For thirteen years, that is to say until her death, on March 20, 1730, Adrienne reigned the almost unquestioned queen of the Comédie-Française, passing from triumph to triumph, associating her name with a great variety of characters in tragedy, and attaining a popularity with the playgoing public such as no actress had ever before enjoyed. "A lofty soul, great enthusiasm, constant study, a passionate love for her art," says Sainte-Beuve, "all combined to make of her that ideal of a great _tragédienne_, which until that time does not appear to have been realised to this degree. Mlle. Duclos was only a representative of the declamatory school, and if Mlle. Desmares and the Champmeslé had had great and splendid parts, they certainly never attained to the all-round perfection of Adrienne Lecouvreur. When the latter appeared, she had no other model than her own taste, and she created."[68] As the French theatre had been founded in imitation of the ancients, without much regard for the difference of manners, in the same way, its dramatic declamation was ruled by obscure traditions, independently of the difference in languages. When at the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the art had hardly freed itself from its first awkwardness, some erroneous ideas of the elocution of the Greeks and the stage system of the Romans made of the actor's delivery a kind of measured chant. Favoured by the construction of the verses of the great seventeenth century dramatists and the brilliant successes of Mlle. de Champmeslé, this monotonous chant passed from the Rue Mauconseil to the Comédie-Française, where, at the time of Adrienne's appearance, it had become so firmly established that to the great majority of the company and a large number of their patrons any revolt against its sway seemed something like sacrilege. So long as Baron had remained on the stage some check had been imposed on this deplorable custom, for Baron, educated in the school of Molière, a strenuous advocate of naturalness, had remained faithful to the traditions of the Palais-Royal. But his abrupt retirement, in 1696, in the flower of his age, left the adherents of the rival school in undisputed possession of the field, and for more than twenty years nothing occurred to interfere with the reign of inflated declamation, which was carried by the successors of Mlle. de Champmeslé to lengths which provoked the ridicule and disgust of foreign visitors.[69]