Page:Rachel (1887 Nina H. Kennard).djvu/82

 vehicle of her own love or hate, joy or grief. She became, as it were, the abstract expression of whatever passion she sought to portray; and by that portrayal she had the power of enchaining the attention of her audience, to the forgetting of all accessories and surroundings.

Long afterwards men remembered with a thrill her speaking a certain sentence, or her look at a certain moment, when even the play itself was completely forgotten; such as her tender despair when, in Les Horaces, she utters the reproach, "Baiser une main qui me perce le cœur!" or her look when, in that terrible rôle of Roxane, she stalked silently upon the stage, approached the front, and remained gazing at the audience. A hush came over them; women involuntarily turned away from that glance; men breathed more heavily, and wished that she would break that painful silence. Subdued by the power of that fierce look, the awful reality of vengeful power which it expressed, they shivered and grew uncomfortable. Then, when the silence seemed wholly intolerable, the pent-up rage, the anger of the wronged woman, burst forth with the irresistible force of a torrent. The tall figure drawn to its utmost height, the heaving breast, the swaying arms, the pale face, the firmly-compressed mouth, were so intently fierce that the actress and her artificial surroundings were forgotten, and the audience deemed it true.

On the 31st of May she wrote to M. Carré again, to say that she has been seriously indisposed, but only stopped in bed a few days; the same feverish energy which all her life was so much greater than her strength, drove her inexorably along. At the end of her letter she adds, "Wednesday—I am engaged to the Queen