Off the stage Madame Réjane has always been a gracious and likable woman, of a gentle, polished manner and lovable disposition that do not always go with a pronounced and much applauded personality. She has a summer place, “_Petit Manoir_,” a large, semi-Elizabethan villa at Hennequeville, near Trouville, on the Normandy coast. There it has been her habit to live quietly whenever her engagements permitted, with her daughter Germaine and her son Jacques. She has always indulged a taste for _objets de vertu_. “When not with her children or at the theatre,” says Huret, “she is likely to find time to go in search of paintings, or books or fine fabrics, a curious old fan, a bit of unique lace, or a rare flower or jewel, with the joyous ardor that she puts into everything and, as in her art, spending immense energy to achieve the exquisite and the delicate, in a word, everything that makes for the joy of working and of life.” The “_joie de travaille_” is one characteristic of the great _comédienne_ that is likely to escape the casual public. But work hard she did, and she made her company work hard. “On the road” it was the regular thing to have daily rehearsals, no matter what familiarity with the plays had been attained. “The amazing variety of her artistry has been expressed,” says Huret, “by two famous portraits of her, one by Chartran, the other by Besnard. You could paint nothing more strikingly truthful than these portraits, yet you cannot dream how unlike they are.... Besnard has retained only those traits of his sitter which give her an expression that is energetic, even a little brutal and sensual,--the popular Réjane, the Réjane of the _Ambigu_, of realistic drama, the Réjane of _La Glu_ and _Germinie Lacerteux_. Despite her silk gown and all her finery, Besnard has seen her with the down-at-heel cloth boots that Germinie wore to third-rate balls, and in the white floss-silk gloves which, to get a realistic touch, she had borrowed from her servant-maid. That Réjane he has caught admirably! “But it is not thus that she has appeared to Chartran. He has seen her in a dainty lace head-dress adorned with a rose-colored ribbon, her hair loose over her eyes, her mobile mouth, her gracious oval face. Above all he has seen her extraordinary and complex eyes, now quick, now velvety, now perverse beneath their large, languorous eyelids: eyes that are mocking, ardent, sparkling and dreamy. This is the Réjane of Meilhac’s plays, the Réjane who is of the line of _comédiennes_ of the eighteenth century; it is _Ma Cousine_ who is about to become _Amoureuse_.