ages. How was it possible,
I wondered, to have more grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, than
Mademoiselle Fargeuil, the heroine?--the fine lady whom a pair of rival
lovers, seeking to win her hand by offering her what will most please
her, treat, in the one case, to a brilliant fete, a little play within a
play, at which we assist, and in the other to the inside view of an
attic of misery, into which the more cunning suitor introduces her just
in time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the place, from being
ruinously, that is successfully, tempted by a terrible old woman, a
prowling _revendeuse_, who dangles before her the condition on which so
pretty a person may enjoy every comfort. Her happier sister, the courted
young widow, intervenes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, opens
for her an account with baker and butcher, and, doubting no longer which
flame is to be crowned, charmingly shows us that what pleases women most
is the exercise of charity.

Then it was I first beheld that extraordinary veteran of the stage,
Mademoiselle Pierson, almost immemorially attached, for later
generations, to the Theatre Francais, the span of whose career thus
strikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty in
the small _feerie_ or allegory forming M. Ponsard's second act. She has
been playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year--and still
indeed much as a juvenile beauty. Not that light circumstance, however,
pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact that I was to admire
Mademoiselle Fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had given
all Sardou's earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, when
she had passed from interesting comedy and even from romantic drama--not
less, perhaps still more, interesting, with Sardou's Patrie as a
bridge--to the use of the bigger brush of the Ambigu and other homes of
melodrama. The sense, such as it is, that I extract from the pair of
modest memories in question is rather their value as a glimpse of the
old order that spoke so much less of our hundred modern material
resources, matters the stage of to-day appears mainly to live by, and
such volumes more of the one thing that was then, and that, given
various other things, had to be, of the essence. That one thing was the
quality, to say nothing of the quantity, of the actor's personal
resource, technical history, tested temper, proved experience; on which
almost everything had to depend,