On December 9, 1896, there was held a fête in Paris in honor of Bernhardt--the most striking in a long line of similar occasions. It was felt that her position as queen of the stage deserved a public recognition. It was carried through with Gallic enthusiasm. Sardou presided at a mid-day banquet attended by Coppée, Lemaître, Theuriet, Lavedan, Coquelin, Charpentier, Rostand, and a host of others from the literary and artistic world of Paris. Sardou hailed her as the acknowledged sovereign of dramatic art, and bore testimony not only to her acting, but also to “the benevolence, the charity, and the exquisite kindness of the woman.” When Sarah had responded with a few words of thanks, there was a great demonstration, emotionally enthusiastic and Gallic. Later in the day, at the _Renaissance_, the ceremonies were continued. Sarah gave the third act of _Phèdre_ and the fourth act of _Rome Vaincue_. She gave her best efforts and her hearers were much moved. Huret records that all his neighbors in the audience were weeping. Then, five poets, François Coppée, Edmond Harancourt, Catulle Mendès, André Theuriet and Edmond Rostand, advanced in turn, each to read a sonnet in Sarah’s honor. When Rostand’s--the last and best--was finished, she was seen to tremble and to stand weeping in their midst. “No spectacle could be finer,” says Huret, “than this woman, whose unconquerable energy had withstood the struggles and difficulties of a thirty-years’ career, standing overwhelmed and vanquished by the power of a few lines of poetry.” Whether or not she was a divinely ennobled and beneficent artist, this trait of “unconquerable energy” is undeniably a marvel. For instance, in January, 1906, when she was sixty-one, she appeared in Boston. In the twenty-six hours between half-past eight on Friday evening and half-past ten on Saturday evening she acted Fédora, Phèdre, and Cesarine in Dumas’s _La Femme de Claude_, each a long, exacting and, one would think, exhausting rôle. At the end of the third play, however, Bernhardt had her artistic resources and her strength as fully under her command as at the beginning. And she had been forty-four years on the stage. This was but an incident of a widely extended tour, a sample of what she had been doing all her life.