But trouble was brewing, and the irrepressible Sarah was soon making difficulties for her _confrères_. She insisted on her right to give performances before private audiences on the nights she was not appearing with the company. Perrin had flown into a rage when he first heard of these performances, for it was the _Comédie’s_ chief grievance against her that she _would not_ rest. There came a day in London when Sarah sent word she was too tired to appear. A Saturday audience had to be dismissed at the last moment; it was too late to change the bill. A great commotion ensued among the company and in the Paris press. So many and varied were the attacks on her that she was on the point of resignation. She had brought to London a number of her sculptures and paintings and gave an exhibition, selling a few pieces, and entertaining at the gallery reception a group of aristocrats and celebrities--Gladstone and Leighton among them. She made a trip to Liverpool to buy more lions, and came back with a chetah, a wolf, and a half dozen chameleons to add to her menagerie. The members of the company thought she was ruining the dignity of “Molière’s House”; and all manner of stories were told. “It was said,” she wrote, “that for a shilling anyone might see me dressed as a man; that I smoked huge cigars leaning on the balcony of my house; that at the various receptions when I gave one-act plays, I took my maid with me for the dialogue; that I practiced fencing in my garden, dressed as a _pierrot_ in white, and that when taking boxing lessons I had broken two teeth for my unfortunate professor.” These stories were only less dreadful than the tales told in Paris: that she had thrown a live kitten into the fire, and poisoned two monkeys with her own hands! As a matter of fact, it is probable that Sarah was finding irksome the restrictions of the _Comédie_, was ambitious to earn more money and, as anxious for her exit from the company as were her jealous _confrères_, was only waiting for a chance to sever her contract. But contracts with the _Française_ are not lightly broken. As Coquelin had told her: “When one has the good fortune and the honor of belonging to the _Comédie Française_ one must remain there until the end of one’s career.” She had to watch her chance shrewdly. Again returned to Paris, the company of the _Comédie_ revived, on April 17, 1880, Augier’s _L’Aventurière_. From whatever cause--pique at being assigned a part she disliked in a play she detested, a temporary suspension of her usual power, or, as she says herself, illness that prevented proper study of her part,--she failed rather miserably. Even the usually indulgent Sarcey said: “Her Clorinde was absolutely colorless”; and the other critics, to a man, wrote scathing reviews. Sarah saw her chance, as she thought, and determined that this would be her last performance at the _Comédie_. The morning after the fiasco she wrote to Perrin: “_Monsieur l’Administrateur_: