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 quality 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 mother told her to ask for his head?
Had she taken dancing lessons from one of the women of Cadiz to learn to dance as she must have danced to excite such lust in Herod?
Was she a monster, a worse than vampire as she is represented by Wilde and Strauss?
Was she an "Israelitish grisette" as Pougin called the heroine of the opera which it took one Italian (Zanardini) and three Frenchmen (Milliet, Gremont, and Massenet) to concoct?
No wonder that the brain of Saint-Saens reeled when he went to hear "Herodiade" at its first performance in Brussels and found that the woman whom he had looked upon as a type of lasciviousness and monstrous cruelty had become metamorphosed into a penitent Magdalen.
Read the plot of the opera and wonder! Salome is a maiden in search of her mother whom John the Baptist finds in his wanderings and befriends.

She clings to him when he becomes a political as well as a religious power among the Jews, though he preaches unctuously to her touching the vanity of earthly love.
Herodias demands his death of her husband for that he had publicly insulted her, but Herod schemes to use his influence over the Jews to further his plan to become a real monarch instead of a Roman Tetrarch.
But when the pro-consul Vitellius wins the support of the people and Herod learns that the maiden who has spurned him is in love with the prophet, he decrees his decapitation.

Salome, baffled in her effort to save her lover, attempts to kill Herodias; but the wicked woman discloses herself as the maiden's mother and Salome turns the dagger against her own breast.
This is all of the story one needs to know.