PARISIAN THEATRICALS.
Although matrimonial questions most particularly serve as a field for the exercise of French casuistry, it is not exclusively confined to any one branch of ethical speculation. Que dire le Monde, to which we alluded last week, was a specimen of a talent employed on the ordinary category. We now have an ingenious example of the value of assassination as an expedient for getting rid of social difficulties. The instructors are MM. Marc Fournier and Decourcelle ; the place of instruction is the Porte St. Martin, of which the former gentleman is manager ; and the title of the instructive exposition is La .Bite du bon _Dieu. A village idiot, whom an act of kindness from a young lady turns into a Cymon, not exactly of love but of gratitude, discovers that his benefactress has been seduced by a very worthless individual. His newly-attained intellect allows him to repair her honour without an unpleasant encumbrance. He makes the seducer marry his victim ; and when all is right and straight so far, he locks himself up in a room with the objectionable husband, and com- mences a knife-duel, which turns the woful wife into a happy widow. What good people these French heroes are ! The piece serves for the debut of M. Deshayes, an excellent actor, who was not exactly in his place at the Varietes.
The ingenuity of the French writers, which is so marvellously dis- played in every other kind of drama, generally abandons them in those huge fairy spectacles, which, produced from time to time at the Porte St. Martin, the Ambigu, the Gaite, and the Ancien Cirque, are generally mere aggregates of scenery, costume, and ballet, brought together by mere order of time, and totally devoid of artistic connexion. Les Sept Mer- veilles du Montle, which set all Paris mad nine months ago, was, for in- stance, a perfect specimen of the gingerbread school of drama, though the gilt was pretty thickly laid on. In fact, a French feerie is almost as dull and stupid as an English pantomime. Just now, however, we have a proof at the Ambigu-Comique that dramatic ingenuity can even be employed in this department of the art. 31M. Clariville and J. Cordier have worked the whole series of popular fairy talcs into one single piece, (a long one, to be sure,) by making the heroine necessarily pass through the vicissitudes of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, the Discreet Prin- cess, the wife of Bluebeard, and the Sleeping Beauty. The title of the spectacle, which comprises the chief incidents of so many tales, is Les Conies de la Mere r
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