was before he came to Chicago, and seemed to be the overture to a
friendship that continued to exchange its favors and tokens of
affection to the close of his life. The doings of the Madame and Count
Bozenta, her always vivacious and enjoyable husband, were perennial
subjects for Field's kindliest paragraphs. As he says, he was a great
theatre-goer, but Field became a constant one when "Modjesky" came to
town. Her Camille--a character in which she was not excelled by the
great Bernhardt herself--had a remarkable vogue in the early eighties.
She imparted to its impersonation the subtle charm of her own sweet
womanliness, which served to excuse Armand's infatuation and as far as
possible lifted the play out of its unwholesome atmosphere of French
immorality to the plane of romantic devotion and self-sacrifice. Her
Camille seemed a victim of remorseless destiny, a pure soul struggling
amid inexorable circumstances that racked and cajoled a diseased and
suffering body into the maelstrom of sin.

Field was so constituted that, without this saving grace of womanliness,
the presentation of Camille, with all its hectic surroundings, would
have repelled him. He did not care to see Mademoiselle Bernhardt a
second time in the role, and he fled from the powerful and fascinating
portrayal of pulmonary emotion which initiated the audiences of Clara
Morris into the terrors of tubercular disease. Night after night, when
Modjeska played Camille, Field would occupy a front seat or a box.
When so seated that his presence could not be overlooked from the
stage, he was wont to divert Camille from her woes with the by-play of
his mobile features. Wherever he sat, his large, white, solemn visage
had a fascination for Madame Modjeska, and from the time she caught
sight of it until Camille settled back lifeless in the final scene, she
played "at him." He repaid this tribute by distorting his face in agony
when Camille was light-hearted, and by breaking into noiseless
merriment as her woes were causing handkerchiefs to flutter throughout
the audience. When we went to visit her next day, as we often did, she
scarcely ever failed to reproach him in some such fashion as: "Ah,
Meester Fielt, why will you seet in the box and talk with your overcoat
on the chair to make Camille laugh who is dying on the stage? Ah,
Meester Fielt, you are a very bad man, but I lof you, don't we,
Charlie?" And the count always stopped rolling a cigarette long enough
to