When all this brilliant talent began to be on the wane, and play-goers began to fear that all the thrones would be vacant, a curious scene used to occur nightly in summer time in the Champs Élysées. Before the seated public, beneath the trees, an oldish woman used to appear, with a slip of carpet on her arm, a fiddle beneath it, and a tin cup hanging on her finger. She was closely followed by a slim, pale, dark, but fiery-eyed girl, whose thoughts seemed to be with some world far away. When the woman had spread the carpet, had placed the cup at one corner, and had scraped a few hideous notes on the fiddle, the pale dark-eyed girl advanced on the carpet and recited passages from Racine and Corneille. With her beautiful head raised, with slight, rare, but most graceful action, with voice and emphasis in exact accord with her words, that pale-faced, inspired girl, enraptured her out-of-door audience. After a time she was seen no more, and it was concluded that her own inward fire had utterly consumed her, and she was forgotten. By-and-by there descended on the deserted temple of tragedy a new queen--nay, a goddess, bearing the name of Rachel. As the subdued and charmed public gazed and listened and sent up their incense of praise and their shout of adulation, memories of the pale-faced girl who used to recite beneath the stars in the Champs Élysées came upon them. Some, however, could see no resemblance. Others denied the possibility of identity between the abject servant of the muse in the open air, and the glorious, though pale-faced, fiery-eyed queen of tragedy, occupying a throne which none could dispute with her. When half her brief, splendid, extravagant, and not blameless reign was over, Mdlle. Rachel gave a ‘house-warming’ on the occasion of opening her new and gorgeously-furnished mansion in the Rue Troncin. During the evening the hostess disappeared, and the _maître d’hôtel_ requested the crowded company in the great saloon so to arrange themselves as to leave space enough for Mdlle. Rachel to appear at the upper end of the room, as she was about to favour the company with the recital of some passages from Racine and Corneille. Thereupon entered an old woman with strip of carpet, fiddle, and tin pot, followed by the queen of tragedy, in the shabbiest of frocks, pale, thoughtful, inspired, and with a sad smile that was not altogether out of tune with her pale meditations; and then, the carpet being spread, the fiddle scraped, and the cup deposited, Rachel trod the carpet as if it were the stage, and recited two or three passages from the masterpieces of the French masters in dramatic poetry, and moved her audience according to her will, in sympathy and delight. When the hurricane of applause had passed, and while a murmuring of enjoyment seemed as its softer echo, Rachel stooped, picked up the old tin cup, and, going round with it to collect gratuities from the company, said, ‘Anciennement, c’était pour maman; à