The heroes of eighteenth-century opera were generally feeble-minded lovers and nothing more; Giordano's Napoleon is only a jealous husband who helps out in the denouement of a play which is concerned chiefly with other people.
In turning Sardou's dramatic personages into operatic puppets a great deal of bloodletting was necessary and a great deal of the characteristic charm of the comedy was lost, especially in the cases of Madame Sans-Gene herself and Napoleon's sister; but enough was left to make a practicable opera.

There were the pictures of all the plebeians who became great folk later concerned in the historical incidents which lifted them up.

There were also the contrasted pictures which resulted from the great transformation, and it was also the ingratiating incident of the devotion of Lefebvre to the stout-hearted, honest little woman of the people who had to try to be a duchess.

All this was fair operatic material, though music has a strange capacity for refining stage characters as well as for making them colorless.
Giordano could not do himself justice as a composer without refining the expression of Caterina Huebscher, and so his Duchess of Dantzic talks a musical language at least which Sardou's washerwoman could not talk and remain within the dramatic verities.

Therefore we have "Madame Sans-Gene" with a difference, but not one that gave any more offence than operatic treatment of other fine plays have accustomed us to.
To dispose of the artistic merits of the opera as briefly as possible, it may be said that in more ways than one Giordano has in this work harked back to "Andrea Chenier," the first of his operas which had a hearing in America.