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Isn't she a fair-haired woman who has a side-box at the Opera? She comes sometimes to the Bouffons, and laughs loudly to attract attention." The Duchess smiled and said: "I wonder at you, dear. Why do you take so much interest in people of that kind? One must have been as madly in love as Restaud was, to be infatuated with Mlle. Anastasie and her flour sacks.
She has hammered out Beethoven, warbled the airs of Rossini and run through the exercises of Crammer. I had already taken pains to convince her of the excellence of music; to attain this end, I have applauded her, I have listened without yawning to the most tiresome sonatas in the world, and I have at last consented to give her a box at the Bouffons.
She has hammered out Beethoven, warbled the airs of Rossini and run through the exercises of Crammer. I had already taken pains to convince her of the excellence of music; to attain this end, I have applauded her, I have listened without yawning to the most tiresome sonatas in the world, and I have at last consented to give her a box at the Bouffons.
There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistible charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a "Good-night, father!"
Then there was the self-appointed critic who admires nothing, and will blow his nose in the middle of a cavatina at the Bouffons, who applauds before any one else begins, and contradicts every one who says what he himself was about to say; he was there giving out the sayings of wittier men for his own.
She went to the Bouffons or to the Opera with M. de Beauseant and M. d'Ajuda-Pinto; and M. de Beauseant, like a well-bred man of the world, always left his wife and the Portuguese as soon as he had installed them. But M. d'Ajuda-Pinto must marry, and a Mlle. de Rochefide was the young lady.
Oh! if my father could see me so come down in the world, it would kill him if he were not dead already! Poor Wilhelmine! and she began to cry. "Malvina, puzzled to know how to comfort her mother, represented to her that she was still young and pretty, that rose-color still became her, that she could continue to go to the Opera and the Bouffons, where Mme. de Nucingen had a box.
The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had his magnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the Guerre des bouffons broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the light Italian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely preferable to the severe and noble forms of the greatest of French composers.
For a short time the popularity of Rameau had been shaken by an Italian opera company, called by the French Les Bouffons, who had created a genuine sensation by their performance of airy and sparkling operettas, entirely removed in spirit from the ponderous productions of the prevailing school.
But the 'Guerre des Bouffons, as the struggle was called, proved one thing, which had already been satisfactorily decided in Italy, namely, that there was plenty of room in the world for serious and comic opera at the same time.
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