A red handkerchief, which he knew how to draw from his pocket at just the proper moment, always excited applause.
One day he conceived the idea of giving one of Bossuet's sermons at his concert.

Religious authority was very powerful at the time and forbade it.

Yet there would have been no sacrilege, and I regretted keenly that I could not hear this magnificent prose delivered so wonderfully.

Now that religious authority has lost its secular support, we see things in an entirely different way.

Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints walk the stage, speak in prose or verse, and sing.