GABRIELLE RÉJANE
A certain Frenchman once voiced the feeling of his fellow Parisians concerning Réjane by calling upon all good French provincials, who would learn the language of the Boulevards in a single lesson, and all children of other lands curious as to the pleasures, tastes, and manners of Paris, to harken while he gave them this advice: “Go and see Réjane. Don’t go to the Opéra, where the music is German; nor to the Opéra-Comique, where it is Italian; nor yet to the Comédie Française, where the sublime is made ridiculous, and the heroes and heroines of Racine take on the attitudes of bull-fighters and cigarette-makers; nor to the Odéon, nor to the Palais-Royal, nor here, nor there, nor elsewhere: go and see Réjane. Be she at London, Chicago, Brussels, St. Petersburg—Réjane is Paris. She carries the soul of Paris with her, wheresoever she listeth.”
GABRIELLE RÉJANE
Madame Réjane—the Parisienne: they are interchangeable terms. And what is a Parisienne? Let our sprightly French friend—M. Dauphin Meunier—tell us; he does it well:[91]
“A fabulous being, in an everyday human form; a face, not beautiful, scarcely even pretty, which looks upon the world with an air at once ironical and sympathetic; a brow that grows broader or narrower according to the capricious invasions of her aureole of hair; an odd little nose, perked heavenward; two roguish eyes, now blue, now black; the rude accents of a street-girl, suddenly changing to the well-bred murmuring of a great lady; abrupt, abundant gestures, eloquently finishing half-spoken sentences; a supple neck—a slender, opulent figure—a dainty foot, that scarcely touches the earth and yet can fly amazingly near the ceiling; lips, nervous, sensuous, trembling, curling; a frock, simple or sumptuous, bought at a bargain or created by a Court-dressmaker; a gay, a grave demeanor; grace, wit, sweetness, tartness; frivolity and earnestness, tenderness and indifference: such is Woman at Paris: such is the Parisienne.
“No need for her to learn good manners, nor bad ones: she’s born with both. According to the time or place, she will talk to you of politics, of art, of literature—of dress, trade, cookery—of finance, of socialism, of luxury, of starvation—with the patness, the sure touch, the absolute sincerity, of one who has seen all, experienced all, understood all. She is as sentimental as a song, wily as a diplomat, gay as folly, or serious as a novel by Zola. What has she read? Where was she educated? Who cares? Her book of life is Paris; she knows her Paris by heart; and whoso knows Paris can dispense with further knowledge.”
Réjane was from the beginning a veritable child of Paris. She was born on June 6, 1857, at 14 Rue de la Duane, in a business section of the city. This street had been “one of the storm centers for almost every great riot known to the Paris of the last century and a half.” The little Gabrielle Charlotte Réju passed her infancy in that busy part of Paris between Porte Saint-Martin and Place Château d’Eau.
Her parents were poor. Her father had earlier been an actor and at one time had directed a theatre at Arras.[92] When Gabrielle was born, and during the years of her infancy, he was the ticket-taker and the keeper of the buffet at the Ambigu. In the work of dispensing refreshments Madame Réju, who came of a good Valenciennes family, actively assisted, and even Gabrielle herself, when she grew old enough, was pressed into service.[93]
With the home life virtually transferred to the lobbies of the Ambigu, it was inevitable that Gabrielle, breathing the mystery-filled atmosphere of a theatre, should at once feel its strong influence. Like Ellen Terry and Mrs. Fiske, and unlike her compatriot the great Sarah, Réjane was, from the beginning, of the theatre. She was an amiably mischievous child, possessed of an immense curiosity about life behind the scenes. She remembers vividly those early days, in which she divided her time between her small duties, napping in corners, and revelling in the delights that presented themselves over the footlights. There she saw many of the stars of the day, Jane Essler, Frédérick Lemaître, Marie Laurent, Adèle Page. On the night of a new production, between the acts, she would go to her mother and recount the story of the play and give childish imitations of the various players. To imitate the fine gowns she saw on the stage, she would make a train from the buffet napkins. One of the memories of her childhood is the enchantment that possessed her when she saw herself, dressed in a velvet robe and a royal diadem, reflected in Adèle Page’s splendid cheval glass.
When Gabrielle was about five, her father died, and mother and daughter were thrown on their own resources. Mme. Réju secured a position at one of the other theatres, and Gabrielle went to school. She was to some extent in the care of a friend, but she was privileged with extraordinary liberties. Her mother gave her a franc each morning with which to buy her evening meal, and it was with immense pride that she would go forth alone to take her dinner at a restaurant. Often she would save enough from her franc to buy an orange which she would take with her into the balcony of the Ambigu, where she was still privileged to go. There she would tarry to see an act of the play before she went home.
It is clear that she was a precocious, clever child. She was already, indeed, an actress. Her evening walk would invariably take her past her beloved Ambigu. She made an event of this passage, putting on her best attitudes and smiles for the artists who might be seated in the terrace of the café.
This café of the Ambigu was the scene of one of the oft-repeated episodes of Réjane’s childhood. The proprietor, a relative of some sort, was in the habit of beating his wife. One evening, Gabrielle, who knew what to expect, happened—as was not unusual—to be in the café. Soon the poor woman’s cries were heard as her lord and master belabored her. A patron demanded of Gabrielle what the terrible noises meant. “Oh, that, Monsieur,” she said. “Why, they’re rehearsing upstairs.”
Soon the mother changed her work, and took up the painting of fans. Between sessions of the school, and all day on Thursdays, little Gabrielle helped in this work and proved herself adept. They received for this work about fifty cents per dozen fans. Madame Réju seems to have been sensitive as to her new work. She and her young daughter, too proud to have it known that they were doing work of that sort, or perhaps for fear of offending certain rich relatives, took a neighbor into their confidence and paid her for delivering the fans to la maison Meyer.
If mother and daughter had continued to live in the immediate neighborhood of the Ambigu it is not unlikely that the already lively ambition of the girl would have found its outlet at that theatre. We have seen something of her enthusiasm for the Ambigu and her close relationship with its entourage. Once launched upon her career there as an actress of popular drama, she would very likely have remained there and missed the valuable training that she was to receive at the Conservatoire. As it happened, however, when she was about ten her mother moved from Rue de Lancry to 17 Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, and in large measure the influence of the Ambigu was removed.
