PARISIAN THEATRICALS.
The leading novelty of the day is Les Belles du aeur, a piece in five acts, written by M. Auguste Maquet on the basis of one of his own novels, and performed at the Vaudeville. Like M. Scribe's comedy, Una Chaim, it shows the disagreeable position of a young gentleman whose heart is pulled in two different ways—by an innocent girl, whom his friends wish him to marry, and the wife of another man with whom he has a liaison. A foreign mission sufficed in the hands of M. Scribe for the solution of the difficulty, but M. Maquet cuts the knot with the dagger of Melpomene. Just as the married lady seems to have the whole game at her command, with the new advantage of widowhood in her favour, she generously drowns herself to relieve her lover of his embar- rassment. Who shall object to suicide after this ? . As we know nothing about that King of Bohemia, with Seven Castles, whose history is so often commenced in Tristram Shandy, we cannot say whether he is to be regarded as the foundation of a piece called Le Rol de Boheme et ses Sept Cheitcaux, written by M. Paul Meurice, and now played at the Ambigu-Comique. Here the potentate is a Spanish gipsy, who in his love for Silvane, a beauty of his race, has no less a rival than King Philip IV. Fortunately, Silvane prefers the sham to the real monarch. Cabrito, as the Bohemian is called, has also to perform cer- tain high duties. He is the illegitimate brother of a lady at Court, one whose welfare he assiduously watches, and with no small ingenuity does he save her from the toils of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who, having been too much idolized by M. Alexandre Dumas, is now made a thorough rascal who hopes to rebuild a dilapidated fortune on the ruins of a woman's honour.
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