“La Belle Russe” received its final performance at the Baldwin Theatre on Saturday evening, July 30. On August 1 “Adolph Challet” was produced there, under Belasco’s direction, and on August 8 a revival of “Diplomacy” was effected, Tearle acting Henry Beauclerc, Gerald Eyre Julian, and Miss Jeffreys-Lewis the Countess Zicka. It had been intended to divide the week between “Diplomacy” and “Camille,” but “to my delight,” Belasco said, “the former was strong enough to fill the whole week and I could give all the time to final preparation of my new play.” That new play was a dramatic epitome of “The Stranglers of Paris” (“Les Étrangleurs de Paris”), by Adolphe Belot, for the production of which much effort had already been made. It was modestly announced by Maguire (who, I surmise, did not thereby greatly distress Belasco) as “The great dramatic event of the nineteenth century,” and it was brought out on August 15. Belasco’s name was not made known as that of the adapter. This play is, in fact, an extravagant and, in some respects, a repulsive sensation melodrama. The story relates some of the experiences of an intellectual pervert named Jagon, a huge hunchback, of remarkable muscular strength, especially in the digits, resident in Paris, and gaining a livelihood for himself and a cherished daughter (whom he keeps in ignorance of her actual relationship to himself) by the gentle art of strangling persons in order to rob them. A specially barbarous murder is committed by Jagon and an accomplice named Lorenz,—an ex-convict who has ingratiated himself with the daughter, Mathilde, and who marries her. Jagon and an innocent man, Blanchard, are arrested, tried for this crime, and sentenced to transportation to New Caledonia. The convict-ship bearing them to that destination is wrecked and they escape together upon a raft and return to Paris. Mathilde, having discovered the criminality of her husband, frees her mind on that subject with such pungency that Lorenz is moved to practise upon her the professional dexterity learned from her revered father and promptly chokes her to death. Jagon arrives at this juncture, attended by police officers, denounces Lorenz to them as his actual accomplice in the crime for which Blanchard has been convicted with him, and then, in the manner of Robert Macaire in somewhat similar circumstances, being determined to escape the guillotine, leaps through a convenient window, thus giving the police an opportunity, which they improve, of shooting him to death. The play is immensely inferior to the story upon parts of which it is based, but it serves its purpose as a “shocker.” The escape of the two convicts on the raft at sea provides an effective scene, not the less so because of its resemblance to a similar scene in the earlier melodrama of “The World”: the expedient, however, was an old one long before “The World” was produced: it is employed with great skill and effect in Reade’s fine novel of “The Simpleton.” Belasco’s mature opinion of this play of his has been recorded in four words which cover the case: “What buncombe it was!” A notably good performance was given in it by Osmond Tearle as Jagon—a part which he expressed himself to the dramatist as delighted to undertake as a relief from acting the repressed “leads” to which he had for some time been restricted. It ran for two weeks. This was the original cast:

“The Stranglers” was superbly mounted, it delighted the public for which it was intended, and was played for two weeks, attracting large and enthusiastically demonstrative audiences.