On the same floor with Madame Réju and her daughter in their new quarters lived a lady with whom they gradually formed a close friendship. When the war of 1870 broke out, the new friend left Paris, leaving her apartment in charge of Mme. Réju and Gabrielle. There the windows, unlike those of Mme. Réju’s own suite, overlooked the street. When the Commune brought the terrors of civil war to Paris, it was from these windows that the child witnessed what was to her a terrible and long-remembered sight, a street battle between the government troops and the Communists. The bodies of slain men, carried past under those windows, gave her her first glimpse of death.
The war past, Gabrielle, now fourteen, returned to school at the Pension Boulet, Rue Pigalle. She applied herself diligently to her somewhat neglected studies, and to such good purpose that the mistress of the school, with whom Gabrielle had become a favorite, offered her a position as an assistant with the younger pupils. She was to be paid forty francs a month, and her luncheon. To her mother this seemed to be the opening of an honorable career. Not so Gabrielle herself, who cherished constantly her already fixed ambition to be an actress. She was, however, fond of children, and to tide affairs over she took a class of the younger pupils. She got along well enough with them with their ordinary lessons, but her own instruction in sewing and embroidery had been neglected, and she had to have the help of the older of her pupils, to bridge the gap.
Occasionally, of a Sunday evening, Gabrielle was taken by her mother to the house of a friend who gathered about herself a modest salon. There came such men as Félicien David, the composer, Joseph Kelm, the writer, and the architect, Frantz Jourdain. Gabrielle, young as she was, with her natural gayety and spontaneity at once took her place in the circle. She would sing for the assembly the popular songs of the day—compositions often full of doubtful meanings that she very imperfectly understood. Her little successes naturally strengthened her longing to be an actress, to stir great houses as she amused this little circle of friends.
To Gabrielle’s increasing ambition her mother set herself in opposition. To her mind the forty francs per month was not lightly to be sacrificed. And she said she did not care to be the mother of an actress. She lived to own herself in the wrong.
One evening, as mother and daughter were passing the Théâtre Français, they saw a crowd at the stage door. They questioned a bystander and were told that this had been the farewell performance of Regnier. Gabrielle insisted on waiting to see him come out. She had never seen him, but every one knew of Regnier, great artist and lovable personality. Soon he appeared, a little, old man, who got up into his carriage and acknowledged the ovation with a modest and confused air. Gabrielle never forgot her first and touching glimpse of the man to whom she was soon to owe so much.
The struggle with her mother over her cherished plan to go on the stage went on for another year. A Mlle. Angelo, a friend of Mme. Réju, attempted to make peace by offering Gabrielle a dot of 10,000 francs if she would accept a plan to marry as a solution of the difficulty. But Gabrielle refused to be bought off, and steadfastly clung to her ambition, with the result that the mother at last gave in.
The friend from whose windows Gabrielle had seen the battling Communists had returned to Paris and now took up the girl’s cause. She introduced Gabrielle to Charles Simon,[94] who knew well the actor Regnier, now an honored teacher at the Conservatoire. The girl was duly introduced to Regnier, who received her affably but tried to dissuade her from attempting the career of an actress. He was unable to overcome the ardent resolution of Gabrielle, and finally consented to receive her, for two months, on the condition that if at the end of the time she failed to convince him of her calling she would promise to give up the attempt for good and all. Sure of success, she promised.
Regnier’s first task was to cure his pupil of a thickness of diction. For hours every day she practiced enunciation, but found her master hard to please. Nevertheless he must have seen promise in her, for during the summer (of 1872) he wrote to Charles Simon that when classes assembled he would receive Gabrielle as a regularly enrolled pupil. When the Conservatoire reopened, she passed her entrance examination by reading the rôle of Henriette in Les Femmes Savantes, and was admitted. Here began, when she was fifteen, the serious work of her career.
She was an ardent pupil. Not content with the regular course, she and her mother squeezed their narrow means that the girl might amplify her studies with a number of private lessons with Regnier at his house. He gave her the lessons, but when she offered to pay, he refused to accept. “One does not accept pay,” he said, “when he is privileged to deal with the temperament of an artist.” And, thus, the trial months past, Regnier, instead of sending Gabrielle packing, engaged himself to teach her as best he could, gratis, till her period as a student should end.
In January (1873), came the annual elimination examination. Gabrielle, like the rest, submitted to the test that weeded out the less promising pupils. She had a rôle—that of Agnes—not altogether suited to her, her dress was not too well chosen, she was at the most awkward of ages, and she was by no means the prettiest girl of the lot. Gazing at her, Edward Thierry, director of the Comédie Française, said in a doubtful tone to Regnier, “Do we keep this?” “Yes,” promptly replied Regnier, “she is in my class and she stays.” At the end of the school year came the annual competition. For her part in the preliminary examination Regnier chose L’Intrigue Épistolaire. Thierry, again one of the judges, failed to recognize her and said, “This child is charming! She is the hope of the competition.” And, imitating his colleague’s former doubting tone, Regnier now said, “We keep this, then?”
In the competition itself Gabrielle, in this same scene of L’Intrigue Épistolaire, fell just short of a prize and received a premier accessit, or honorable mention,—not bad for a girl just turned sixteen and a mere beginner.[95]
In this competition Mlle. Legault won the first prize in comedy and with it a post at the Comédie Française. Her departure left vacant a scholarship of 1,200 francs. In the same competition her successor to the scholarship was to be determined. Regnier had resolved to get the scholarship, if possible, for Gabrielle. The professors who sat in judgment were forbidden by a rule of the Conservatoire to impart personally any news of the outcome. Such information was to come only from the administration. Regnier, however, conspired with his favorite pupil to relieve her of suspense. If she were the successful candidate for the scholarship he was to rub his nose as he left the building. After the meeting, therefore, she stood anxiously in the porte-cochère, awaiting her teacher and the behavior of his index finger. Imagine the importance of the moment to the rather shabbily dressed, not too well-fed, nervously anxious girl. To stay her hunger as she waited she was eating bits from a long loaf tucked under her arm. First came M. Legouvé, who, by a curious chance, rubbed his nose briskly as he left the building. Then came MM. Beauplan and Ambroise Thomas, and each, oddly enough, suddenly gave his nose a vigorous rub. Gabrielle wondered, but could not believe that all these demonstrations were for her. Finally, out came Regnier, smiling, and slowly rubbing his nose with the end of his forefinger. For the moment the loaf of bread had been forgotten. Now she waved it aloft, dancing about in an ecstasy of joy.
The winning of the scholarship made it possible for Gabrielle to go on with her studies in the two months’ interval that preceded the reopening of the Conservatoire.
