The performance was a delight throughout. Every person in the cast is an artist, and as Joyzelle I had an excellent opportunity to study the personality and art of Georgette Leblanc,--now Mme. Maeterlinck,--for whom Monna Vanna was written. A versatile woman, Leblanc was originally in opera. She has sung Thaïs, Sapho, Navarraise, Carmen, Françoise in L'Attaque au Moulin, the Bruneau-Zola music drama, and has played over Europe with unbounded success Charlotte Corday and Monna Vanna. As an interpreter of the _lieder_ literature of Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, and the new Frenchmen and Belgians, Gabriel Fauré, d'lndy, Claude Debussy, Georgette Leblanc has also won praise. And her voice was never a great one. She has sung by the grace of God, as our German brethren say, and as a _diseuse_ she has won more success than as a singer. She is distinctly a personality. Her hair is wonderfully red, the mask of her face a peculiarly expressive one. You recall those old portraits by the masters, of some unknown woman, whose eyes follow you from the canvas, eyes that peer beneath tumbled tresses, surmounted by an imperial Gainsborough hat of velvet. She is given to the picturesque in daily life, and has written a clever volume of essays all her own in style and idea. As an actress, I should say that Leblanc was halfway in her methods between Sarah Bernhardt and--Georgette Leblanc. She has great facility of speech, is plastic in her poses, indulges in those serpentine, undulating movements we have long since recognized as Sarah's own. Do not mistake; Mme. Leblanc has a pronounced individuality. She is herself. Her intonations are her own. But she has such velocity and clarity of diction, has such temperamental energy, plays a rôle with such swiftness, that Bernhardt is inevitably suggested. As Monna Vanna she is more successful than as Joyzelle. The abundant nervous energy of the woman ill brooks long periods of repose, and Joyzelle is more like a Burne-Jones maiden than the fiery lover of Prinzevalle. Leblanc was intense in all the climaxes, and her denotements of joy, love, hatred, and overwhelming desolation were alike admirable. She has expressive features, though they are irregular--few women would call her good-looking. (Note the discrimination of sex!) She nevertheless made a charming Joyzelle, and spoke her husband's cadenced lines with the exact feeling for their exquisite rhythms. VII