Adrienne Lecouvreur (whose story has been twice told in French dramas, and once marvellously illustrated by the genius of Rachel), before she made her exit from the world, thought of the poor of her district, and she left them several thousands of francs. The curé of St.-Sulpice was told of the death and of the legacy. The good man took the money and refused to allow the body to be buried in consecrated ground. Princes of the church went to her _petits soupers_, but they would neither say ‘rest her soul’ nor sanction decent rest to her body; and yet charity had beautified the one, as talent and dignity had marked the other. The corpse of this exquisite actress (she was only forty when she died) was carried in a _fiacre_, accompanied by a faithful few, to a timber yard in the Faubourg St.-Germain; a hired porter dug the shallow grave of the tragedy queen; and I remember, in my youthful days, a stone post at the corner of the Rue de Bourgogne and the Rue de Grenelle which was said to stand over the spot where Monimia had been so ingloriously buried. It was then a solitary place, significantly named La Grenouillière. And when this drama had closed, a valet of Baron, the great tragedian, looked at an old woman who attended in a box lobby of the Comédie Française, and they mutually thought of their daughter as the successor to poor Adrienne Lecouvreur. Their name was Gaussem; but when, a year after Adrienne’s death, they succeeded in getting the young girl--eighteen, a flower of youth, beauty, and of simplicity, most exquisite, even if affected--they changed their name to Gaussin. As long as she was young, Voltaire intoxicated her with the incense of his flattery. He admired her Junie, Andromaque, Iphigénie, Bérénice; but he worshipped her for her perfect acting in parts he had written--Zaïre (in which there is a ‘bit of business’ with a veil, which Voltaire stole from the ‘handkerchief’ in ‘Othello,’ the author of which he pretended to despise)--Zaïre, Alzire; and in other characters Voltaire swore that she was a miracle of acting. But La Gaussin never equalled Adrienne. She surpassed Duclos in ‘Inés de Castro:’ she was herself to be surpassed by younger rivals. At about forty Voltaire spoke of his once youthful idol as _that old girl_!