Clairon, Le Kain, and others of the great French players of the past. [Illustration: Rachel as the Muse of Greek Tragedy.] Less success than had been looked for attended Rachel's invasion of the repertory of Mlle. Mars, an actress so idolized by the Parisians that her sixty years and great portliness of form were not thought hindrances to her personation of the youthful heroines of modern comedy and drama. But Rachel's fittest occupation and her greatest triumphs were found in the classical poetic plays. She, perhaps, intellectualized too much the creations of Hugo, Dumas, and Scribe; gave them excess of majesty. Her histrionic style was too exalted an ideal for the conventional characters of the drama of her own time; it was even said of her that she could not speak its prose properly or tolerably. She disliked the hair-powder necessary to Adrienne Lecouvreur and Gabrielle de Belle Isle, although her beauty, for all its severity, did not lose picturesqueness in the costumes of the time of Louis XV. As Gabrielle she was more girlish and gentle, pathetic, and tender, than was her wont, while the signal fervor of her speech addressed to Richelieu, beginning, "Vous mentez, Monsieur le Duc," stirred the audience to the most excited applause. Rachel was seen upon the stage for the last time at Charleston on December 17, 1856. She played Adrienne Lecouvreur. She had been tempted to America by the prospect of extravagant profits. It had been dinned into her ears that Jenny Lind, by thirty-eight performances in America, had realized seventeen hundred thousand francs. Why might not she, Rachel, receive as much? And then, she was eager to quit Paris. There had been strange worship there of Madame Ristori, even in the rejected part of Medea. But already Rachel's health was in a deplorable state. Her constitution, never very strong, had suffered severely from the cruel fatigues, the incessant exertions, she had undergone. It may be, too, that the deprivations and sufferings of her childhood now made themselves felt as over-due claims that could be no longer denied or deferred. She forced herself to play, in fulfilment of her engagement, but she was languid, weak, emaciated; she coughed incessantly, her strength was gone; she was dying slowly but certainly of phthisis. And she appeared before an audience that applauded her, it is true, but cared nothing for Racine and Corneille, knew little of the French language, and were urgent that she should sing the "Marseillaise" as she had sung it in 1848! It was forgotten, or it was not known in America, that the actress had long since renounced revolutionary sentiments to espouse the cause of the Second Empire. She performed all her more important characters, however, at New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Nor was the undertaking commercially disappointing, if it did not wholly satisfy expectation. She returned to France possessed of nearly three hundred thousand francs as her