Vitu, Sarcey, and Lapommeraye had said so much against me that I was stupefied to learn from Mayer that they had arrived in London to be present at my performances. I did not understand it at all. I thought that the Parisian journalists were leaving me in peace at last, and here were my worst enemies coming across the sea to see and hear me. Perhaps they were hoping, like the Englishman who followed the lion-tamer, to see him devoured by his lions. Vitu, in the _Figaro_, had finished one of his bitter articles in these words: “But we have heard enough surely, of Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt! Let her go abroad with her monotonous voice and her funereal fantasies! Here, we have nothing new to learn from her talents or her caprices ...” Sarcey, in an equally bitter article, apropos of my resignation at the Comédie, finished with these words: “... There comes a time when naughty children must go to bed ...” [Illustration: THE CELEBRATED PORTRAIT OF SARAH BERNHARDT, PAINTED BY JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE.] As to the amiable Lapommeraye, he had showered on my devoted head all the rumors that he had collected from all sides. But as they said he had no originality, he tried to show that he also could dip his pen in venom and he had cried: “Pleasant journey!” And here they all came, these three, and others with them.... And the day following my first performance of “Adrienne Lecouvreur,” Auguste Vitu telegraphed to the _Figaro_ a long article, in which he criticised me in certain scenes, regretting that I had not followed the example of Rachel, whom I had never seen. And he finished his article with these words: “The sincerity of my admiration cannot be doubted when I avow that in the fifth act Sarah Bernhardt rose to a height of dramatic power, to a force of expression which could not be surpassed. She played the long and cruel scene in which _Adrienne_, poisoned by the _Duchesse de Bouillon_, struggles against death in her fearful agony, not only with immense talent, but with a science of art which up to the present she has never revealed. If the Parisian public had heard ... or ever hears, Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt cry out with the piercing accent which she put into her words that evening: ‘I will not die, I will not die!’ it would weep with her.” Sarcey finished an admirable critique with these words: “She is prodigious!...” And Lapommeraye, who had once more become amiable, begged me to go back to the Comédie which was waiting for me, which would kill the fatted calf on the return of its prodigal child. Sarcey, in his article in the _Temps_, consecrated five columns of praises to me and finished his article with these words: