Mademoiselle Raucourt stopped at Amiens. There she discovered a beautiful young girl of fifteen years of age who looked to be eighteen; you might have thought that the Venus of Milo had descended from her pedestal. Mademoiselle Raucourt, who was almost as classic in her tastes as the Lesbian Sappho, admired statuesque beauty immensely. When she saw the way this young girl walked—her gait that of the goddess, to use Virgil's phrase—the actress made inquiries and found that her name was Georges Weymer; that she was the daughter of a German musician named Georges Weymer, manager of the theatre, and of Mademoiselle Verteuil the actress who played the chambermaid parts.
This young lady was destined for tragedy. Mademoiselle Raucourt made her play Élise, with her, in Didon, and Aricie in Phèdre. The experiment succeeded, and the very night of the performance of Phèdre, Mademoiselle Raucourt asked the young tragédienne's parents' leave to take her.
The prospect of being a Government pupil, and, better still, the pupil of Mademoiselle Raucourt, was, with the exception of some slight drawbacks in the way of regulations to which the young girl had perforce to agree, too tempting an offer in the eyes of her parents to be refused. The request was granted, and Mademoiselle Georges departed, followed by her mother. The lessons lasted eighteen months. During these eighteen months the young pupil lived in a poor hotel in the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, which, probably ironically, was named the hôtel du Pérou.
Mademoiselle Raucourt lived at the end of the allée des Veuves, in a magnificent house which had belonged to Madame Tallien and which, no doubt also ironically, was called The Cottage (la Chaumière). We have called Mademoiselle Georges' residence "a magnificent house": we should also have said "a small house," for it was a perfect specimen of a bijou villa in the style of Louis XV.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century—that strange epoch when people called things by their right names—Sapho-Raucourt enjoyed a reputation the originality of which she took not the least pains to hide.
Mademoiselle Raucourt's attitude towards men was more than indifference, it was hatred. The writer of these lines has in his possession a memorandum signed by this famous actress which is a regular war-cry against the masculine sex, and in which the modern Queen of the Amazons calls upon every lovely warrior enrolled under her orders to open rupture with men.
Nothing could be more odd than the form and, above all, the subject-matter of this manifesto. And yet, strange to relate, in spite of this contempt towards us, Mademoiselle Raucourt, whenever the costume of her sex was not indispensable to her, adopted that of our sex. Thus, very often, in the morning, Mademoiselle Raucourt gave lessons to her beautiful pupil in trousers, with a dressing-gown over them,—just as M. Molé or M. Fleury would have done,—a pretty woman by her side who addressed her as "dear fellow," and a charming child who called her "papa."
We did not know Mademoiselle Raucourt,—she died in 1814, and her funeral created a great sensation,—but we knew her mother, who died in 1832 or 1833; and we still know the childy who is to-day a man of fifty-five.
We were acquainted with an actor whose whole career was blighted by Mademoiselle Raucourt on account of some jealousy he had the misfortune to arouse in the terrible Lesbian. Mademoiselle Raucourt appealed to the Committee of the Théâtre-Français, reminded them of her rights of possession and of priority in respect of the girl whom the impertinent comedian wished to seduce from her, and, the priority and the possession being recognised, the impudent comedian, who is still living and is one of the most straightforward men imaginable, was hounded out of the theatre, the members of the company believing that, as in the case of Achilles, Mademoiselle Raucourt, because of this modern Briseis, would retire in sulks.
Let us return to the young girl, whose mother never left her a single instant during the visits she paid to her teacher: three times a week had she to traverse the long distance between the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs and the allée des Veuves in order to take her lessons. Her first appearances were fixed to take place at the end of November. They were to be in Clytemnestre, in Émilie, in Aménaïde, in Idamé, in Didon and in Sémiramis.