"An artistic tableau..." formed, from right to left, by: May Saba Haddad, Nadia Saikali, Valerie Sarrouf, and Leila Rbeiz

Visits by European ballet companies to Lebanon have come one after another, above all of late, thanks to the Tourism Year and the emigrants' summer. Beirut has seen the performances of Yvette Chauviré and Jean Babilée, and of the Spanish company of the Marquis de Cuevas, which has soared in the sky of this art; and only a month ago, the French company of "Lycette Darsonval" — all this in the hall of the UNESCO Palace. The Lebanese' desire to watch this kind of dancing has been quite

palpable, and it is a desire of recent date, for a number of their daughters have begun to dance on the tips of their toes, and they grow more numerous year by year, climbing the stairways of this refined art in magical white slippers; and because ballet, like all the arts, fosters in the soul a taste for beauty, and a feeling for the harmony of movements, their consonance, and their balance. It is, in the Frenchmen's phrase, "the best apparatus for giving

beauty as the clock gives the time"; besides which, it endows the body with a suppleness, a grace, and an adroitness that captivate minds and hearts, and it breeds in the dancer a great self-confidence and a longing to create... Yet it is hard to master, demand-ing, talent apart, persever-ance, exertion, and time. It is the shortest-armed and shortest-lived of the arts, and the most treacherous of them: after its practi-tioner has spent a stretch of his life reaching the degree of perfection, he

And among them the little ones... Mariana Elias Makdisi.