Look here, upon this picture, and on this;
and he strongly deprecated the idea of two life-sized portraits hanging against the wall, as is sometimes the usage.
Mention was made of Bulwer's Richelieu by one of the guests as a part peculiarly fitted to the powers of the great tragedian, and he was asked if he knew the play.
"No," answered Rossi, "and I should scarcely care to add it to my repertoire, which is already rather an extensive one. I have personated in my time over four hundred characters, including all the prominent personages of Alfieri, Molière and Goldoni."
"Then you play comedy as well as tragedy? Have you ever appeared as Shakespeare's Benedick?"
"Never, but I may perhaps study the character for my approaching tour in the United States. My other Shakespearian characters, besides those in which I have already appeared in Paris, are Coriolanus, Shylock, and Timon of Athens. Once I began to study Richard III., but chancing to see Bogumil Dawison in that character, I was so delighted with his personation that I gave up all thoughts of performing the part myself."
At this juncture our host attempted to fill Rossi's glass with some peculiarly choice wine, but the tragedian stopped him with a smile. "I am very temperate in my habits," he said, "and drink nothing but light claret. I am not one of those that think that an actor can never play with proper fire unless he is half drunk, like Kean in Désordre et Genie. I may have very little genius—"
But here a universal outcry interrupted the speaker. That proposition was evidently wholly untenable, in that company at least.
"Well, then," added Rossi laughing, "whatever genius I may possess, I do not believe in disorder."
This little incident turned the conversation on the modern French drama, whereof Rossi spoke rather slightingly, stigmatizing it as mechanical, being composed of plays written to be performed and not to live. "In Victor Hugo's dramas," he remarked, "there are some fine lines and noble passages, but the characters are always Victor Hugo in a mask: they are never real personages. It is always the author who speaks—never a new individuality. As to the classic dramatists of France, they are intolerable. Corneille is perhaps a shade better than Racine, but both are stiff, pompous and unnatural: their characters are a set of wooden puppets that are pulled by wires and work in a certain fixed manner, from which they never deviate.