own daughter whom she had deserted for love of the Tetrarch. As for
John the Baptist the camel's hair with which he was clothed must
have cost as pretty a penny as any of the modern kind, and if he
wore a girdle of skins about his loins it was concealed under a
really regal cloak. He was a voice; but not one crying in the
wilderness. He was in fact an operatic tenor comme il faut, who
needed only to be shut up in a subterranean jail with the young
woman who had pursued him up hill and down dale, in and out of
season to make love to her in the most approved fashion of the
Paris Grand Opera.

What shall we think of the morals of this French opera, after we
have seen and heard that compounded by the Englishman Oscar Wilde
and the German Richard Strauss? No wonder that England's Lord
Chamberlain asked nothing more than an elimination of the Biblical
names when he licensed a performance of "Herodiade" at Covent
Garden. There was no loss of dramatic qualitiy in calling Herod,
Moriame, and Herodias, Hesotade, and changing the scene from
Jerusalem to Azoum in Ethiopia; though it must have been a trifle
diverting to hear fair-skinned Ethiopians singing Schma Yisroel,
Adonai Elohenu in a temple which could only be that of Jerusalem.
John the Baptist was only Jean in the original and needed not to be
changed, and Salome is not in the Bible, though Salome, a very
different woman is--a fact which the Lord Chamberlain seems to have
overlooked when he changed the title of the opera from "Herodiade"
to "Salome."

Where does Salome come from, anyway? And where did she get her
chameleonlike nature? Was she an innocent child, as Flaubert
represents her, who could but lisp the name of the prophet when her