Page:Adelaide Ristori. Studies and memoirs (IA adelaideristoris00rist).pdf/66

52 “Give me poison if it will do any good!” I cried. I knew that the remedy suggested was not poison, but it did taste quite bad enough to have been such.

I did not, indeed, fully recover my voice, but an announcement was made to the audience, asking them to excuse any deficiency on my part in the representation of Mary Stuart, and I was more successful than I could have hoped.

This anecdote will serve to show how great was my consideration for the public, and what a strong hold the feeling of duty had upon me.

Indeed, I cannot describe the influence the public exercised over me. Since childhood, a sentiment of mingled respect and awe towards my audience had been inculcated in me, and the feeling had grown with my growth. I made it a special study, therefore, to allow no unforeseen circumstances to disconcert me, so that the public should not be disappointed on account of the performance not being as good as we could make it. And I was called upon to put one of these fundamental maxims into use, on one of the evenings when I appeared as Judith in the Biblical tragedy written expressly for me by my friend and favorite author, the lamented Paolo Giacometti.

In the culminating scene of the play, when I have cut off the head of Holophernes, his favorite slave, Azraele, discovering the murder of her lover, hurls herself in her fury upon me, and I seize hold of her and throw her to the ground, thus terminating the act with great effect. A very short time before she ought to have made her entry, they informed me from