But her next part was not, as one might have expected, a return to the medium of her accepted successes. It was even a step further away. Bernhardt, in the spring of 1900, had acted the Duke of Reichstadt in Rostand’s play _L’Aiglon_. Reichstadt was the son of Napoleon the Great and Marie Louise of Austria. The play tells the story of his abortive attempt to regain his father’s throne. Miss Adams, a few months after Bernhardt’s production in Paris, essayed the part in New York, of course in an English version.[207] Like one part she had played before, Juliet, and another she was to play later, Chanticler, Reichstadt was too large and exacting a part for her. Yet by reason of her own physical characteristics she suggested the weakness and effeminacy of the young Duke, and in the lighter scenes she was pleasing and satisfying. In the more serious scenes--and there are two that require great acting in the tempestuous strain: the Mirror Scene, in which Reichstadt is shown by Metternich the hopeless weakness of his character and the desperation of his cause; and the scene on the battlefield of Wagram, where “the eaglet” is crushed by visions of his father’s ruthless career,--in these scenes Miss Adams was interesting and pathetic, but she hardly exhausted the possibilities.[208] The production of _L’Aiglon_ could not, however, fail to add to her artistic reputation and to her immense popularity, if that were possible. With _Quality Street_, a delightful, simple, sunshiny play by Barrie in which she was the lovable and thoroughly feminine Phœbe Throssell, and in the far less attractive play _The Pretty Sister of José_, in which she was a Spanish girl, “of delicate, winning sensibility,”[209] Miss Adams returned to the sort of acting which in _The Little Minister_ had made her name universally known.