and Hermione. It needed a critic more appreciative than Souliè, therefore, to draw attention to the young actress, and that critic was found in Véron, "the self-elected Maecenas" of the French literary world, who wrote under the pseudonym of the "Bourgeois de Paris." He thus describes the impression the young actress made upon him the first time be saw her at the Français:—
One fine summer evening, June 12th, 1838, seeking for shade and solitude (everything, even shade and solitude, may be found in Paris by him who seeketh diligently), I entered the Théâtre Français between 8 and 9 o'clock. There were four people in the stalls; I made the fifth. My attention was suddenly attracted to the stage by a strange and expressive countenance; the brow was prominent, the eye dark, deep set and full of fire; while a certain elegance and dignity in movement and attitude saved the fragile body from insignificance. A clear, musical, and above all sympathetic voice, roused me at once out of my indolence and indifference. This strange countenance, this eye full of fire, this sympathetic voice, belonged to Mademoiselle Rachel. She was acting Camille in Les Horaces for the first time. A crowd of confused memories swept over my brain, and at last I remembered an odd-looking girl who had acted in the Vendéene at the Gymnase; and I also remembered this same young girl, miserably shod and poorly clad, being asked in the corridor of the theatre "what she was doing," and answering, to my great astonishment, in a slow, serious voice, "I am pursuing my studies." I discovered in Mademoiselle Rachel that young actress who had appeared in the Vendéene at the Gymnase, and the poorly-clad girl who "was pursuing her studies." From that moment I became a passionate admirer of her talent. I sought my friend Merle, who generally entered into my literary enthusiasms and ideas, hoping to induce him to follow with me the career of the child I already called my little prodigy. "When the twelve or fifteen hundred men of taste and judgment who constitute public opinion in Paria," I said to him, "have heard and passed judgment on that child, she will be the glory and fortune of the Comédie Française."
In spite of the prophecy of the enthusiastic "Bourgeois de Paris," however, the select twelve or fifteen hundred, la Clique in fact, did not appear, and Rachel continued to act to empty houses.
