“The sincerity of my admiration cannot be doubted when I avow that in the fifth act Sarah Bernhardt rose to a height of dramatic power, to a force of expression which could not be surpassed. She played the long and cruel scene in which Adrienne, poisoned by the Duchesse de Bouillon, struggles against death in her fearful agony, not only with immense talent, but with a science of art which up to the present she has never revealed. If the Parisian public had heard, or ever hears, Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt cry out with the piercing accent which she put into her words that evening, ‘I will not die, I will not die!’ it would weep with her.”
Sarcey finished an admirable critique with these words:
“She is prodigious!”
And Lapommeraye, who had once more become amiable begged me to go back to the Comédie, which was waiting for me, which would kill the fatted calf on the return of its prodigal child.
Sarcey, in his article in the Temps, consecrated five columns of praises to me, and finished his article with these words:
“Nothing, nothing can ever take the place of this last act of Adrienne Lecouvreur at the Comédie. Ah! she should have stayed at the Comédie. Yes, I come back to my litany! I cannot help it! We shall lose as much as she will. Yes, I know that we can say Mlle. Dudlay is left to us. Oh, she will always stay with us! I cannot help saying it. What a pity! What a pity!”
And eight days after, on June 7, he wrote in his theatrical feuilleton, on the first performance of Froufrou:
“I do not think that the emotion at any theatre has ever been so profound. There are, in the dramatic art, exceptional times when the artistes are transported out of themselves, carried above themselves, and compelled to obey this inward ‘demon’ (I should have said ‘god’), who whispered to Corneille his immortal verses.
“‘Well,’” said I to Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt, after the play: “this is an evening which will open to you, if you wish, the doors of the Comédie Française. ‘Do not speak of it,’ said she, ‘to me. We will not speak of it.’ But what a pity! What a pity!”
My success in Froufrou was so marked that it filled the void left by Coquelin, who, after having signed, with the consent of Perrin, with Messrs. Mayer and Hollingshead, declared that he could not keep his engagements. It was a nasty coup de Jarnac by which Perrin hoped to injure my London performances. He had previously sent Got to me to ask officially if I would not come back to the Comédie. He said I should be permitted to make my American tour, and that everything would be arranged on my return. But he should not have sent Got. He should have sent Worms or le petit père Franchise—Delaunay. The one might have persuaded me by his affectionate reasoning and the other by the falsity of arguments presented with such grace that it would have been difficult to refuse.