MARY JEFFREYS-LEWIS Belasco’s Collection. OSMOND TEARLE About 1881, when they acted in Belasco’s “La Belle Russe”] was then in San Francisco, and I stipulated with Maguire that he should engage her for me, and also Osmond Tearle and Gerald Eyre, from Wallack’s; John Jennings, from the Union Square, and Clara Walters, who was then acting in Salt Lake City.” Maguire agreed to do this, the engagements were made, and Belasco earnestly addressed himself to the completion of his play, which was accomplished in six weeks. Meantime Tearle ended his engagement in New York (at Wallack’s Theatre, July 2) and, with other members of the Wallack company, went at once to San Francisco, where rehearsals of the new play were immediately begun. Belasco’s “La Belle Russe” was originally entitled “Violette.” He chanced to read the phrase “la belle Russe” on a wind-blown fragment of newspaper, was pleased by it, and adopted it as a better title. The play is a fabric of theatrically effective but incredible situations, and it is founded on two other plays, well known to him,--both of them having been acted in San Francisco, under his management,--namely, “Forget Me Not,” by Herman Merivale and Charles Groves, and “The New Magdalen,” by Wilkie Collins: the version produced under Belasco’s direction was a piratical one made by James H. LeRoy. _La belle Russe_ is a beautiful but vicious Englishwoman, named _Beatrice Glandore_, daughter of a clergyman. She has sunk, by a facile process of social decline, until she has become a decoy for a gambling house, where, pretending to be a Russian, she is known to its frequenters by the sobriquet which gives the play its name. She has a virtuous twin sister, _Geraldine_, so like her in appearance that they are, practically, indistinguishable. _La belle Russe_ has infatuated a young Englishman, _Captain Brand_ (known at the time by the name of _Captain Jules Clopin_), with whom she has lived, whom she has robbed, abandoned, and finally shot, believing herself to have killed him. _Geraldine_, meantime, has married a young Englishman of great expectations, _Sir Philip Calthorpe_, who is repudiated by his mother and other relatives because of his marriage, whereupon, in financial straits, though represented as loving his wife, _Calthorpe_ deserts her, enlists in the Army, and disappears.