Page:My Double Life — Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt.djvu/331

Rh compelled myself to learn by heart the muscles of the head or the arm, and did not sleep till this was done.

A month after the exhibition there was a reading of Parodi's play, Rome Vaincue, at the Comédie Française. I refused the rôle of the young vestal Opimia, which had been allotted to me, and energetically demanded that of Posthumia, an old, blind Roman woman with a superb and noble face.

No doubt there was some connection in my mind between my old Breton weeping over her grandson and the august patrician claiming forgiveness for her grand-daughter. Perrin was at first astounded. Afterwards he acceded to my request. But his order-loving mind and his taste for symmetry made him anxious about Mounet-Sully, who was also playing in the piece. He was accustomed to seeing Mounet-Sully and me playing the two heroes, the two lovers, the two victims. How was he to arrange matters so that we should still be the two—something or other? Eureka! There was in the play an old idiot named Vestæpor, who was quite unnecessary for the action of the piece, but had been brought in to satisfy Perrin.

"Eureka!" cried the director of the Comédie; "Mounet-Sully shall play Vestæpor!" Equilibrium was restored. The god of the bourgeois was content.

The piece, which was really quite mediocre, obtained a great success at the first performance (September 27, 1876), and personally I was very successful in the fourth act. The public was decidedly in my favour, in spite of everything and everybody.