Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 6

Wednesday. 4th.

Friday. 6th.

Thursday. 5th. CFA

1835-02-05

Thursday. 5th. CFA
Thursday. 5th.

The weather continues very cold. I went to the Office. Mr. Walsh spent an hour and I passed some time in paying a visit to T. K. Davis who had much of the News of the day. He tells me that the Suffolk Senators were five to one in the late vote. That one being B. T. Pickman. This is as curious as any thing. This information I have since found was not quite true—Franklin Dexter not having brought himself to this, threw away his vote upon Bates. This is a small alternative. The Legislature is in great agitation. Mr. Webster and Mr. Everett have been flattering each other. The latter, not suffering any feeling of friendship to prevent his sacrificing my father, has been instrumental in procuring this empty sound, this Legislative nomination of Mr. Webster to the Presidency, in exchange for which Mr. Webster urges the translation of Davis to the Senate so that room may be made for Mr. Everett next year. Mr. Webster knows very perfectly what he is about in all this. The presence of my father in the Senate would hardly be agreeable to him. His newspaper organs are the Atlas and Courier, while strange to say the Centinel and Gazette incline to the other scale in the balance. An editorial in the former of the two last is written with far more ability than J. T. Adams is commonly known 69by. Well, we must quietly wait for the development of all this matter.

Walk and home to read Ovid. Mrs. Gray and her daughter with Mrs. Hall from Medford dined here. The young lady is just engaged to Mr. Ign. Sargent the husband of her sister who died three or four years since. P.C.B. Jr. dined here too. The afternoon was much abridged by it. I continued Faust or rather Hayward’s Preface and began the Translation.

Evening I went to the Theatre. A melo-drama called the Wizard Skiff written for the famous Opera dancer, Celeste. She enacts a dumb girl disguised as a man and Captain of the Wizard Skiff. The story is taken from the Massacre of Scio, in which a Russian leading the Turkish forces is supposed to have murdered the father and Mother of the girl, to have violated her and left her with her tongue cut out. She fits out a vessel with the assistance of a Greek priest who was left for dead in the Massacre and they arrive on the coast of Russia many years afterwards where the Russian has retired to a Castle. It is to be presumed that this must be the Russia of the Black Sea. The interest consists in the hazardous situation in which the Greek girl finds herself while pursuing her scheme of revenge to successful completion. The usual quantity of fire and smoke is administered. The piece is not dramatic. One sees the issue too easily, but her performance is quite spirited. She afterwards danced a ballet dance called the Danse des Folies. That is in a Masquerade in the Opera of Gustavus She comes in dressed with the cap and bells of Folly and leads the Masquers. The idea is exceedingly pretty. She does not appear much altered from what she was when here before, and her dancing is perhaps more decided but scarcely better.1 A short interlude of Is he Jealous and we went home in fine season.

1.

Mlle. Celeste as a young dancer from Paris had made her American debut in 1827, being one of those who first introduced ballet in this country. Shortly thereafter she had returned to Europe and did not reappear on the American stage until Nov. 1834. Throughout the New York season that followed she had a sensational popular and critical success both as dancer and pantomimist. The Wizard Skiff, or the Tongueless Pirate Boy was one of the staples in her repertory. (Odell, Annals N.Y. Stage , 3:24, 272; 4:29–30, 32.)

This attendance at a theatrical performance was CFA’s first in Boston since the death of JA2 in Oct. 1834.