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Updated: June 4, 2025
In the theatre she blossoms forth, she is the lily of the stage. Young and inexperienced as I am, I have broken my heart over her several times. I could write a sonnet-sequence to her, yes, the fair, pale, tear-stained thing, white-robed, with her hair down her back; I could call her by a hundred names, in a hundred languages, Melisande, Elizabeth, Juliet, Butterfly, Phedre, Minnehaha, etc.
It has sometimes been said I knew how to play that part. If ever I could play it, I shall show this when I play it the next and the last time. Monsieur Voltaire, I charge you to go this night to the director of the Théâtre Français and say to him that I shall be ready to play Phèdre four days from now, as announced."
Hippolytus refuses the love which Phèdre offers after a long struggle with herself, and this gives cause for the violent bursts in which Rachel shows her power. It was an outburst of passion of which I have no conception, and I felt as if I saw a new order of being; not a woman, but a personified passion. The vehemence and strength were wonderful. It was in parts very touching.
Then we have the first one of the lady competitors, Mademoiselle Edet, a tall, awkward girl of eighteen, with a flat face and Chinese-like features, dressed up in a gown of cream-yellow foulard trimmed with wide fringe and made with a loose jacket, whereon the fringes wave wildly in the air as she flings her arms around in the tragic love-making of Phèdre.
Eve and her serpent seem to me a pretty little case of symbolical adultery; you must suppress the Psalms of David, inspired by the highly adulterous love affairs of that Louis XIV. of Judah; you must make a bonfire of Mithridate, le Tartuffe, l'Ecole des Femmes, Phedre, Andromaque, le Mariage de Figaro, Dante's Inferno, Petrarch's Sonnets, all the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the romances of the Middle Ages, the History of France, and of Rome, etc., etc.
Very touching in her invocation to her "old Corneille," Mademoiselle Gontier was superb at the moment when the comedienne, knowing at last who is her rival, quotes from Racine that passage in 'Phedre' which she throws, so to speak, in the face of the patrician woman: .... Je sais ses perfidies, OEnone! et ne suis point de ces femmes hardies Qui, goutant dans la crime une honteuse paix, Ont su se faire un front qui ne rougit jamais.
Eve and her serpent seem to me a pretty little case of symbolical adultery; you must suppress the Psalms of David, inspired by the highly adulterous love affairs of that Louis XIV. of Judah; you must make a bonfire of Mithridate, le Tartuffe, l'Ecole des Femmes, Phedre, Andromaque, le Mariage de Figaro, Dante's Inferno, Petrarch's Sonnets, all the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the romances of the Middle Ages, the History of France, and of Rome, etc., etc.
And Racine he confounded with his offspring of pretentiously introspective Parisian psychologists. None of these people had really broken free from the classics. The critics were for ever discussing Tartuffe and Phedre. They never wearied of hearing the same plays over and over again.
Her voice was the voice of Phedre, and the gesture of lassitude with which she let her arms fall into her lap was precisely that which only the day before she had used to accompany Portia's plaint of my little body is a-weary of this great world.
Even in Paris I have never heard a purer, finer rendition of a passage in Phèdre than one day burst from her lips in a moment of deep feeling, yet I cannot tell you how or where she learned French. She made her début in tragedy, somewhere in the West, and when she reappeared in New York her success was brilliant.
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