All the talent in the world, especially when continually applied to the same dramatic works, will not satisfy continually the hearer. What pleases in a great actor, as in all arts that appeal to the imagination, is the unforeseen. When I am utterly ignorant of what is to happen, when I do not know, when you yourself do not know what will be your next gesture, your next look, what passion will possess your heart, what outcry will burst from your terror-stricken soul, then, indeed, I am willing to see you daily, for each day you will be new to me. To-day I may blame, to-morrow praise. Yesterday you were all-powerful; to-morrow, perhaps, you may hardly win from me a word of admiration. So much the better, then, if you draw from me unexpected tears, if in my heart you strike an unknown fiber; but tell me not of hearing night after night great artists who every time present the exact counterpart of what they were on the preceding one. It was at the Theatre Francais that she won her final acceptance as the greatest of all tragedians of her time. This was in her appearance in Corneille's famous play of "Horace." She had now, in 1838, blazed forth with a power that shook her no, less than it stirred the emotions and the passions of her hearers. The princes of the royal blood came in succession to see her. King Louis Philippe himself was at last tempted by curiosity to be present. Gifts of money and jewels were showered on her, and through sheer natural genius rather than through artifice she was able to master a great audience and bend it to her will. She had no easy life, this girl of eighteen years, for other actresses carped at her, and she had had but little training. The sordid ways of her old father excited a bitterness which was vented on the daughter. She was still under age, and therefore was treated as a gold-mine by her exacting parents. At the most she could play but twice a week. Her form was frail and reed-like. She was threatened with a complaint of the lungs; yet all this served to excite rather than to diminish public interest in her. The newspapers published daily bulletins of her health, and her door was besieged by anxious callers who wished to know her condition. As for the greed of her parents, every one said she was not to blame for that. And so she passed from poverty to riches, from squalor to something like splendor, and from obscurity to fame. Much has been written about her that is quite incorrect. She has been credited with virtues which she never possessed; and, indeed, it may be said with only too much truth that she possessed no virtues whatsoever. On the stage while the inspiration lasted she was magnificent. Off the stage she was sly, treacherous, capricious, greedy, ungrateful, ignorant, and unchaste. With such an ancestry as she had, with such an early childhood as had been hers, what else could one expect from her?