Francisque Sarcey was discerning enough to note the promise in this sixteen year old girl. He said of her, in speaking to the playwright Meilhac: “She has a face you would know as Parisian a mile off ... and she is full of the devil. If this girl doesn’t make her way, I shall be much surprised.... She is charming; she is piquant; and if I were a manager I would engage her out of hand.”
To eke out the family income, Gabrielle had two pupils, youngster though she was. They were young girls from Gascony, and it was her task to cure them of their un-Parisian accent. She remembers that one day when she was on her way to her pupils, the omnibus passed a church. The crowd about the door, and the numerous flowers, denoted a funeral. “They are burying Desclée,”[96] said a fellow passenger. Gabrielle had seen Desclée in some of her notable successes:—Froufrou, La Femme de Claude, La Princesse Georges—and had been stirred to renewed ambition by her art. So now she was tempted to alight and pay her respects to the dead actress’ memory; but she remembered her lesson, and went on to her pupils.
Her last year (1873–4) at the Conservatoire Mme. Réjane remembers not only for its months of hard study but for an incident or two that, trivial in themselves, had considerable importance in her youthfully ambitious mind. One morning Regnier called on her to recite “La Fille d’Honneur,” a poem she had memorized by hearing it often spoken by a fellow pupil. She was horribly nervous. Her own two pupils were present, as auditrices, and Gabrielle feared the usual frequent interruption of Regnier, who as a rule made his pupils repeatedly go back over imperfectly recited passages. This time, however, he allowed her to proceed to the end, which agitated her still more, and then he said in a solemn tone as if pronouncing a final judgment on her: “C’est très bien, ma petite; descends, tu seras une grande artiste.” Réjane says that the intense joy of that instant never was equaled afterwards, even in the moments of her greatest triumphs.
The pupils of the Conservatoire were permitted to accept engagements to play on Sundays at the little theatre of the Tour-d’Auvergne. There it was that Gabrielle made her first public appearance. The play was Les Deux Timides, and in acting it she had the inexpert assistance of Albert Carré. In the middle of the piece M. Carré was seated at a desk, writing a letter, when his nose began to bleed. He bolted from the stage, leaving the débutante alone to face her first audience in the midst of a staggering contretemps. Advice was hoarsely whispered from the wings to do this or that, to walk off, to sit down, to wait for Carré; Gabrielle coolly seated herself and took up the writing of the letter until, a moment later, the bleeding stopped, Carré returned.[97]
When the concours of 1874 arrived—the annual prize contest of the Conservatoire—Gabrielle’s progress had been such that her fellow-students and her professor all thought her sure of the first prize in comedy. Regnier chose for her one of Roxelane’s scenes in Les Trois Sultanes. When she had finished she felt that she had done herself scant justice. Then the unexpected happened. She was also to appear in a dialogue called La Jeunesse, by Emile Augier. A youthful couple met at a fountain. The young man says: “Cyprienne!” She exclaims: “Ah! Mon Dieu!” Gabrielle delivered this commonplace speech with such a sincerity and intensity of emotion that the audience broke into applause. Reassured, she played the dialogue through to the end with a command of emotional acting that surprised even her friends, for she had been thought of as only a comédienne, a soubrette.
When the prizes were announced, Gabrielle found that she had not only missed getting the first comedy prize, but that she was to get only a share of the second; the other half was to go to Mlle. Jeanne Samary, she “of the perfect laugh.”
Regnier was chagrined. “Malfaiteurs,” he called the judges. And some of the newspaper comment showed a recognition of unusual merit in the young Réjane. Sarcey, the reigning king of the Paris critics, had again been present, and Le Temps rang with his praises of her. And his praises were perhaps better than official prizes. A score of years later, M. Meunier wrote:
“To-day, as then, though twenty years have passed, there is no possibility of success, no chance of getting an engagement, for a pupil on leaving the Conservatoire, unless a certain all-powerful critic, supreme judge, arbiter beyond appeal, sees fit to pronounce a decision confirming the verdict of the Examining Jury.... He smiles or frowns, the Jury bows its head. The pupils tremble before this monstrous Fetich—for the Public thinks with him, and sees only through his spectacles; and no star can shine till his short sight has discovered it. This puissant astronomer is Monsieur Francisque Sarcey....
“Monsieur Sarcey smiled upon and applauded Réjane’s début at the Conservatoire. He consecrated to her as many as fifty lines of intelligent criticism; and I pray to Heaven they may be remembered to his credit on the Day of Judgment. Here they are, in that two-penny, half-penny style of his, so dear to the readers of Le Temps:
“‘I own that, for my part, I should have willingly awarded to the latter (Mlle. Réjane) a first prize. It seems to me that she deserved it. But the Jury is frequently influenced by extrinsic and private motives, into which it is not permitted to pry. A first prize carries with it the right of entrance into the Comédie Française; and the Jury did not think Mademoiselle Réjane, with her little wide-awake face, suited to the vast frame of the House of Molière. That is well enough; but the second prize which it awarded her authorized the director of the Odéon to receive her into his company; and that perspective alone ought to have sufficed to dissuade the Jury from the course it took.... Every one knows that at present the Odéon is, for a beginner, a most indifferent school.... Instead of shoving its promising pupils into it by the shoulders, the Conservatoire should forbid them to approach it, lest they should be lost there. What will Mademoiselle Réjane do at the Odéon? Show her legs in La Jeunnesse de Louis XIV, which is to be revived at the opening of the season? A pretty state of things. She must either go to the Vaudeville or to the Gymnase. It is there that she will form herself; it is there that she will learn her trade, show what she is capable of, and prepare herself for the Comédie Française, if she is ever to enter it.... She recited a fragment from Les Trois Sultanes.... I was delighted by her choice. Les Trois Sultanes is so little known nowadays.... What wit there is in her look, her smile! With her small eyes, shrewd and piercing, with her little face thrust forward, she has so knowing an air, one is inclined to smile at the mere sight of her. Does she perhaps show a little too much assurance? What of it? ’Tis the result of excessive timidity. But she laughs with such good grace, she has so fresh and true a voice, she articulates so clearly, she seems so happy to be alone and to have talent, that involuntarily one thinks of Chenier’s line: “Sa bienvenue au jour lui rit dans tous les yeux.”... I shall be surprised if she does not make her way.’”
