tended to the heart of the manager, who was said to have offered her his hand!" This statement, however, sounds rather like one of M. Laporte's many modes of puffing.
From Frances Kemble's Records of Later Life we take the following account:—
I shall never forget the first time I ever heard Mademoiselle Rachel speak. I was acting my old part of Julia in The Hunchback, at Lady Ellesmere's, where the play was got up for an audience of her friends, and for her especial gratification. The room was darkened, with the exception of our stage, and I had no means of discriminating anybody among my audience, which was, as became an assembly of such distinguished persons, decorously quiet and undemonstrative. But in one of the scenes, where the foolish heroine, in the midst of her vulgar triumph at the Earl of Rochdale's proposals, is suddenly overcome by the remorseful recollection of her love for Clifford, and almost lets the Earl's letter fall from her trembling hands, I heard a voice out of the darkness, and it appeared to me almost close to my feet, exclaiming in a tone, the vibrating depth of which I shall never forget, "Ah, bien, bien, très bien!" Mademoiselle Rachel's face is very expressive and dramatically fine, though not absolutely beautiful. It is a long oval, with a head of classical and very graceful contour, the forehead rather narrow, and not very high; the eyes small, dark, deep-set, and terribly powerful; the brow straight, noble, and fine in form, though not very flexible.
I was immensely struck and carried away with her performance of Hermione, though I am not sure that some of the parts did not seem to me finer than the whole as a conception. That in which she is unrivalled by any actor or actress I ever saw, is the expression of a certain combined and concentrated hatred and scorn. Her reply to Andromaque's appeal to her, in that play, was one of the most perfect things I have ever seen on the stage. The cold, cruel, acrid enjoyment of her rival's humiliation, the quiet, bitter, unmerciful exercise of the power of torture, was certainly, in its keen incisiveness, quite incomparable. It is singular that so young a woman should so especially excel in delineations and expressions of this order of emotion, while, in the utterance of tenderness, whether in love or sorrow, she appears comparatively less successful. I am not, however, perhaps, competent to pronounce upon this point, for Hermione and Emilie, in Corneille's Cinna, are not characters abounding in tenderness. Lady M saw her the other day in Marie Stuart, and
