I Was Of Course Highly Pleased, Tho' I Was Rather Far Off To Hear Very Distinctly; This Was, However, No Very Great Loss, As I Was Perfectly Well Acquainted With The Tragedy.

Talma's gestures, his pause's, his natural mode of acting gave a great relief to the long declamation with which this tragedy abounds.

When this tragedy was given it was during the time that poor Labedoyere's trial was going on, and the allusions to Augustus' clemency were eagerly seized and applauded. It was hoped that Louis XVIII would imitate Augustus. Vain hope!

I have seen Phedre; the part of Phedre by that admirable actress Mlle Duchesnois, who performs the part so naturally and with so much passion that we entirely forget the extreme plainness of the person. She acts with far more feeling and pathos than Mlle Georges. I shall never be able to forget Mlle Duchesnois in Phedre. She gave me a full idea of the impassioned Queen, nor were it possible to depict with greater fidelity the "Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee," as in that beautiful speech of Phedre to Oenone wherein she reveals her passion for Hippolyte and pourtrays the terrible struggle between duty and female delicacy on the one hand, and on the other a flame that could not be overcome, convinced as it were of the complete inutility of further efforts of resistance and invoking death as her only refuge. I was moved even to tears. I am so great an admirer of the whole of this speech beginning "Mon mal vient de plus lorn" etc., and ending "Un reste de chaleur tout pret a s'exhaler," that I think in it Racine has not only united the excellencies of Euripides, Sappho and Theocritus in describing the passion of love, but has far surpassed them all; that speech is certainly the masterpiece of French versification and scarcely inferior to it is that beautiful and ingenuous confession of love by Hippolyte to Aricie.

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