an historical consumptive patient, supposing there is one to be found, I think I could act it to draw tears, for I would weep myself. It is all very well to tell me I am only suffering from nerves. I feel there is something wrong. We were speaking of the watch; it is as if you had turned the key too hard—it goes "crac." I often feel something going "crac' in me when I wind myself up to play. The day before yesterday, in Les Horaces, when giving Maubant his cue, I felt the "crac." Yes, my friend, I was breaking to pieces. This is between ourselves, because of my mother and the little ones.
Always superstitious, she was now under the influence of the manifold fancies and tremors of disordered health and overtaxed nerves. She could not sleep, and saw visions. Her maid Rose related how one night she called her, and told her a long white figure had entered her room, and, on her asking who she was, the figure had thrown off her veil and revealed the face of a skeleton. Another time she declared Corneille had appeared to her, with a frown on his face, as though reproaching her for her disloyalty to the allegiance she had sworn to him in her youth. At a supper at Victor Hugo's some months before, Rachel had discovered they were thirteen at table; she now frequently recurred with terror to the misfortunes that had pursued each of the guests. Victor Hugo and his wife in exile, Madame de Girardin dead, Pradier gone, Alfred de Musset gone, Count D'Orsay dead, Rebecca dead. "I alone am left, and that will not be for long."
There is little doubt that several times during her career Rachel inclined toward Catholicism. The splendour and pomp of the ceremonial made a deep impression on her excitable nature, and there were not wanting many who were interested in her conversion. It was an endless subject of jest and speculation in the Paris press of the time. In 1846 it was affirmed positively by one authority that she had been seen to
