a fitting feature of the
old _portier_ he was playing. In the midst of my admiration for the
actor, however, I studied the man himself; and I saw that he dominated
his fellow-actors with a will of the most imperious sort. He swept along
the action of the piece, and manipulated the rather poor company of
actors who moved about him, with a leonine agility of movement and an
autocratic command of the scene which showed that even in his old age he
was no subject for patronizing sympathy. There was a meek, white-faced
young lady who played the part of granddaughter to the old _portier_,
and I transferred my pity to her; for the way Lemaitre hauled her hither
and thither by her slender wrists (not in simulated rudeness, for she
was the pet of the old _portier's_ heart, but simply in the actor's
imperative arrangements of tableaux), and the manner in which he dragged
her young head with his iron arms to his broad breast in affectionate
but rough and picturesque embrace, were enough to wear on the nerves of
the stoutest young woman; and this one was as frail in form as she was
fair in face.

A day or two later I had an opportunity of observing more closely the
hero of fifty years of mimic life. It was in the green-room of the
Ambigu, half an hour before the curtain rose on his fiftieth
performance of the _portier_, and the old man was in his shirt-sleeves
and with his apparel otherwise disordered. Learning that we were from
America, he invited us to sit for a moment in his dressing-room, which
adjoined the green-room, and waved us toward the door with as grand a
gesture as if he were Hamlet saying "Lead on! I'll follow thee." The
dressing-room was a pleasant little box (in French stage-parlance, by
the way, a player's dressing-room is always called his _loge_), with the
walls covered with portraits of theatrical and other celebrities. The
impression Lemaitre made on me at this time was more that which might be
made by an American statesman of the old school--a Clay, a Webster, an
Adams--than that one would expect from a mere mouther of other people's
words. However, I am wrong to apply this term to Lemaitre, who was in
the truest sense an _author_. But of this later. He was full of a sort
of sad dignity, and the burden of his conversation was, "I am no longer
young." He inquired curiously concerning America, but when it was
suggested that he should visit our country, shook his head: "No; I am
too old to cross the sea now." The