Second prize or first, it mattered not, really; for she had, almost at once, offers from three theatres: the Odéon, the government theatre that by the conditions of the award had a right to her services, and also from the Vaudeville and the Gymnase. M. Duquesnel of the Odéon proposed, as Sarcey had predicted, that she take a part in the impending La Jeunesse de Louis XIV. Réjane, however, declined to cut short her studies at the Conservatoire, which had yet a few weeks to run.
Her choice fell to the Vaudeville, as the theatre best suiting her methods and sympathies. Also, the pay there was to be four thousand francs per year, and costumes, as against one hundred and fifty francs per month at the Odéon. With the directors of the Vaudeville she signed a provisional contract, by the terms of which she was to join their forces if the Odéon did not press home its claim to her. Weeks passed, the October openings came round, and still there was no summons. In her anxiety she went to the office of the Minister of Fine Arts and from him obtained a letter releasing her, in two days’ time, from her obligations to the Odéon. Before the two days were up, however, she received from Duquesnel a summons to a rehearsal of La Jeunnesse. Réjane hastened to see him. “Well,” he said, “we shall rehearse to-morrow at one.” Réjane replied that she had one at the Vaudeville at the same hour. Duquesnel objected to the loss of his promising recruit and showed an official letter bestowing her services upon the Odéon. Gabrielle in turn showed the letter from the Minister. Duquesnel was forced to yield, but afterwards lodged a suit in which the Odéon was awarded damages. “So,” said Réjane to Jules Huret, “if the Odéon can to-day boast its velvet chairs, it has me to thank for them.”
And so Réjane began her career, when she was less than eighteen, with a two years’ engagement at the Vaudeville. Her first few rôles[98] were unimportant, and in them she attracted no particular notice, but in September (1875) she appeared in Madame Lili, a one-act play in verse, to such good purpose that Sarcey wrote of her: “Mademoiselle Réjane is charming, with her roguery, her ingenuousness, her tenderness. This pretty and piquant girl is spirited to her fingertips. What a piece of good luck it is that she cannot sing; for if she had a voice operetta would gobble her up.”
Yet Regnier wrote to her in the following April, on the day following her appearance in Le Premier Tapis (in which she sang an interpolated song by Lecocq): “I was really astonished by your singing. You had better cultivate this talent, which I didn’t know you had.” Offenbach also heard her in this piece, and liked her singing so well that he offered her twenty thousand francs a year for her signature to a contract at the Variétés. Luckily she made no attempt to break her contract with the Vaudeville.
That contract she renewed again and again until she had played eight seasons at the theatre of her first choice. The best guide to her growing art, and to the beginnings of her fame, are found in her letters from Regnier, who followed her career with loving watchfulness, and often with frank, kindly comment on her work. Their correspondence forms a charming chapter of her youth.
Regnier’s birthday fell on the first of April. Every year Réjane wrote to him on March 31 and sent him some small gift. In the year when she was beginning her work at the Vaudeville he wrote her:
“Ought you really send me presents, my child? Do I need assurances of your affection? Do follow my advice, dear girl, save your money and give me nothing but your friendship. That is the only present I desire from you and, I warn you, it is the only one I shall accept in the future. You hope to be able to celebrate my birthday for many years to come. I hope so too. You will never have a better friend, a better adviser, and no one, save only your mother, will ever bear your welfare more at heart. I thank you, none the less, and with all my heart I embrace you.”
At the close of a health-seeking trip she took in Holland and Belgium in the summer of 1875 he wrote: “I knew you would get many new impressions. You must always be on the search for like ones, for your spirit, your ideas, your taste, your talent will thus find themselves. Frequent our museums, stimulate your mind, read a great deal, even do a little writing. Such is the intellectual regimen that will profit your soul as the exercises I have advised will benefit your gentle body.”
Less exalted advice comes after Le Verglas and Le Premier Tapis, besides the commendation of her singing in the latter piece: “Keep at your study and your work and let me repeat that it is the simple and the veracious that brings the true effect. But I was more than satisfied with you yesterday. But, please remember your carriage—don’t waddle on one leg and then on the other; don’t swallow your syllables and your words. Pronounce everything without affectation, but also without negligence. I embrace you.”
After she had been a year and a half in harness, he was still emphasizing the fundamentals. After Le Perfide comme l’Onde he wrote (November 26, 1876): “You are very pretty and very amusing in your rôle.... You are a comédienne,—that you have proved. Between ourselves, the other young ladies frightened me a bit. Do not you allow yourself to fall into the general carelessness of carriage and pronunciation. Really talk to those to whom your words are addressed, and when your eyes peer into the auditorium remember it is a vacuum, and never talk to any one therein. You know how to avoid this fault, so look out for it, and remain natural. But you played well, were applauded, and deserved to be.”
Her work must have pleased the directors of the Vaudeville, for when the time came to renew her contract she signed for nine thousand francs, a considerable advance over four thousand. Her mother, however, had set her heart on nine thousand six hundred francs, and her objections threatened to break off the negotiations. Réjane promised, however, unknown to her mother, to repay the disputed six hundred francs during the engagement.
“I economized on cress,” she relates. “Instead of getting two boxes at three sous apiece, I got two boxes at five sous. From time to time I put fifteen centimes into my boots. And one fine day I carried to the managers one hundred and fifty laboriously collected francs. I must say, to their credit, that they wouldn’t take the money. But my mother never knew, and sometimes, endeavoring to crush me with the superiority of a strong-minded woman, she would say: “There now! Without me, you would never have had those six hundred francs.”
In the summer of 1877 she grew nervous over the forthcoming production of Pierre. She wrote Regnier from Abbeville: “If you could only give me one hour for the third act of Pierre. The nearer the time approaches, the more I fear that act—all sentiment. If I am unsupported by your good advice, my dear master, I cannot answer for myself.”
Regnier was eager to help her; and in his response he gives her more fatherly advice: “My greatest wish is to help you in your work.... But is it necessary for you to go to La Bourbelle, where you will stay hardly two weeks? The time seems to me much too short for serious treatment. Can’t you simply betake yourself to the waters of Enghien?
“Talk this over with your doctor: ask him if it is really good for the nerves that that abominable musk or amber odor which perfumes your letters should permeate your whole system. No doubt the odor is agreeable, but still that is a matter of taste.”
