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But so much at least was common property in the department; and the elevation of Miss Westlake, the humiliation of Miss Stein, could be seen by all, for Miss Westlake close by was selling the most entrancing new fichus which had begun the day with a succès fou. No use advising Miss Stein to buck up and do her best. Anything Fred Thorpe could say on the subject would be bitterly misconstrued.
The only criticism that appeared in the papers was: "Madame Philips, une Americaine, a fait son apparence dans 'Trovatore. Elle joue assez bien, et si sa voix avait l'importance de ses jambes elle aurait eu sans doute du succes, car elle peut presque chanter." Poor Miss Philips! I felt so sorry for her. I thought of when I had seen her in America, where she had such success in the same roles.
Those who had the slightest premonition of what the future would accord him were a mere handful of enthusiasts. Such a thing as a Wagner cult was undreamed of. He had produced three works for the stage. "Rienzi" had been a brilliant success, "The Flying Dutchman" a mere succès d'estime, "Tannhäuser" a comparative failure.
And in this way, a blunder in French, a mistake in grammar, or a false accentuation became actually a succès de salon. Though I could not help smiling at the absurdity of a vogue whose violence alone indicated its unlikeliness to last, yet I had sufficient of the spirit of my adopted country to benefit by it while it did exist, and never spent a single day out of company.
Friends will rally round her, and she may perhaps discover with a touching surprise that the staunchest and truest are those of whom, in her days of brilliant prosperity, she thought the least. But a succès d'estime is soon exhausted.
Hitherto, ever since the appearance of his first poem, and its instant acceptance by all classes from courtiers to courtesans under a somewhat dubious and two-headed form of popular success, 'vrai succes de scandale s'il en fut' even the potent influence and unequivocal example of Rabelais had never once even in passing or in seeming affected or infected the progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare with a taint or touch of anything offensive to healthier and cleanlier organs of perception than such as may belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan.
You, who have lived so long at Paris, who speak our language in all its shades of elegance; you, who have divined all our secrets of pleasing, who have caught our very air, "Et la grace, encore plus belle que la beaute;" you, who are absolutely a French woman, and a Parisian, what a sensation you will produce at Petersburg! Quels succes vous attendent! Quels hommages!
In 1879 Sir Henry Irving had thought the play too costly to be produced with more than a succes d'estime; but in 1891 he put it on the stage, where it proved the most successful of modern poetic dramas. As published it is, obviously, far too long for public performance. It is not easy to understand why dramatic poets always make their works so much too long.
Both these classes of men, despots and feudal nobles, had a wide field for their ambition among the necessarily dissolved civic institutions; and their easy success contributed to confirm the general tendency of the day to say with Commines, "Qui a le succès a l'honneur," and to confound these two words and ideas.
Their vogue is chiefly a succès de scandale. Sensible people will gape at the spectacle without admiration, and even the reader of the society column in the sensational newspapers keeps more critical detachment than he is usually credited with. In any case neither the boisterous nor the shrinking multimillionaire has any representative standing. He is not what a poor person means by a rich person.
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