Mystery brown-wax cylinder: early Pathé?

[Menophanes]

My latest batch of brown-wax cylinders includes one whose light colour made me hope at first that it might be an exceptionally early one. I am now doubtful about this, chiefly because the opening announcement is so short; my impression is that, the farther back one goes in the 1890s, the wordier the announcements are. The voice sounds French although I believe he is actually speaking English; what I hear is ‘Les Quatre [+ two obscure syllables], played by Bande [unidentifiable word] Normale’, with no reference to the manufacturer at all. (The French use the phrase école normale for certain higher-education colleges, but the elusive word is certainly not école.) The music too sounds French, but I cannot yet trace any French opera of the period called ‘Les Quatre [tum-tum]’. The record is quite clean but very faint and with shallow grooves, suggesting a poor-quality pantographic transfer. Could this be an early product of Pathé Frères?

The cylinder has a bevelled narrow end, rather in the Columbia style but deeper. I have just uploaded a digitisation to http://www.horologia.me.uk/cylinders.html. Two of the following images show it side by side with a British (Edison-Bell/Edisonia) cylinder of about 1900 for comparison of the colour.

Oliver Mundy.