Against his opinion the newspapers can raise no voice, for he alone edits them all. He writes thirty articles a day, each of which is thirty times reprinted, thrice thirty times quoted from. He is, as it were, the Press in person. And presently the momentous hour arrived when the delicate and sprightly pupil of Regnier was to appear before this enormous and somnolent mass, and to thrill it with pleasure. For Monsieur Sarcey smiled upon and applauded Réjane's début at the Conservatoire. He consecrated to her as many as fifty lines of intelligent criticism; and I pray Heaven they may be remembered to his credit on the Day of Judgment. Here they are, in that twopenny-halfpenny style of his, so dear to the readers of _Le Temps_. "I own that, for my part, I should have willingly awarded to the latter (Mademoiselle Réjane) a first prize. It seems to me that she deserved it. But the Jury is frequently influenced by extrinsic and private motives, into which it is not permitted to pry. A first prize carries with it the right of entrance into the Comédie Française; and the Jury did not think Mademoiselle Réjane, with her little wide-awake face, suited to the vast frame of the House of Molière. That is well enough; but the second prize, which it awarded her, authorises the Director of the Odéon to receive her into his Company; and that perspective alone ought to have sufficed to dissuade the Jury from the course it took.... Every one knows that at present the Odéon is, for a beginner, a most indifferent school.... Instead of shoving its promising pupils into it by the shoulders, the Conservatoire should forbid them to approach it, lest they should be lost there. What will Mademoiselle Réjane do at the Odéon? Show her legs in _La Jeunesse de Louis XIV._, which is to be revived at the opening of the season! A pretty state of things. She must either go to the Vaudeville or to the Gymnase. It is there that she will form herself; it is there that she will learn her trade, show what she is capable of, and prepare herself for the Comédie Française, if she is ever to enter it.... She recited a fragment from _Les Trois Sultanes_.... I was delighted by her choice. The _Trois Sultanes_ is so little known nowadays.... What wit there is in her look, her smile! With her small eyes, shrewd and piercing, with her little face thrust forward, she has so knowing an air, one is inclined to smile at the mere sight of her. Does she perhaps show a little too much assurance? What of it? 'Tis the result of excessive timidity. But she laughs with such good grace, she has so fresh and true a voice, she articulates so clearly, she seems so happy to be alive and to have talent, that involuntarily one thinks of Chénier's line: _Sa bienvenue au jour lui rit dans tous les yeux._