caricatures concerning me were indulged in by everyone to their heart’s content. Was it really for the sake of advertising myself that I was so thin, so small, so weak, and was it for this, too, that I remained in bed six months of the year, laid low by illness? My name became celebrated before I was, myself. At the first night of Louis Bouilhet’s piece “Mlle. Aïssé” at the Odéon, Flaubert, who was an intimate friend of the author, introduced an attaché of the British Embassy to me. [Illustration: SARAH BERNHARDT AS THE _DUC DE RICHELIEU_.] “Oh, I have known you for some time, mademoiselle,” he said, “you are the little stick with the sponge on the top!” This caricature of me had just appeared and had been the delight of idle folks. I was quite a young girl at that time and nothing of that kind hurt me or troubled me. In the first place all the doctors had given me up, so that I was indifferent about things, but all the doctors were mistaken and twenty years later I had to fight against the monster. The return of the Comédie to their homes was an event, but an event that was kept quiet. Our departure from Paris had been very lively and gay and quite a public event. Our return was clandestine for many of the members, and for me among the number. It was a doleful return for those who had not been appreciated and those who had been failures were furious. I had not been back home an hour when Perrin, the manager, was announced. He began to reproach me gently about the little care I took of my health. He said I caused too much fuss to be made about me. “But,” I exclaimed, “is it my fault if I am thin? Is it my fault, too, that my hair is too curly and that I don’t think just as other people do? Supposing that I took arsenic enough, for a whole month, to make me swell out like a barrel and supposing I were to shave my head like an Arab and only answer ‘Yes’ to everything you said. People would declare I did it for advertisement.” “But, my dear child,” answered Perrin, “there are people who are neither fat nor thin, neither close shaven nor with shocks of hair, and who answer yes and no.” I was simply petrified by the justice and reason of the remark and I understand the “because” of all the “whys” I had been asking myself for some years. There was no happy medium about me. I was “too much” and “too little” and I felt that there was nothing to be done for it. I owned it to Perrin and told him that he was quite right. He took advantage of my mood for lecturing me and for advising me not to put in an appearance at the opening ceremony that was to take place at the Comédie. He feared a cabal against me. “Some people were rather excited, rightly or wrongly, a little of both,” he added, in that shrewd and courteous way which was peculiar to him. I listened to him without interrupting, which slightly embarrassed him, for Perrin was an arguer but not an orator.