Page:Rachel (1887 Nina H. Kennard).djvu/72

 in so coarse a manner. I rose and took my leave, full of admiration, respect, and tenderness.

I sit down and send you, with the exactitude of a short-hand writer, all the details of this wonderful evening, thinking that perhaps you will keep them, and that posterity one day will read them.

After this supper a friendship sprang up between the poet and the actress. He undertook to write a tragedy in five acts for her, and determined to take his subject from the early history of France. "For days," as his brother tells us in his biography, "Alfred's table was covered with volumes of Thierry's and Sismondi's, and he at last fixed on the story of Frédégonde and Chilperic, calling it La Servante du Roi."

The details of this piece were never completed; the outline, as told by the old chroniclers, is this:—

Frédégonde insinuates herself into the confidence of Andovère, Chilperic's first wife, and by her coquetry and pretended modesty becomes possessed of the good graces and heart of the King. So great is her influence, that she induces him to repudiate the Queen, hoping to succeed to the crown herself. Deceived in her expectations by Chilperic's second marriage with Galsuinde, she yields to the King's love, becomes his mistress, and heaps every possible humiliation and insult on the new Queen. At the beginning of the fourth act, Galsuinde has resolved to secretly leave the court and to return to her father. Frédégonde, informed of her intention, deliberates if she should assassinate her or let her flee.

This monologue and the succeeding scene with the King are the only portions ever written.

We can see here and there, in the account Frédégonde gives of her youth and girlhood, a certain reflex of Rachel's earliest years, and the impression that the