“Just as the first dressmakers of Paris measure Réjane’s fine figure for the costumes of her various rôles, so the best writers of the French Academy now make plays to her measure,” wrote M. Meunier in 1894. “They take the size of her temperament, the height of her talent, the breadth of her acting; they consider her taste, they flatter her mood; they clothe her with the richest draperies she can covet. Their imagination, their fancy, their cleverness, are all put at her service. The leaders in this industry have hitherto been Messrs. Meilhac and Halévy, but now M. Victorien Sardou is ruining them. _Madame Sans-Gêne_ is certainly, of all the rôles Réjane has played, that best suited to bring out her manifold resources. It is not merely that Réjane play the washerwoman, become a great lady, without blemish or omission; she _is Madame Sans-Gêne_ herself, with no overloading, nothing forced, nothing caricatured. It is portraiture; history. “Many a time has Réjane appeared in cap, cotton frock, and white apron; many a time in robes of state, glittering with diamonds; she has worn the buskin or the sock, demeaned herself like a gutter heroine, or dropped the stately curtsey of the high-born lady. But never, except in _Madame Sans-Géne_, has she been able to bring all her rôles into one focus, exhibit her whole wardrobe, and yet remain one and the same person, compress into one evening the whole of her life.” What sort of woman presented herself to the gaze of her Parisian admirers--and soon to American eyes--at this, the time of her greatest triumph? Whatever other gifts she brought to her work, sheer beauty was not one of them. “Is it her beauty?” asked M. Filon, seeking the source of her power, and of her perfect understanding with her audiences. “Certainly not. She is not pretty; one might even say ... but it is more polite not to say it. To quote a famous _mot_, ‘She is not beautiful, she is worse.’”[99] Though Réjane never had the least claim to Mr. Vance Thompson’s rhapsodic description of her as “amazingly and diabolically beautiful,” she really has no quarrel with the fate that made her as she is. Comedy was to be her mission, and if Wilde was right in his dictum that “what serves its purpose is beautiful,” beautiful she is, after all. For plain though it be, her face is a true comedy mask. “There is comedy in every line of her face, in the arched eyebrows, the well opened, dancing eyes, the tip-tilted nose, and the wonderful, mobile, expressive mouth,” says William Archer. “This mouth is unquestionably the actress’ chief feature; it conditions her art. With a different mouth she might have been a tragedian or a heroine of melodrama, which would have been an immense pity. It is not a beautiful feature from the sculptor’s point of view; even from the painter’s it is not so much a rose-bud as a full-blown rose. It has almost the wide-lipped expansiveness of a Greek mask, but it is sensitive, ironic, amiable, fascinating.”