their importunity. She had won all she had ever hoped for in her most ambitious dreams. Fame, riches, applause—all were hers in abundance; and yet, perhaps, she could not help feeling with regret that the light-hearted irresponsibility of those childish days of poverty and suffering was gone never to return.
Towards 1830 the Félix family found their way to Paris, where they continued the same struggle for existence as in Lyons. The early details of a career that begins in obscurity and rises into sudden notoriety are almost always contradictory and misleading, but most of those we give here concerning Rachel are taken from her own lips: she was fond of talking of her childhood to her intimate friends. Monsieur Arséne Houssaye was one of them, and has given us in his sketch entitled La Comédienne a description of both the sisters as they went about the streets of Paris in those days when, as she would say later, "she had learnt the actress's best art, of being only sad at home." "Is it any wonder," she remarked to someone on another occasion, "I should be so fond of money, considering the suffering I went through in my youth to earn a few sous." For to this proud, sensitive young Bohemian, imbued already with a certain artistic appreciation, it must have been intense suffering thus to exhibit herself to a careless, unappreciative crowd. On the other hand, Sarah, the elder by some years, liked the vulgar applause and admiration that her beauty and youth excited.
The two sisters formed in every way a remarkable contrast: the one with her rosy cheeks, fair hair, and self-confident expression; the other pale, subdued, with head bent forward under the wreath of artificial flowers that encircled it. Rachel would relate, Hous-