The première of Pierre proved the first crowning success for the young actress. Immediately after the performance, unable to restrain her overflowing joy, she wrote to Regnier this enthusiastic letter:
“I have just had a grand succès, and I don’t wish to sleep before thanking you, to whom I owe it. I have never been so happy as I am tonight, and I believe that, if such a thing is possible, even my affection for you has grown. One thing alone distresses me, and that is my inability to repay you for all you have done. At each burst of applause, I thought of you, dear master, who have given me your time and made sure for me my future. No affection has ever been more profound nor any gratitude so sincere, believe me. Without you I would have been nothing, but with you—two hours ago they told me I was an artist! I can open my heart to you. You cannot imagine how much is included in that one word “artist” especially to a young girl, who yesterday had doubts about the future and had need of reading all your letters in order to give courage.... I am doubly happy. Do not mistake for vanity the effects of the great joy I have been experiencing. How I would work, dear master, to do you the honor of registering a multitude of such nights!”
But good parts fell to Réjane’s lot only infrequently. The reigning queen of the Vaudeville was Mme. Bartet, and it was she, naturally, who got most of the leading rôles. The public had begun to like the young newcomer, whom it had come to know in her small but repeated successes; but nevertheless she was kept more or less in the background, encouraged only by Regnier and patiently waiting her opportunities.
It was in this fashion that she spent the remaining time at the Vaudeville until she left it in the spring of 1882. That period, whatever dissatisfactions it brought to her, is not without its high lights. In Le Club she has “un vrai rôle,” and played it, with gratifying success, a hundred times. In April, 1879, Mme. Bartet fell suddenly ill, and with only a few hours notice Réjane assumed the older woman’s rôle in Les Tapageurs. When Les Lionnes Pauvres was revived, in November 1879, her Séraphine aroused one of those artistic controversies which delight the French mind. Sarcey disapproved, for once. M. Defère advised her to change her costumer. M. Barbey d’Aurevilly on the other hand said she recalled Rachel and was a true artist; Augier, the author of the play, sustained her; and stanch old Regnier wrote her at length, discoursing on the art of acting and of his affection véritable. Her Mimi in La Vie de Bohème again saw the critics at odds about her.
Altogether in her eight seasons at the Vaudeville, she had played more than a score of parts, some of them genuine successes. Yet she had not won genuine recognition at the hands of the directors, and her position in the company was hardly in accord with her promise and deserts. Sardou and the others responsible for the affairs of the Vaudeville seemed strangely blind to the fact that in Réjane they had a comédienne of the first order. But though she was by her superiors much of the time either kept idle or employed in almost insignificant parts, the rest of Paris speedily knew her for what she was. She was in keen demand for all the special, semi-informal performances that make up so large a part of the artistic life of the normal Paris. The “spectacles” of the Cercle de la rue Royale, the revues at the Epatant, the dramatic trifles that were the adjuncts of authors’ readings, all found in Réjane a willing and able helper. She took these artistic informalities seriously, rehearsed for them and costumed them with care, and was so particularly well adapted to the work that she became a marked favorite with the very social and artistic circles to which the Vaudeville catered.
As the directors, however, continued to give her insignificant parts, it is not strange that she listened to those friends, like Pierre Berton, who urged her to shake the dust of Vaudeville from her feet. “You are a star,” Berton told her. It happened that a star was the quest just then of M. Bertrand of the Variétés and with him she signed a three years’ contract.
This moment may be said to mark the definite arrival of Réjane. She was no longer to cool her heels in the greenroom or at home, and henceforth she was to play, as a rule, principal parts. Moreover, the agreement with the Variétés was elastic enough to allow appearances at other theatres, often in plays of more import than the light material of which the Variétés was the avowed medium. And when she returned, on occasion, to the Vaudeville, it was not in minor rôles. Réjane had assumed her due place on the stage of Paris.
It had not been a difficult rise. Though it is not possible to overlook the elements of steadfast ambition, patience, and hard work in Réjane’s early career, it is true that her native spirits, her flair, and the training and friendship of Regnier made inevitable her right to a prominent place on the stage of Paris.
With that place assured, we see her thenceforth steadily enlarging it, progressing from part to part, appearing now in this theatre of Paris and now in that, shortly venturing into the other capitals of Europe, then making a tour—to be later repeated—in America, and finally acquiring a theatre of her own in Paris,—an international figure, a queen of comedy.
M. Porel, whom Réjane afterward married, has given a graphic account of one of her earlier triumphs—and a typical Parisian first night. The play was de Goncourt’s Germinie Lacerteux, the date, 1888; the theatre the Odéon.
“Oh, that première! The beautiful theatre was crowded to the last inch with an audience that was restless and seemed none too good-natured. The journalists were furious because the dress rehearsal had been behind closed doors. The women were puzzling themselves about the subject of the play, and some of the literary gossips were loudly telling all they thought they knew. The cafétiers of the neighborhood, disgruntled because the usual five entr’actes had been cut down to two, were protesting to the claque against the change, which interfered with the sale of the usual five bocks. Amid the confusion of the lobbies were heard remarks that the piece was impossible.
“The curtain rises; Réjane makes her appearance, with her arms as red as those of a kitchen-girl. In the ball gown of a servant-maid she is indeed amazing. This little scene she plays well, and wins applause. In the scene of the fortifications, some of the hissers are in evidence before she enters; and then Réjane, so prettily modest, plays her idyllic scene so well that the delighted audience breaks into cries of ‘Bravo!, and the curtain is raised and raised again.... In one of the following scenes, some of the audience refuse to listen to Mme. Crosnier; she becomes confused, loses her head and begins over again. Some cry aloud, some laugh, some hiss. Without Réjane the piece will go on the rocks. A gesture, a poignant, sincere cry, and Réjane has the house with her again. They applaud her, they recall her again and again. During the entr’acte, there is a stormy time. Antoine is indignant over the sneering of his neighbors and calls them scoundrelly imbeciles. There is shaking of fists, challenges are exchanged, some hiss, others applaud. It is in this atmosphere that the scene in the creamery begins. Then it was that she quite won the house. She is again recalled again and again, applauded by the whole audience. She is acclaimed again, after the fall of the curtain in the scene of the Rue du Roiher. The ladies were completely upset; they wept, they clapped their hands. Even without Réjane, the two last scenes finished themselves somehow. After that, de Goncourt’s play was to live more than one night; and after that Réjane was assuredly a great comédienne.”
