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Gillette de Narbonne is a French opéra comique in three acts, with music by Edmond Audran and libretto by Alfred Duru and Henri Chivot. It is based on a fabliau from The Decameron, the same tale on which Shakespeare based his play All's Well That Ends Well, depicting a rejected bride posing as another woman to deceive her husband into consummating their marriage. The authors wrote for a cast largely familiar from their earlier work, including mezzo-soprano Marie Montbazon, tenor Charles Lamy and baritone Louis Morlet. The first performance of the opera took place on 11 November 1882, at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris, where it ran for 122 performances, until the following March. Productions followed in London, where the piece failed to run, as well as in Berlin, where it was more successful.
This picture is a poster from the original production of Gillette de Narbonne, produced by French printmaker Paul Maurou in 1883. This copy is in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.Poster credit: Paul Maurou; restored by Adam Cuerden