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Updated: June 4, 2025
The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaïre nor Phèdre. To those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with a splendour to which this country has, for a long time, seen nothing comparable, Mr. Hunt is an absolute stranger.
Everybody on the stage knew about it, and stood at the door of my dressing-room wishing to comfort me, Mounet-Sully, who was playing Hippolyte, told me that he had dreamed "we were playing Phedre, and you were hissed; and my dreams always go by contraries so," he cried, "we shall have a tremendous success."
Who has dared to interfere with my cats, my dear friends? Le Cid Chateaubriand Phédre Montcalm eh? What has been done with them? And the doors, the little doors I had made for them nailed up, I see! Ah ah, madame this is your work! You have killed them! Say then, am I not right? Miserable wretch of a woman!"
Clairon, the actress in vogue, recites the roles of Phedre and Agrippine, Lekain reads Voltaire, and Goldoni a comedy of his own, which the hostess finds tiresome. New books, new plays, the last song, the latest word of the philosophers all are talked about, eulogized, or dismissed with a sarcasm. The wit of Mme. du Deffand is feared, but it fascinates.
A debutante, as beautiful as she was clever, was drawing the entire capital to the Comedie Francaise. She obtained especial applause in the difficult part of Phedre. My friends spoke marvels of it, and wished to take me there with them. Their box was engaged. We arrived as the curtain was going up. As I took my seat I noticed a certain stir in the orchestra and pit.
The year before the jury had only awarded her two secondary prizes; not that she had not deserved the first, but that on account of her youth they had thought it wiser to keep her back for another year. The young artist was to compete for tragedy in the first act of Phedre, for comedy in Alfred de Musset's Barberine. The dawn of the fifteenth was clear and quiet.
But then sounded the three knocks which herald the rising of the curtain, and the play began. When the time came for Mademoiselle Lecouvreur to appear and the first glimpse of her as Phèdre in her classic garb was seen, a frantic roar of applause went up men shouting, women weeping their welcome.
She seems to speak her words, her lines, with a kind of joyful satisfaction; all the artist in her delights in the task. Her nerves are in it, as well as her intelligence; but everything is coloured by the poetry, everything is subordinate to beauty. Well, and she seems still to be the same Phèdre that she was eleven or twelve years ago, as she is the same "Dame aux Camélias."
It comes to us with the tradition to which it has given life; it does not spring into our midst, unruly as nature. But it is in "Phèdre" that Sarah Bernhardt must be seen, if we are to realise all that her art is capable of. In writing "Phèdre," Racine anticipated Sarah Bernhardt.
When the curtain rose, and when Adrienne appeared as Phedre, an uproar began. It was clear to the great actress that a plot had been devised against her. In an instant her whole soul was afire. The queen-like majesty of her bearing compelled silence throughout the house. Even the hired lackeys were overawed by it.
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