Two years later, when Ma Cousine, a comedy in three acts by Henri Meilbac, was produced, Paris saw that Réjane had again made extraordinary progress. “Playing,” says M. Huret, “in a vast auditorium, a rôle that demanded large dramatic power, she responded to that demand, and, exhibited new poise, control of voice, and exactness of articulation. She who had heretofore almost expired of apprehension at each new impersonation, was now calm, sure of herself, almost indifferent. She sensed the authority that had come to her; she held the audience in her hand. In Décoré, in Monsieur Betsy, she had been one of a remarkable trio of actresses; now, in Ma Cousine, she outshone her confrères at all points. The author had set her the difficult task of playing an act three quarters of an hour long without rising from her couch. But she was equal to the occasion, and, by the intelligence and sprightliness of her inflections, gestures and facial expression, she made that chair itself a miniature theatre.” It was in Ma Cousine that Réjane introduced on the boards of the Variétés, after careful study, a bit of dancing like that on view at the Elysée-Montmartre; “she seized on and imitated the grotesque effrontery of Mlle. Grille-d’Egout.” In other words the sprightly Gabrielle performed a veritable can-can.
A little later M. Meunier, who was not remarkable for his kindness in print to the dean of his craft, wrote: “Sarcey’s exultation knew no bounds when, in 1890, Réjane again appeared in Décoré. Time, that had metamorphosed the lissom critic of 1875 into a round and inert mass of solid flesh, cruel Father Time, gave back to Sarcey, for this occasion only, a flash of youthful fire, which stirred his wits to warmth and animation. He shouted out hardly articulate praise; he literally rolled in his stall with pleasure; his bald head blushed like an aurora borealis. ‘Look at her!’ he cried, ‘See her malicious smiles, her feline graces, listen to her reserved and biting diction; she is the very essence of the Parisienne! What an ovation she received! How they applauded her! and how she played!’ From M. Sarcey the laugh spreads; it thaws the skepticism of M. Jules Lemaître, engulfs the timidity of the public, becomes unanimous and universal, and is no longer to be silenced.”
The day of Réjane’s greatest and most lasting success came with the production, in 1893, of Madame Sans-Gêne, by Sardou, the latest of the Parisian dramatists to answer the call of the great comédienne in their midst.
“Just as the first dressmakers of Paris measure Réjane’s fine figure for the costumes of her various rôles, so the best writers of the French Academy now make plays to her measure,” wrote M. Meunier in 1894. “They take the size of her temperament, the height of her talent, the breadth of her acting; they consider her taste, they flatter her mood; they clothe her with the richest draperies she can covet. Their imagination, their fancy, their cleverness, are all put at her service. The leaders in this industry have hitherto been Messrs. Meilhac and Halévy, but now M. Victorien Sardou is ruining them. Madame Sans-Gêne is certainly, of all the rôles Réjane has played, that best suited to bring out her manifold resources. It is not merely that Réjane play the washerwoman, become a great lady, without blemish or omission; she is Madame Sans-Gêne herself, with no overloading, nothing forced, nothing caricatured. It is portraiture; history.
“Many a time has Réjane appeared in cap, cotton frock, and white apron; many a time in robes of state, glittering with diamonds; she has worn the buskin or the sock, demeaned herself like a gutter heroine, or dropped the stately curtsey of the high-born lady. But never, except in Madame Sans-Géne, has she been able to bring all her rôles into one focus, exhibit her whole wardrobe, and yet remain one and the same person, compress into one evening the whole of her life.”
What sort of woman presented herself to the gaze of her Parisian admirers—and soon to American eyes—at this, the time of her greatest triumph? Whatever other gifts she brought to her work, sheer beauty was not one of them. “Is it her beauty?” asked M. Filon, seeking the source of her power, and of her perfect understanding with her audiences. “Certainly not. She is not pretty; one might even say ... but it is more polite not to say it. To quote a famous mot, ‘She is not beautiful, she is worse.’”[99]
Though Réjane never had the least claim to Mr. Vance Thompson’s rhapsodic description of her as “amazingly and diabolically beautiful,” she really has no quarrel with the fate that made her as she is. Comedy was to be her mission, and if Wilde was right in his dictum that “what serves its purpose is beautiful,” beautiful she is, after all. For plain though it be, her face is a true comedy mask. “There is comedy in every line of her face, in the arched eyebrows, the well opened, dancing eyes, the tip-tilted nose, and the wonderful, mobile, expressive mouth,” says William Archer. “This mouth is unquestionably the actress’ chief feature; it conditions her art. With a different mouth she might have been a tragedian or a heroine of melodrama, which would have been an immense pity. It is not a beautiful feature from the sculptor’s point of view; even from the painter’s it is not so much a rose-bud as a full-blown rose. It has almost the wide-lipped expansiveness of a Greek mask, but it is sensitive, ironic, amiable, fascinating.”
To others, her eyes have been her chief charm. They are large and gray, changeful with the flexibility of Réjane’s whole nature, surmounted by extraordinarily lofty and expressive brows, and often half covered by eyelids almost languorous. Her hair is, or at least was, golden brown. She is not tall. She is by no means commanding in figure. There is nothing of the imposing stage queen about her; yet, in figure, as in face, she has been perfectly equipped for her work as comédienne de Paris. Being just that, she makes her hands and her body means to her histrionic ends. Those who have repeatedly studied her art have found the subtlety, the distinction, and the perfect command of her gestures and her poses more than a match for even the brightness, or the sadness or the tenderness of her face. In every critique of Réjane there crops out a pointed reference to her wonderful fluency and flexibility of style, her fertility of invention of expressive detail, the naturalness of her transitions of mood. “Elasticity, dexterity and rapidity she has in a superlative degree, and with them grace and geniality, together with simple pathos and honest heat of temper. And of course she possesses that peculiar fineness of taste which belongs to her nation and which is very apparent in Madame Sans-Gêne, whose heroine may be crude and uncultivated, but is never boorish or clownish, is awkward but not ugly. Her voice is clear and pleasant, but her elocution is less distinct than that of many other French artists, although her tones mark unmistakably the spiritual and intellectual differences which fluctuate through her speeches. She has an unfailing regard for the proportions of her scenes, and never obtrudes herself into a prominent place just because she is the star of the company.”[100]
We have heard much of the comic finesse of Réjane’s Madame Sans-Gêne. Now listen to one acute observer (Arthur Symons) of another side of her genius: “Réjane can be vulgar, as nature is vulgar; she has all the instincts of the human animal, of the animal woman, whom man will never quite civilize.... Réjane, in Sapho or Zaza for instance, is woman ... loving and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable, horribly human thing, whose direct appeal, like that of a sick animal, seizes you by the throat at the instant in which it reaches your eyes and ears. More than any actress she is the human animal without disguise or evasion; with all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements. In Sapho or Zaza she speaks the language of the senses, no more.... In being Zaza, she is so far from being herself (what is the self of a great actress?) that she has invented a new way of walking, as well as new tones and grimaces. There is not an effect in the play which she has not calculated; only, she has calculated every effect so exactly that the calculation is not seen.”
