One may as well admit at once that Réjane’s tours in the United States were not successful, in the sense that continuously crowded houses indicate success. The language was, of course, one stumbling block, for a keen understanding of the foreign tongue was more necessary for a taste for Réjane than for the broad effects, say, of a Bernhardt or a Salvini. And if the language fell on baffled ears, the essence of the plays, in some cases, antagonized the more puritanical of our public. For the pieces Réjane played reflected a society and a point of view for which many Americans found it hard to muster much sympathy. So meager was the American response to Réjane’s art during her first visit that she forswore us forever. Nine years sufficed to make her change her mind. “But now (1904) as then,” said the New York _Times_, “she is hampered by the moral bias of American audiences, and by the fact that the manners she so searchingly studies and exquisitely depicts are exotic--foreign alike to our sympathies and our experience.” Whatever her popular success in America may or may not have been, Réjane--in some of her parts at least--won the enthusiastic praise of the critics and of the restricted public that knew its French well enough to meet her on something like Parisian terms. The _pièce de résistance_ of the first tour was _Madame Sans-Gêne_. Like most of Sardou’s later dramas, it was a “tailor-made” play, written to suit the personality and methods of its principal actress.[102] A secondary object was evident in the effort to take advantage of the revival of interest in Napoleon that marked, for no evident reason, the early nineties. Technically the play was interesting chiefly as showing the author in a new phase, for it was surprising to find Sardou, a notorious disciple of Scribe, writing a piece that was little more than a series of sketches. But Réjane lifted the whole affair to a height at which it could be regarded only as one of the triumphs of the nineteenth century theatre. Réjane’s freshness, naturalness, tenderness, and charmingly subtle sense of comedy as Catherine Hubscher in _Madame Sans-Gêne_ was instantly recognized and celebrated in every American city that she visited. In _Ma Cousine_, a light farce, she acted the soubrette _Riquette_ with an abandon, a cleverness, a joyousness, that emphasized her new public’s admiration of her. Her Nora, however, in _Maison de Poupée_ (Ibsen’s _A Doll’s House_), revealed her in a new and more serious light, demonstrating at once her genuine versatility and her considerable emotional power. Even the unsavory _Sapho_ she made something new and different, “moderating its excesses and enhancing its better moods. Less pathetic directly than by suggestion, she often moved by simple means a sympathy which _Sapho_ ill deserved.”