it lacks sunshine, to shut itself up in drawing-rooms where chandeliers are the most suitable for it.  It has retained of the vast popular masquerade only a fragment, the opera ball, certainly very splendid and frequented by princes, princesses and the queen; but this fragment, brilliant as it is, does not suffice; consequently, in every chateau, in every mansion, at Paris and in the provinces, it sets up travesties on society and domestic comedies. — On welcoming a great personage, on celebrating the birthday of the master or mistress of the house, its guests or invited persons perform in an improvised operetta, in an ingenious, laudatory pastoral, sometimes dressed as gods, as Virtues, as mythological abstractions, as operatic Turks, Laplanders and Poles, similar to the figures then gracing the frontispieces of books, sometimes in the dress of peasants, pedagogues, peddlers, milkmaids and flower-girls like the fanciful villagers with which the current taste then fills the stage.  They sing, they dance, and come forward in turn to recite petty verses composed for the occasion consisting of so many well-turned compliments.[68] — At Chantilly “the young and charming Duchesse de Bourbon, attired as a voluptuous Naiad, guides the Comte du Nord, in a gilded gondola, across the grand canal to the island of Love;” the Prince de Conti, in his part, serves as pilot to the Grand Duchesse; other seigniors and ladies “each in allegorical guise,” form the escort,[69] and on these limpid waters, in this new garden of Alcinous, the smiling and gallant retinue seems a fairy scene in Tasso. — At Vaudreuil, the ladies, advised that they are to be carried off to seraglios, attire themselves as vestals, while the high-priest welcomes them with pretty couplets into his temple in the park; meanwhile over three hundred Turks arrive who force the enclosure to the sound of music, and bear away the ladies in palanquins along the illuminated gardens.  At the little Trianon, the park is arranged as a fair, and the ladies of the court are the saleswomen, “the queen keeping a café,” while, here and there, are processions and theatricals; this festival costs, it is said, 100,000 livres, and a repetition of it is designed at Choisy attended with a larger outlay.

Alongside of these masquerades which stop at costume and require only an hour, there is a more important diversion, the private theatrical performance, which completely transforms the man, and which for six weeks, and even for three months, absorbs him entirely at rehearsals.  Towards 1770,[70] “the rage for it is incredible; there is not an attorney in his cottage who does not wish to have a stage and his company of actors.”  A Bernardine living in Bresse, in the middle of a wood, writes to Collé that he and his brethren are about to perform “La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV,” and that they are having a small theater constructed “without the knowledge of bigots and small minds.”  Reformers and moralists introduce theatrical art into