As to the amiable Lapommeraye, he had showered on my devoted head all the rumours 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 thus: [Illustration: SARAH BERNHARDT AS “ANDROMAQUE” BY WALTER SPINDLER ] “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: “Nothing, nothing can ever take the place of this last act of _Adrienne Lecouvreur_ at the Comédie. Ah! she should have stayed at the Comédie. Yes, I come back to my litany! I cannot help it! We shall lose as much as she will. Yes, I know that we can say Mlle. Dudlay is left to us. Oh, she will always stay with us! I cannot help saying it. What a pity! What a pity!” And eight days after, on June 7, he wrote in his theatrical _feuilleton_, on the first performance of _Froufrou_: “I do not think that the emotion at any theatre has ever been so profound. There are, in the dramatic art, exceptional times when the artistes are transported out of themselves, carried above themselves, and compelled to obey this inward ‘demon’ (I should have said ‘god’), who whispered to Corneille his immortal verses. “‘Well,’” said I to Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt, after the play: “this is an evening which will open to you, if you wish, the doors of the Comédie Française. ‘Do not speak of it,’ said she, ‘to me. We will not speak of it.’ But what a pity! What a pity!”