She became a great reader, and though she never acquired English, Shakespeare was one of her enthusiasms. Maeterlinck was another. Cryptic sciences fascinated her. In modern art, her sympathies were with the symbolists and impressionists. It was not strange that d’Annunzio, the poet-dramatist-novelist who was making his presence felt in Italy about the time of her Paris triumph, should appeal to her as a kindred spirit. His fiery exaltation of human passions, his undoubted poetic gifts, she took for real genius, and about 1900 the world heard that Duse had forsworn all dramatists else and would act henceforth nothing but d’Annunzio’s plays. The poet and the actress formed an association that was plainly more than that of friendship or professional coöperation. That she was passionately devoted to d’Annunzio for some years, and that their friendship was broken by the publication of one of his novels--in which he made literary use of what she considered their sacred alliance--was the talk of Europe. The resulting separation she is said to have taken, as she had her earlier love affair, with tragic seriousness. How much her retirement from the stage was due to this disappointment, and how much merely to advancing age, it is difficult to say. The d’Annunzio campaign was not a success, even in Italy. His plays were not saved by patriotic interest in the author or by affection for the actress from being thought decadent and undramatic, though everywhere the richness of their poetic strain was recognized. Duse’s faith however, until the rupture with d’Annunzio, was unreasoning and unswerving. She came to the United States again in 1902, acting in his plays.[125] She did nothing with them to add to the fame she had earlier acquired, though, in spite of d’Annunzio, her acting still retained its freedom from artificiality or exaggeration.[126] After her return to Europe her appearances became more infrequent. In 1904 she gave a “command performance” at the English court (she had always been popular in England, which received comparatively well even the d’Annunzio plays), and in 1906 she came all the way from Italy to assist in the great testimonial to Ellen Terry. Illness, which assailed her often, and weariness of her work, herself and all things else, kept her from the stage most of the time. She continued, however, to keep her company constantly under salary and at her command, and as late as 1909 it was her custom, when at rare intervals the spirit moved her, to assemble them for brief appearances in the European capitals. Of late years she has given her energy to the founding of a home for aged actors. By means first of vivid imagining and then by the revealing power of an unobtrusive, lucid art Duse made herself the greatest _artiste_ of her day. When the French said she had widened the horizon of her art they paid tribute to what was, after all, something akin to original genius.