M. Filon confessed himself baffled by the question of whether Réjane’s marvelous liquidness of mood and method is due to something essential in her nature, or merely to an incomparable power of imitation. “If I shut my eyes,” he says, “I sometimes think I can hear the nasal intonation, the little squeaky voice which belonged to Céline Chaumont. A minute later this voice has the cadence, the sustained vibration, the artistic break with which Sarah Bernhardt punctuates her diction, and the transition is so skillfully managed that all these different women—the woman who mocks, the woman who trembles, the woman who threatens, the woman who desires, the woman who laughs, and the woman who weeps—seem to be one and the same woman. For the matter of that, I have set myself a problem which I should not be able to solve even with the help of Réjane herself. Let us be content with what lies on the surface. I am inclined to think that her resources consist of a host of petty artifices, each more ingenious and more imperceptible than the last. If one studied her secret one might draw up a whole set of rules for the use of comédiennes.”
With Sans-Gêne among her achievements, more and more word of her became known outside of France. Unmitigatedly French though she was, though there was little in her to suggest the universal appeal that has made world artists of other actresses, by the sheer merit of the thing she did, and because she was so complete an epitome of one phase of her nation’s art, she was bound to become an international figure. Her first appearance in London was in June, 1894. Her Sans-Gêne there instantly won her the recognition she deserved. America had not long to wait. On February 27, 1895 she appeared in Madame Sans-Gêne in New York. She remained there several weeks, playing in Divorçons, Sapho, Ma Cousine, the one act play Lolotte, and Maison de Poupée (Ibsen’s A Doll’s House), besides Sans-Gêne. Ten years later[101] she made her second and last tour in America. In the meantime Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Russia, Austria, Roumania, Italy, Spain and Portugal had all seen her. Regnier’s nose rubbing had assuredly been to good purpose.
One may as well admit at once that Réjane’s tours in the United States were not successful, in the sense that continuously crowded houses indicate success. The language was, of course, one stumbling block, for a keen understanding of the foreign tongue was more necessary for a taste for Réjane than for the broad effects, say, of a Bernhardt or a Salvini. And if the language fell on baffled ears, the essence of the plays, in some cases, antagonized the more puritanical of our public. For the pieces Réjane played reflected a society and a point of view for which many Americans found it hard to muster much sympathy. So meager was the American response to Réjane’s art during her first visit that she forswore us forever. Nine years sufficed to make her change her mind. “But now (1904) as then,” said the New York Times, “she is hampered by the moral bias of American audiences, and by the fact that the manners she so searchingly studies and exquisitely depicts are exotic—foreign alike to our sympathies and our experience.”
Whatever her popular success in America may or may not have been, Réjane—in some of her parts at least—won the enthusiastic praise of the critics and of the restricted public that knew its French well enough to meet her on something like Parisian terms. The pièce de résistance of the first tour was Madame Sans-Gêne. Like most of Sardou’s later dramas, it was a “tailor-made” play, written to suit the personality and methods of its principal actress.[102] A secondary object was evident in the effort to take advantage of the revival of interest in Napoleon that marked, for no evident reason, the early nineties. Technically the play was interesting chiefly as showing the author in a new phase, for it was surprising to find Sardou, a notorious disciple of Scribe, writing a piece that was little more than a series of sketches. But Réjane lifted the whole affair to a height at which it could be regarded only as one of the triumphs of the nineteenth century theatre.
Réjane’s freshness, naturalness, tenderness, and charmingly subtle sense of comedy as Catherine Hubscher in Madame Sans-Gêne was instantly recognized and celebrated in every American city that she visited. In Ma Cousine, a light farce, she acted the soubrette Riquette with an abandon, a cleverness, a joyousness, that emphasized her new public’s admiration of her. Her Nora, however, in Maison de Poupée (Ibsen’s A Doll’s House), revealed her in a new and more serious light, demonstrating at once her genuine versatility and her considerable emotional power. Even the unsavory Sapho she made something new and different, “moderating its excesses and enhancing its better moods. Less pathetic directly than by suggestion, she often moved by simple means a sympathy which Sapho ill deserved.”
Just before Réjane began her second American tour she had an unhappy experience in Havana. She gave there a series of eight performances, the total result being chronicled in the American papers as a “fiasco.” She had a welcome such as no actor or actress had ever before received in Cuba. Thousands gathered at the pier as a private steamer went out to meet her and bring her ashore; formal addresses of welcome and bouquets were showered on her; and the Havana papers were full of odes and eulogies. The first-night audience that gathered to see Sapho was the most brilliant ever seen in Havana, and the applause that greeted Réjane’s entrance was prolonged and hearty. But the audience grew colder and colder as the play progressed. The next day began a festival period for the dramatic critics of Havana. They pounced upon Sapho and Daudet, its author, and declared that while his sort of “esoteric rot” might be what Frenchmen regard as the product of genius, they rejoiced that such stuff could not pass as art in Havana.[103] Matters grew worse with La Pétite Marquise and Zaza, the company and the mediocre productions were abused (“What did the actress mean by leaving everything except her costumes in New York?” the papers asked. “Does she believe that ‘any old thing’ is good enough for Havana?”), and the young ladies of Havana were all kept away from Réjane’s improper plays. Personalities became frequent in the papers, and one critic boldly asserted that Réjane’s star had set. Her manager made matters worse by revoking the passes of one paper, the lady herself provoked more criticism by her refusal to be a guest at a reception at the Athenæum, and altogether affairs reached such a pass that every one was immensely relieved when Réjane and her company sailed away for New York. The whole incident indicated more than anything else the narrow outlook of the Cubans. “We are making our political independence apply to everything,” wrote one of the critics. “America for the Americans, and Cuba for the Cubans! Let the foreigner get out!”
When Réjane reached America her audiences found that she could not altogether conceal the traces left by the flight of time—she was now forty-seven—but that she had suffered no loss of her vivacity and power. The tour of 1904–05 was not, however, the improvement over that of ten years earlier that had been hoped for. The enthusiasm of American audiences was not to be won over by the cynicism and frankness of such pieces as Amoureuse, though the critics were not slow to recognize the subtle and convincing quality of Réjane’s work even in that play, which Mr. Winter gently characterized as “filthy trash.”
