Taylor thought he would try another chance, and was met with the reply, "Cher baron, I am very sorry, but I have just taken five tickets from Mdlle. Rachel. It appears that she is a lady patroness, and that they burdened her with two hundred; fortunately, she told me, people were exceedingly anxious to get them, and these were the last five."
"Then she had two hundred tickets after all," said Baron Taylor to himself, making up his mind to find out who had been before him with Rachel. But no one had been before him. The five tickets sold to Comte Le Hon were five of the ten she had sold to Comte Walewski. When the latter had paid her, she made him give her five tickets for herself and family, or rather for her four sisters and herself. Of Comte Le Hon she only took toll of one, which, wonderful to relate, she did not sell. This was Rachel's way of bestirring herself in the cause of charity.
"Look at the presents she made to every one," say the panegyrists. They forget to mention that an hour afterwards she regretted her generosity, and from that moment she never left off scheming how to get the thing back. Every one knew this. Beauvallet, to whom she gave a magnificent sword one day, instead of thanking her, said, "I'll have a chain put to it, mademoiselle, so as to fasten it to the wall of my dressing-room. In that way I shall be sure that it will not disappear during my absence." Alexandre Dumas the younger, to whom she made a present of a ring, bowed low and placed it back on her finger at once. "Allow me to present it to you in my turn, mademoiselle, so as to prevent you asking for it." She did not say nay, but carried the matter with one of her fascinating smiles. "It is most natural to take back what one has given, because what one has given was dear to us," she replied.
Between '46 and '53 I saw a great deal of Rachel, generally in the green-room of the Comédie-Française, which was by no means the comfortable or beautiful apartment people imagine, albeit that even in those days the Comédie had a collection of interesting pictures, busts, and statues worthy of being housed in a small museum. The chief ornament of the room was a large glass between the two windows, but if the apartment had been as bare as a barn, the conversation of Rachel would have been sufficient to make one forget all about its want of decoration; for, with the exception of the elder Dumas, I have never met any one, either man or woman, who exercised the personal charm she did. I have been told since that Bismarck has the same gift. I was never sufficiently intimate with the great statesman to be able to judge, having only met him three or four times, and under conditions that did not admit of fairly testing his powers in that respect, but I have an idea that the charm of both lay in their utter indifference to the effect produced, or else in their absolute confidence of the result of their simplicity of diction. Rachel's art of telling a story, if art it was, reminded one of that of the chroniclers of the Niebelungen; for notwithstanding her familiarity with Racine and Corneille, her vocabulary was exceedingly limited, and her syntax, if not her grammar, off the stage, not always free from reproach.
I do not pretend, after the lapse of so many years, to give these stories in her own language, or all of them; there are a few, however, worth the telling, apart from the fascination with which she invested them.
One evening she said to me, "Do you know Poirson?"
I had known Poirson when he was director of the Gymnase. He afterwards always invited me to his soirées, one of which, curiously enough, was given on the Sunday before the Revolution of '48. So I said, "Yes, I know Poirson."
"Has he ever told you why he did not re-engage me?"
"Never."
"I'll tell you. People said it was because I did not succeed in 'La Vendéenne' of Paul Duport; but that was not the cause. It was something much more ridiculous; and now that I come to think of it, I am not sure that I ought to tell you, for you are an Englishman, and you will be shocked."