sinful, and as the base conceptions of a depraved nature; she had even
come to witness them to confirm the abhorrence in which she held them,
and show that they appealed to no one sentiment of her heart. Alas! the
experiment was destined to prove too costly.

The splendor, the beauty, the glowing language of the scene, the
strains of music, softer and more entrancing than ever swept across her
senses,--the very picturesque effect of everything,--varied with every
artifice of light and shadow, carried her away, and bore her to an ideal
world, where she, too, had her homage of devotion, where her beauty
had its worshippers, and she was herself loved. It was in vain that she
tried to reason herself out of these fancies, and regard such displays
as unreal and fictitious. Had they been so, thought she, they could not
appeal, as I see and know they do, to the sympathies of those thousands
whose breasts are heaving in suspense, and whose hearts are throbbing
in agony. But more than that, she beheld the great actress of the day
received with all the homage rendered to a queen in the real world.

If ever there was one calculated to carry with her from the stage into
society all the admiration she excited, it was that admirable actress
who was then at the very outset of that brilliant career which for
nigh half a century adorned the French stage, and rendered it the most
celebrated in Europe. Young, beautiful in the highest sense of the word,
with a form of perfect mould, gifted and graceful in every gesture, with
a voice of thrilling sweetness and a manner that in the highest circles
found no superior, Mademoiselle Mars brought to her profession traits
and powers, any one of which might have insured success. I remember her
well! I can bring to mind the thundering applause that did not wait for
her appearance on the boards, but announced her coming; that gorgeous
circle of splendid and apparelled beauty, stimulated to a momentary
burst of enthusiasm; that waving pit, rocking and heaving like a stormy
sea,--the hoarse bray of ten thousand voices, rude and ruthless enough
many of them, and yet all raised in homage of one who spoke to the
tenderest feelings of the heart, and whose accents were the softest
sounds that ever issued from human lips. And I remember, too, how, at
the first syllable she uttered, that deafening clamor would cease, and,
by an impulse that smote every one of that vast assemblage in the same
instant of time,