_Les Burgraves_ was hissed on the 7th of March 1843. On the 22nd of April of the same year _Lucrèce_ was received on its first night with thunders of applause. So closely as this did the short-lived triumph of what went by the name of _l'école du bon sens_ follow on the defeat of Romantic dramaticism. If the worthy Ponsard relied upon the verdict of his critics, Janin and the others (Théophile Gautier and Théophile Dondey alone protested), he must have believed that his fame was established for all time. The Classic reaction had found its actress as well as its dramatist. In 1838 a young Jewess had made her début in the Theatre Français. She was then eighteen, an ignorant child who had played the harp and sung in the cafés and in the streets; but time proved _Rachel_ to be a genius, the greatest actress France had ever known. And this great actress, as it happened, had a thorough distaste for the rôles with which the Romantic drama provided her, whilst she studied and played those of the old Classic repertory with such zeal and passion that she actually succeeded in doing what no one had believed possible namely, restoring their power of attraction to the tragedies which the Romantic School had disdainfully driven from the stage. Of what avail was it that Gautier wrung his hands! Iphigénie, Mérope, Émilia, Chimène, Phèdre, again trod the boards. And so nobly and naturally were they personated that an impressionable public was at times actually roused to a kind of fury with the authors and critics who had dared to throw contempt on these sacred national treasures. A nation is naturally rejoiced to learn that it has not been mistaken in the eminence of the men and works it has reverenced for centuries. Although the title-rôle of _Lucrèce_ had been written for her, Rachel at first refused to play it; but after the success of the drama at the Odéon she consented. The mood of the audience the first time she appeared in it has been described to me by an eye-witness. "We sat waiting in breathless expectation for the curtain to rise. It rose, and we saw Rachel as Lucretia sitting at her spinning-wheel among her maidens. The silence had been complete enough before; but when she raised her head and opened her lips to say the first words (to one of the slaves): _Lève-toi, Laodice!_ there was such utter stillness that the fruit-sellers were heard crying their oranges in the market-place."