Page:Rachel (1887 Nina H. Kennard).djvu/123

 With a disdainful smile on her lips and a triumphant gleam in her eyes, she turned towards the supporters of Mademoiselle Maxime, with the words of Marie Stuart, "J'enfonce le poignard au sein de ma rivale."

Maxime never dared to show herself on the same stage as Rachel again, and disappeared into the secondary position from which she ought never to have been raised and to which her talents alone entitled her. Until midnight that night an impatient crowd waited for Rachel at the stage-door, and greeted her, when she appeared, with loud and prolonged cheers. During the whole of her theatrical career, Rachel boasted of her influence over the pit. She could shake them with the power of her passion. There was a perfect understanding between the actress and them—an alliance strong enough to break down any favouritism or party that either the literary or theatrical world might endeavour to use against her. On her great nights, in Camille or Phèdre, the audience, to the very lowest among the "gods," would sit gazing on the stage, scarcely daring to breathe. "On entendait voler une mouche," Jules Janin says—in the midst of the almost supernatural silence.

Many were the charges brought against Rachel's genius. She was artificial, stilted, wanting in tenderness, too fond of making points at the expense of the subtler gradations of feeling; but all were unanimous that at times she was superhuman in her passion and emotion. She tore aside the veil that hid the higher spiritual world, and appealed to sentiments so profound and primæval, that men were startled for the first time into the consciousness that they possessed them. Some will deny that the art of acting admits of original genius. They will say the actor is merely an