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.”
ELEONORA DUSE
When the American papers announced, in the spring of 1914, that Eleonora Duse had recovered her health and was contemplating a return to the stage, the news had a curious effect, somewhat as if the New York press had casually said that “Ada Rehan and Mr. Daly’s company are to play The Taming of the Shrew next Monday.” A little later the cable brought the announcement that Bernhardt was thinking of coming again to America, and though Mme. Sarah is almost old enough to be Duse’s mother, the news of her coming had not the same effect of turning the clock backward. For Bernhardt is apparently one of the earth’s permanent phenomena, like the return of vegetation in the spring; while the tragic figure of Duse, though she played in America only a dozen years ago, seems somehow to belong to the last generation.
