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Remember Monsieur de Gentz, who fell in love in his old age with Fanny Ellsler, and left the Revolution of July to take its course while he attended the dancer's rehearsals." "It seems to me unlikely," replied Lousteau. "I can still believe in love, but I have ceased to believe in woman.
One of these gentlemen was a well-known opera manager in London; another, a theatrical manager in Manchester; a third, a musical composer and conductor of the orchestra of Her Majesty's Opera in London; and the fourth, Chevalier Wyckoff, who had conducted a successful speculation some years previously by visiting America in charge of the celebrated danseuse, Fanny Ellsler.
Fanny Ellsler had bewitched the town a few years before; and some graybeards and baldheads, now tottering in the sun upon Broadway, but then the golden youth of Manhattan, took the horses from the Bayadere's carriage and drew her in triumph to her hotel. Ole Bull, also, had come conquering out of the North like a young Viking, charming and subduing, and Vieuxtemps came also, disputing the palm.
"Them there pretty feet of your'n will make your fortune yet, and beat Fanny Ellsler!" "Not to mention her pretty face," said a brother fiend, removing his mask. "Her fortune's made already, if she's a mind to take it. There's a gay young city swell a-waiting at the wings to see you home, Miss Monti." "Is it Maynard, the banker's son?" she asked. The second demon nodded.
Their great great-grandson, Sir Algernon O'Neill, is fond of the water, too; but he takes to it in a splendid yacht, called the "Fanny Ellsler," with his delicate wife, the Lady Ginevra, who abhors the sea, and gets dreadfully sick always, but will take cruises, because the sea air is good for the little O'Neills, she says, because Queen Victoria has set the fashion, some people say.
The danseuse, who was celebrated before Taglioni and Ellsler appeared, has preserved to our day some of the old traditions of the character dance and pantomime. If the two others had not revealed in the art of dancing a poetry hitherto unperceived, she would have been the leading talent; as it is, she is reduced to the second line.
Far into middle life I never saw beautiful dancing without a rapture of enthusiasm, and used to repeat from memory whole dances after seeing Duvernay or Ellsler, as persons with a good musical ear can repeat the airs of the opera first heard the night before.
"At long intervals in what most would call our drudgery," she says, "there came a day devoted to amusement. Once we had a masquerade picnic in the woods, where we were thrown into convulsions of laughter at the sight of George W. Curtis dressed as Fanny Ellsler, in a low-necked, short-sleeved, book-muslin dress and a tiny ruffled apron, making courtesies and pirouetting down the path.
Ellsler rose and laid two playbooks on the table. Then, while standing there, staring into space, I heard his far, faint voice saying: "So great so good a man destroyed, and by the hand of that unhappy boy! my God! my God!" He wiped his brow again and slowly left the house, apparently unconscious of our presence.
The performance was as faultless as a performance can be made; and, as a final compliment to the composer, his own "nature ballet" was performed, with Mademoiselle Ellsler, who had come from Vienna for the purpose, in her already famous pas seul of the Butterfly.
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