Racine, and you ask for Santerre and Danton. Go, you are unworthy of these great men. You are incapable of understanding the godlike sorrow, and heaven-born grief of these great works. . . .'
"Do not let us expose our great tragedian any longer to the contempt of a democracy. We hope, perhaps, that Mademoiselle Rachel has seen long ago that she does not speak the 'language of the country,' and let us hope she will give place to the performing bear, to the nigger preachers, to the Barnum circus, and other amusements congenial to the American people. Let her return to us; she will be still more welcome if she return before we expected her; we will console her for her neglect there; her very disappointment will increase her popularity here; and we implore her to let this be a lesson never again to leave us."
On the 17th November Rachel bade farewell to New York in Phèdre and Le Moineau de Lesbie. An ode written for the occasion by M. de Trobriand, Rachel à l'Amérique, was recited by her and received with hearty applause. From New York the company proceeded to Philadelphia, where Rachel caught a violent cold when acting in Les Horaces at the Walnut Street Theatre. She had already been coughing before she left New York; but, regardless of the most ordinary sanitary precautions, had taken no notice, and, anxious to get through her engagements as fast as she could, had acted repeatedly four nights running—a strain which the fragile body could have hardly borne in her strongest days. She now broke down utterly, and was obliged to give up all idea of appearing before the Philadelphians again.
The doctors ordered removal to a warmer climate as
