Mlle. de Champmeslé left behind her two brilliant pupils. The first was Mlle. Duclos, daughter of a former member of the Marais troupe named Châteauneuf, who made her _début_ at the Comédie-Française in 1693, and was soon afterwards engaged to understudy the great actress in first tragedy parts. She excelled in rôles requiring "majesty of bearing and the impetuous sway of passion," and in such secured several notable successes; but her style both of speaking and acting seems to have been very artificial. She was, moreover, cursed with a most abominable temper, which made her a perfect terror to her colleagues at rehearsals, and which she could not always control, even before the audience. At the first performance of La Motte's _Inès de Castro_, in 1723, a scene which was intended to be intensely pathetic excited the merriment of the pit, upon which Mlle. Duclos, who was playing Inès, stopped the performance, and coming to the front of the stage, shouted angrily, "Foolish pit! You are laughing at the finest thing in the play." On another occasion, when Dancourt apologised to the audience for the lady's non-appearance in one of her most popular rôles, at the same time indicating, by a significant gesture, the cause of her indisposition, the actress, who happened to be standing in the wings, rushed on to the stage, beside herself with passion, and soundly boxed her facetious colleague's ears, amid roars of laughter. In 1733, when in her fifty-sixth year, Mlle. Duclos was foolish enough to marry an actor named Duchemin, a youth scarcely seventeen! Two years later, she was compelled to obtain a separation from her juvenile husband, whom she alleged had "maltreated her daily," and dealt her "_coups de pied et de poing tant sur le corps que sur le visage_." Mlle. Duclos's most successful creation was Zénobie, in the _Rhadaminthe et Zénobie_ of Crébillon, and among her other impersonations were Ariane, in Thomas Corneille's play of that name, Josabeth, in _Athalie_, Hersélie in La Motte's _Romulus_, and the title-part in the _Électre_ of Longpierre. She retired, in 1733, with a pension of 1000 livres from the theatre, and another of the same amount from the court, which she enjoyed for twelve years.