For nearly twenty-two years, Mlle. Clairon disputed the dramatic sceptre with her celebrated rival, inferior to the latter in parts which required the combination of tragic force with pathos and tenderness, but incomparably her superior in characters of the sterner type, especially those into which dignity and an element of lofty and inflexible pride entered.[160] The methods of the two great actresses could hardly have been more dissimilar. "The one was all temperament," says Edmond de Goncourt, "the other all study and art." Mlle. Dumesnil frequently came upon the stage with no very definite idea as to the tone or attitude she would assume in certain passages, trusting to a happy inspiration, which, it must be acknowledged, seldom failed her.[161] With Mlle. Clairon, who made her art the subject of the most profound and unremitting study, every tone and every gesture had been carefully rehearsed beforehand, and the character elaborated in its minutest details. So numerous indeed were her private rehearsals that she insensibly carried with her her theatrical air into private life, and her friends laughingly declared that she called for her fan and her coach in the tone of Agrippina, and spoke to her lackey like a queen addressing the captain of her guards.[162] But this artificiality was so dexterously concealed, she possessed in such a supreme degree the art of concealing art, so dignified and graceful were her movements, and so marvellous her command of facial expression, that even the warmest admirers of Mlle. Dumesnil and her school of acting and the most captious of critics were compelled to acknowledge her charm, while the ordinary playgoer was "transported with enthusiasm." Tributes to her genius came from all quarters, from friend and foe, from her compatriots and from foreigners alike. Voltaire, when she performed in his little theatre at Ferney, went quite wild with enthusiasm, and declared that, for the first time in his life, he had seen perfection in any kind.[163] Favart, though severely reprobating the extravagance of the admirers who had medals struck in the lady's honour,[164] cherished for her the most profound admiration. "Mlle. Clairon," he writes to the Count Durazzo, "is raised so far above criticism by the superiority of her talents that all the remarks of the most punctilious censor can but serve to convince me that she has attained the last degree of perfection. It seems as if she owed only to Nature all that she has acquired by assiduous study. Every day we are struck with some new admiration."