An unexpected circumstance gave new emphasis to the half-heartedness of her welcome in the United States. It was simply a bit of bad luck for Réjane, an injustice to a distinguished woman and artist, and an illustration of the influence of American newspaper publicity. James Hazen Hyde, then in the public eye because of his share in the insurance scandals, was—as he has always since been—a generous patron of the American study of French literature. He gave a dinner in New York to honor the actress whose claim to honor none knew better than he. It was said that on behalf of himself and his guests he gave her a diamond crown. Accurately or not, it was reported next day—and the news was not slow in traveling,—that Réjane’s gratefulness and Gallicism took the form of her doing a sprightly dance on the table. The incident was not important, but the wide publicity given it did not tend to increase Réjane’s hold on that part of the public to which she had, on her merits, so good a claim.
To get all the scandal over with at once, let us dispose of Réjane’s husband. In 1892 she had married M. Porel, who had been an actor, then director of the Odéon, and then of Grand-Théâtre. Soon after the marriage he became co-director of the Vaudeville and the Gymnase. Early in the marriage there were two children, a daughter and a son. On more than one occasion Madame Réjane began divorce proceedings, which were halted when friends intervened and kept the couple together in the interest of the children or of the parents’ professional welfare. Finally both sued for divorce. After many preliminaries the husband was granted the decree, though, eventually at least, the children were left with the mother.
Naturally, the Vaudeville was no longer open to her. But, as Arnold Bennett (then not yet the distinguished novelist) wrote in P. T. O.,[104] though “Réjane may now and then suffer a brief eclipse, she can be absolutely relied upon to emerge in a more blinding glory. Exiled from her proper home, the Vaudeville, she naturally wanted a theatre. She has got it. She took hold of the Nouveau Théâtre, the unlikeliest and one of the most uncomfortable theatres in Paris—the Lamoureaux concerts alone have succeeded there. She removed everything from within its four walls, and presently frequenters of the Rue Blanche observed that the legend Théâtre Réjane had been carved on its façade. Last week she announced to her friends (that is to say, to Paris) that she would be ‘at home’ on such and such a night. The invitation added, ‘Comedy will be played.’ Her friends went, and discovered the wonderfullest theatre in the town, incredibly spacious, with lounges as big as the auditorium, wide corridors, and a scheme of decoration at once severe and splendid. Réjane was written all over it, even in the costumes of the women attendants. Paris was charmed, astounded, electrified; and now Réjane flames a more brilliant jewel than ever in the forehead of the capital.”
There, during the past ten years, she has appeared in more than a score of new plays, none of them, perhaps, a new Sans-Gêne or Marquise, but each serving to keep in vigorous use one of the rarest talents of the time. During this time, too, she has acted in South America (1909), and occasionally, and as recently as the spring of 1915, she has gone to London, where she has always been appreciated, sometimes to act in the regular theatres, and sometimes to give in the music halls one-act pieces like Lolotte, and scenes from the longer plays.[105] “Madame Réjane long since announced to the world, by publicly going about with a grown-up daughter, that she meant no more to depend for even the smallest part of her charm and her power upon the semblance of youthfulness,” wrote Mr. Bennett in 1906. “She is a middle-aged woman, and she doesn’t care who knows it.” She is now even more certainly a middle-aged woman, but she still has much of her essential vitality, and of the force of a distinguished personality.
Off the stage Madame Réjane has always been a gracious and likable woman, of a gentle, polished manner and lovable disposition that do not always go with a pronounced and much applauded personality. She has a summer place, “Petit Manoir,” a large, semi-Elizabethan villa at Hennequeville, near Trouville, on the Normandy coast. There it has been her habit to live quietly whenever her engagements permitted, with her daughter Germaine and her son Jacques. She has always indulged a taste for objets de vertu. “When not with her children or at the theatre,” says Huret, “she is likely to find time to go in search of paintings, or books or fine fabrics, a curious old fan, a bit of unique lace, or a rare flower or jewel, with the joyous ardor that she puts into everything and, as in her art, spending immense energy to achieve the exquisite and the delicate, in a word, everything that makes for the joy of working and of life.” The “joie de travaille” is one characteristic of the great comédienne that is likely to escape the casual public. But work hard she did, and she made her company work hard. “On the road” it was the regular thing to have daily rehearsals, no matter what familiarity with the plays had been attained.
“The amazing variety of her artistry has been expressed,” says Huret, “by two famous portraits of her, one by Chartran, the other by Besnard. You could paint nothing more strikingly truthful than these portraits, yet you cannot dream how unlike they are.... Besnard has retained only those traits of his sitter which give her an expression that is energetic, even a little brutal and sensual,—the popular Réjane, the Réjane of the Ambigu, of realistic drama, the Réjane of La Glu and Germinie Lacerteux. Despite her silk gown and all her finery, Besnard has seen her with the down-at-heel cloth boots that Germinie wore to third-rate balls, and in the white floss-silk gloves which, to get a realistic touch, she had borrowed from her servant-maid. That Réjane he has caught admirably!
“But it is not thus that she has appeared to Chartran. He has seen her in a dainty lace head-dress adorned with a rose-colored ribbon, her hair loose over her eyes, her mobile mouth, her gracious oval face. Above all he has seen her extraordinary and complex eyes, now quick, now velvety, now perverse beneath their large, languorous eyelids: eyes that are mocking, ardent, sparkling and dreamy. This is the Réjane of Meilhac’s plays, the Réjane who is of the line of comédiennes of the eighteenth century; it is Ma Cousine who is about to become Amoureuse.
“And this astonishing complexity of temperament is reflected in her childhood, in her life, and in her tastes to-day. The youngster who passed her evenings in the balcony of the Ambigu sucking an orange, who stood in ecstasy before the glass of Adèle Page, and who for years dreamed of such a life as the acme of luxury,—her one sees in the portrait by Besnard. But the young lady of the Conservatoire, the favorite pupil of Regnier, who won her first success in L’Intrigue Épistolaire, the elegant and finished interpreter of the life of the salons and cercles, the full-grown artiste of Marquise: all these live in the painting of Chartran.”
“Ces deux jolis noms d’une seule et même personne: Réjane, Madame Sans-Gêne”; thus one of her countrymen happily characterized her. But another was just as right when he called her “the innumerable Réjane.”