Page:Rachel (1887 Nina H. Kennard).djvu/93

mère." The old lady stopped short, and altering her course towards the door, left the room, saying with the offended dignity of a duchess, "Sonnez vous même, ma fille." Rachel made no reply, but, when the note was despatched, hastened to her mother's room to apologise, and entreat forgiveness for her imperious behaviour.

Rachel's letters to her family are all charming, but those to her mother are more especially so.

"On ne remercie pas une mère des ennuis, des fatigues qu'on lui cause; on l'aime, et jamais on ne s'acquitte envers elle et voilà!" she wrote a few months before her death.

In her relations with her family, Rachel shows at her best. She might be selfish, heartless, grasping to others, but to them she showed all her affection, kindness, and generosity. Both father and mother died some years after her, and both left considerable fortunes, which had been bestowed upon them by their daughter. In 1841 she gave them a luxuriously-furnished apartment, and took a country house for them in the Vallée de Montmorency, where they lived the greater part of the year. Her great delight was to retire there for a time, surrounded by father, mother, brother, and sisters. Jules Janin relates how,

 

one summer evening, the actress, in all the brilliancy of her youth and beauty, was seated in her garden contemplating the scene with delight. Applauded, admired, worshipped, she was the pride and joy of Paris. The evening before M. de Chateaubriand had conducted her on his arm to the theatre; that morning her carriage had been stopped by a crowd of all that was noble and distinguished in Paris, that they might inquire after her health. On her table lay a letter from Victor Hugo, rendering homage to the young muse who had for the moment dethroned him and his romantic following. There she was, at twenty-five, in the zenith of her power and popularity. Up above sang the nightingales. A little way off her brothers and