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THE PEOPLE'S THEATER

idly gathered to itself an interested and exclusive clientele of people. I have more than once enjoyed the opportunity of watching these audiences—especially at performances of Madame Sans-Gêne and at the premiere of a Jean Jullien play. I was struck by the keen interest displayed everywhere about me, often taking the form of audible expression, where someone would agree or disagree with a character. I am told that at Danton the audience roundly berated the Revolutionary figures who displeased them: Vadier, Fouquier-Tinville, etc. At one performance of Madame Sans-Gêne I saw them on the point of hissing Napoleon when he reproached the heroine for being a washerwoman. They always took sides, they were incapable of remaining neutral. This Belleville People's Theater has a public of quick intelligence. I watched especially the young men and women, people with splendid faces, but many of them pale and pinched and worn with the fatigue of constant labor. Beneath the transparent and mobile faces there seemed to float great waves of desire, and care, and changing moods of irony. A truly intelligent class—almost too intelligent—with a touch of the morbid: the people of a large city. And this public might in a few years' time become the ideal audience: intellectual and passionate.

A few weeks after the opening of this Théâtre populaire, M. Henri Beaulieu, an actor of talent, opened on November 14 a second Théâtre du Peuple, in the Théâtre Moncey, in Clichy. It was