Accordingly, when I danced at the palace the little princes and princesses were not present at the performance. They came back, on the other hand, to the theatre, where they were confirmed in their conviction that the lady whom they had seen with their mother and who tried to pass herself off as Loie Fuller was an impostor. The eldest of the little princesses called out so loudly as to be heard all over the house:
“This time it is really Loie Fuller.”
She pronounced her words with a distinctness that proved clearly that the subject had been discussed at length among the children, and that this affirmation was the result of mature deliberation.
M. Roger Marx has two sons, who, when they saw me for the first time, were respectively four and six years old. The elder took a notion to dance “like Loie Fuller,” using a table cloth for drapery. I gave him a robe modelled after one of mine and, before we knew it, the child was evolving new dances.
The way he expressed joy, grief, ecstasy and despair was admirable. His memory of me, or rather his memory of my dances, remained so vivid and epitomised so precisely the conception he had of beauty and of art that he became a “poet.”
Here are some verses which, two years later, I inspired in this little boy, and which his mother, Mme. Roger Marx, turned over to me:
Pale vision
A l’horizon
En ce lieu sombre
Fugitive ombre ...