The quick succession of novelties at the French Plays makes
it difficult to keep pace with them: ere we have well reconnoitered the chiefs of the corps, they disappear from the field of observation. The engagement of Mademoiselle Nathalie and M. Lafont terminates this week; though their benefits will afford another opportunity of seeing them.
.; Mademoiselle Nathalie is the most joyous and impulsive of French actresses, and therefore the most delightful to an English audience. She seems to throw her heart into all that she does; and her smiles and tears appear equally spontaneous: in this respect she resembles Mrs. Keeley. She played a precocious and mischievous boy in Le Cadet de Familk, with an air of masculine ease and freedom wholly removed from affecta- tion and indelicacy, and without any apparent consciousness of the meta- morphosis. She assumes the style of a woman of todgracefully, but the peasant character becomes her best: it suits the abandon of her manner, and the character of her face and figure. Her personation of Catherine, in La Croix d' Or—the original of the Maid of Croissy—is charming: grief for a brother who is drawn for the conscription, joy at his return, sympathy for the officer who loves her, and despair at not being able to re- ciprocate his love, are expressed in a simple and natural way, that touches the feelings. M. Lafont's performance of Sergeant Austerlitz in this piece Is the perfection of stage-dressing: the spruce, powdered militaire, setting out for the campaign, and the haggard, decrepit veteran after the retreat from Moscow, are a pair of living portraits. M. Lafont is most at home in brusque and reckless characters, wheie address rather than refinement and freedom more than elegance are requisite: his performance of the Duke in Le Hochet tine Coquette was deficient in dignity and polish. Mademoi- selle Eliza Forgeot played the coquette cleverly:- she looked the hard, heartless, wily woman. Among other permanent members of the company, MM. Beret, Bizet, and Masquillier, deserve notice; the more so for that their merits are unobtrusive. -This is the abiding charm of the French Performances: the actors merge their personal identity and individual pre- tensions in the assumed charaoters.:- '
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