'I know you by that smile, O girls of marble,' says
Diogenes,--'courtesans of the past, courtesans of the future!' and he
returns to his mat.

At this moment Theä's voice is heard in the far distance, singing a few
mystical, mournful bars of music, and the curtain falls.

This is the 'argument,'--the other four acts work it out.

The next act opens in a restaurant of to-day in the Bois de Boulogne,
near Paris. A young artist lives there, and falls desperately in love
with an actress, for whom he leaves his art, his mother, and his
betrothed, is ruined in purse, and returns at last, heart-broken, to
his old home, to die; the actress all the while sees his despair with
indifference, and proves herself therefore a '_fille de marbre_'

In another recent piece, we are told that a 'procession of nuns, dressed
in white, sing a lay at midnight. In the intervals, a chorus of frogs in
the neighboring swamp croak the refrain in unison. Sax, the great
brass-founder, who made the Last Trumpets for the 'Wandering Jew,' and
the instruments for the Band of the Guides, is engaged upon the
frogpipes required. The illusion will be heightened by characteristic
scenery and mephitic exhalations. M. Sax visited the pool in the Bois de
Boulogne, known as the _Marée d'Auteuil_, and brought back many useful
ideas in reference to the quadruped with whose vocal powers he desired
to become acquainted. The frog voices will be a series of eight,
representing a full octave.'

The Provincial, at Paris, is a standard theme for playwrights; what the
Scotch were to Johnson, Lamb, and Sidney Smith, is the native of