Page:Rachel (1887 Nina H. Kennard).djvu/37

 on the sixth story at No. 23 Rue Traversière, Saint HonoréTraversière-Saint-Honoré [sic]. On the 12th June 1838, therefore, Rachel appeared at the Français, for the first time, as Camille."

Since the day when, early in 1639, Corneille's tragedy of Les Horaces was first acted at the HotelHôtel [sic] de Bourgogne, it had kept its place as one of the great classics of the French language. We in England find it difficult to understand the enthusiasm of Frenchmen for Corneille and Racine, the one seems hard and dry, the other but a weak echo of Euripides and Sophocles; but, as Saint BeuveSainte-Beuve [sic] said to the English critic who ventured to dissent from his opinion that Lamartine was a poet of very high importance, "He was important to us." Corneille and Racine were and are important to Frenchmen. They delight in the grandiloquent patriotism of Les Horaces, the high-sounding heroism of Polyeucte and the overstrained honour of Cinna. The scene where the elder Horace parts from his son and the affianced lover of his daughter, soon to face each other in deadly strife, and ends by saying, "Moi mêmeMoi-même [sic] en cet adieu, j'ai les larmes aux yeux. Faites voire devoir, et laisser faire aux dieux"; or his bitter invectives against his third son for having, as was supposed, fled from the field, and his fierce reply to the question, "Que vouliez-vous qu'il fitfît [sic] contre trois?" "Qu'il mourutmourût [sic]," had become a portion of the intellectual pabulum on which the youth of France was nourished, and stock pieces at every Academy recital; but, as Samson tells us, in the few years preceding Rachel's advent, ordinary readers had put them on the shelves of their libraries, and no longer cared to see them acted. They were fascinated by the movement, poetry and picturesqueness of Hernani and Ruy Blas