pressed a wish to bid good-bye for the last time to the two theatres which had witnessed her period of probation and the glorious days of her triumphs. Jules Janin tells us:—
The day she quitted Paris she rose very early. When those around her suggested that she ought to rest as long as possible, she answered that she bad determined to pay a visit to the scenes connected with her earlier days, and that her family and friends might come to take leave of her at the station. She would listen to no remonstrance, and those about her remarked that for some time she had not displayed so much energy.
When she was dressed she entered her carriage, and gave orders to drive first to the Gymnase and then to the Français.
The morning (it was not quite six o'clock) was cold and misty. Not a sound was to be heard in the sleeping city, and the great theatre of the Rue Richelieu stood silent and deserted. The entrance and portico loomed faintly through the morning mist. The small side-door, where the child Rachel had knocked so often in vain with her little hand, thin and rigid with hunger and cold, was hardly visible. As she gazed, she must have lived over again all those days of varying sadness and joy, of depression and exultation, which are a portion of every actor's life. Slowly she turned away, bending forward to look at the walls of the theatre where she had awakened the echoes with the voice of Hermione, Camille, and Monime, and where she had made men and women tremble and weep as she chanted the "Marseillaise." When she reached the station, where her friends and relations waited to say the last words of parting, a parting that was to be eternal, she tried to walk from her carriage to the train, but was obliged to submit to be carried in a chair. She smiled once more at the crowd of sympathetic faces, then gently closed her eyes, as if that were the memory she wished to take with her.
Her life, thanks to the warm, dry air of Le Cannet, was prolonged until the mouth of January 1858, much longer than she herself expected. Towards the end of December, feeling her strength fail, she made a supreme effort. In one day she wrote seventeen letters, and prepared seventeen little boxes, filled with orange flowers; on the top of each she laid one of the letters.
