ating.

In all Rachel's career one can detect just a single strand of real
romance. It is one that makes us sorry for her, because it tells us that
her love was given where it never could be openly requited.

During the reign of Louis Philippe the Comte Alexandre Walewski held
many posts in the government. He was a son of the great Napoleon. His
mother was that Polish countess who had accepted Napoleon's love because
she hoped that he might set Poland free at her desire. But Napoleon was
never swerved from his well-calculated plans by the wish of any woman,
and after a time the Countess Walewska came to love him for himself. It
was she to whom he confided secrets which he would not reveal to his own
brothers. It was she who followed him to Elba in disguise. It was her
son who was Napoleon's son, and who afterward, under the Second Empire,
was made minister of fine arts, minister of foreign affairs, and,
finally, an imperial duke. Unlike the third Napoleon's natural
half-brother, the Duc de Moray, Walewski was a gentleman of honor and
fine feeling. He never used his relationship to secure advantages for
himself. He tried to live in a manner worthy of the great warrior who
was his father.

As minister of fine arts he had much to do with the subsidized theaters;
and in time he came to know Rachel. He was the son of one of the
greatest men who ever lived. She was the child of roving peddlers whose
early training had been in the slums of cities and amid the smoke of
bar-rooms and cafes. She was tainted in a thousand ways, while he was a
man of breeding and right principle. She was a wandering actress; he was
a great minister of state. What could there be between these two?

George Sand gave the explanation in an epigram which, like most
epigrams, is only partly true. She said:

"The count's company must prove very restful to Rachel."

What she meant was, of course, that Walewski's breeding, his dignity
and uprightness, might be regarded only as a temporary repose for the
impish, harsh-voiced, infinitely clever actress. Of course, it was all
this, but we should not take it in a mocking sense. Rachel looked up out
of her depths and gave her heart to this high-minded nobleman. He looked
down and lifted her, as it were, so that she could forget for the time
all the baseness and the brutality that she had known, that she might
put aside her forced vivacity and the self that was not in reality her
own.

It is pitiful to th