, well worthy of being conjoined. It would appear that posterity will make scant mention of the first, not to speak of the other two.1

In 1733, at the age of fifty, Rameau brought out his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, at the Académie royale de musique. Almost at the same time (June the 1st) Jélyotte made his début in Les Fêtes grecques et romaines, by Colin de Blamont; Marie Fel followed next year, on October the 29th, in the rôle of Venus in La Coste's Philomèle, which had been revived ten days before. She was a pupil of the wife of the painter Van Loo, née Christine Somis, who came to Paris the year preceding, and whose "nightingale" voice was highly appreciated by music-lovers. Before the end of the year she appeared as Electra in Campra's Iphigénie, in which she was an understudy of the Petitpas, and throughout the winter she was "liked better and better," as the editor of the "Mercure de France" declared in December, 1734. Meanwhile, she was laying the groundwork of her reputation as a singer before the audiences at the Concerts Spirituels in the Tuileries, who bestowed "much applause" upon her at a concert on All Saints' day two days after her début at the Opéra, and praised her “accuracy of pitch" in the execution of motets by Mondonville, Lalande or Mouret, in which she took part with "la Dlle. Petitpas” and “le sieur Jélyotte."

Marie Fel, at the time of her début in Paris, was exactly twenty-one years old, having been born at Bordeaux, not in 1716, the date generally accepted, but in 1713, on October 24th, and not baptized until the 31st at the church of Saint-André, as the “legitimate daughter of Henry Fel, organist, and Marie Devacle, parish of Sainte-Eulalie."

Henry Fel already had a son, born in 1694, whom we shall meet again further on as a baritone at the Opéra, which he had no doubt joined before his younger sister. The daughter and the sister of musicians, the future star of the Académie royale studied music at a very early age. Her youth was probably spent at Bordeaux until the day when some "recruiter" for the Prince de Carignan, then master of the destinies of the Opéra, came to carry her away from her family and engage her;-unless it happened

1Encyclopédie, Vol. III (1751), p. 145, art. Chanteur.