Page:Rachel (1887 Nina H. Kennard).djvu/143

 one of the effects that delighted and electrified her audience but was studied and tried with the most astounding perseverance. She played Phèdre every evening for two years, and Jules Janin declared she always played it differently in certain scenes. It was only when she returned from St. Petersburg, in 1846, that she had reached the extreme perfection of conception and execution which placed her indisputably in the foremost rank of her profession. "I have studied my sobs (in the fourth act of Phèdre)," she wrote to her old teacher, Samson. "I do not dare to boast for the second representation; but I am sure they are coming. Not having seen you behind the scenes, I will make a point of looking at you as I come on, and will soon see if you are pleased."

Those were the sobs which seemed to everyone that heard them to proceed from the depths of some divine despair, as she exclaimed, "Misérable et je vis!"

Phèdre was incomparably Rachel's greatest inspiration. In it she touched heights that had never been touched before. This woman, devoured by unlawful passion, became, interpreted by her, so pathetic, so grand, that the audience were forced to attribute her wickedness and treachery, as did the ancient Greeks, to a curse of the gods, and not to her own wrong-doing.

Phèdre, the culminating point of French tragedy, has ever been looked on as a test play for all great actresses. The whole range of human feelings, love, fear, grief, jealousy, revenge, repentance, all that can move and excite an audience, are represented in three stages of development by one central figure; and yet, though a prey to all these passions, the daughter of Pasiphæ, both in Euripides' and Racine's tragedy, remains an elevated person, victim of the persecutions