heart you
strike an unknown fiber; but tell me not of hearing night after night
great artists who every time present the exact counterpart of what they
were on the preceding one.

It was at the Theatre Francais that she won her final acceptance as the
greatest of all tragedians of her time. This was in her appearance in
Corneille's famous play of "Horace." She had now, in 1838, blazed forth
with a power that shook her no, less than it stirred the emotions and
the passions of her hearers. The princes of the royal blood came in
succession to see her. King Louis Philippe himself was at last tempted
by curiosity to be present. Gifts of money and jewels were showered on
her, and through sheer natural genius rather than through artifice she
was able to master a great audience and bend it to her will.

She had no easy life, this girl of eighteen years, for other actresses
carped at her, and she had had but little training. The sordid ways of
her old father excited a bitterness which was vented on the daughter.
She was still under age, and therefore was treated as a gold-mine by her
exacting parents. At the most she could play but twice a week. Her form
was frail and reed-like. She was threatened with a complaint of the
lungs; yet all this served to excite rather than to diminish public
interest in her. The newspapers published daily bulletins of her health,
and her door was besieged by anxious callers who wished to know her
condition. As for the greed of her parents, every one said she was
not to blame for that. And so she passed from poverty to riches, from
squalor to something like splendor, and from obscurity to fame.

Much has been written about her that is quite incorrect. She has been
credited with virtues which she never possessed; and, indeed, it may be
said with only too much truth that she possessed no virtues whatsoever.
On the stage while the inspiration lasted she was magnificent. Off
the stage she was sly, treacherous, capricious, greedy, ungrateful,
ignorant, and unchaste. With such an ancestry as she had, with such an
early childhood as had been hers, what else could one expect from her?

She and her old mother wrangled over money like two pickpockets. Some of
her best friends she treated shamefully. Her avarice was without bounds.
Some one said that it was not really avarice, but only a reaction from
generosity; but this seems an exceedingly subtle theory. It is possible
to give illustrations of it, howeve