was toned down to something like decency and at least the grosser
vulgarities of the music-hall stage were banned by common consent.

The little indecencies, the sly allusions, the candour of French
comedy remained, and often it was only stupidity which made one
laugh. Nothing on earth could have been more ridiculous than the
little lady who strutted up and down the stage, in the uniform of a
British Tommy, to the song of "Tipperary," which she rendered as a
sentimental ballad, with dramatic action. When she lay down on her
front buttons and died a dreadful death from German bullets, still
singing in a feeble voice: "Good-bye, Piccadilly; farewell, Leicester
Square," there were British officers in the boxes who laughed until
they wept, to the great astonishment of a French audience, who saw
no humour in the exhibition.

The kilted ladies of the Olympia would have brought a blush to the
cheeks of the most brazen-faced Jock from the slums of Glasgow,
though they were received with great applause by respectable
French bourgeois with elderly wives. And yet the soul of Paris, the big
thing in its soul, the spirit which leaps out to the truth and beauty of
life, was there even in Olympia, among the women with the roving
eyes, and amidst all those fooleries.

Between two comic "turns" a patriotic song would come. They were
not songs of false sentiment, like those patriotic ballads which thrill
the gods in London, but they had a strange and terrible sincerity, not
afraid of death nor of the women's broken hearts, nor of the grim
realities of war, but rising to the heights of spiritual beauty in their
cry to the courage of women and the pity of God. They sang of
the splendours of sacrifice for France and of the glory of that young