"Great God! how handsome this man is! how sublime! how admirable!" On this evening Le Kain rendered the illusion more complete than ever. Exerting over his fascinated audience that sovereign influence which, in ancient times, would have been compared to that of the sibyls or prophetesses, and which at the present could be likened more justly to the all-powerful action of the magnetic fluid, he transported, turn by turn, the entire audience from icy thrills of terror to the sympathetic anguish of compassion-from exclamations of surprise, repressed as soon as uttered, to bursting acclamations of applause. His acting, delicate and profound, pathetic and terrible, drew prolonged bravos from the lips of the gravest; unanimous plaudits from hands the most strictly shackled by etiquette; involuntary tears from eyes the most securely shielded by coquetry. Among the dames whose emotion betrayed itself the most unaffectedly and openly, Le Kain, with that eagle glance which actors, who are masters of themselves, know how to dart into the farthest recesses of the house, across the brilliant limits of the balustrade and the lustre, soon remarked a young stranger near the centre of the front boxes, whose attention resembled a sort of extacy, whose delight seemed rapture. Her beautiful face, shaded by ringlets of chestnut-colored hair, appeared to stand out from amid the red and gilded columns of the box, like those ravishing forms of the ancient masters, which seemed ready to start from the canvass. To judge from her air and apparel, not less than from the seat which she occupied, the young dame moved doubtless in the highest circles. A dame de compagnie was seated behind her chair, while she herself leaned over the edge of the box, with an air of ardent melancholy. One hand was partly hidden beneath her hair, yet it did not support her cheek, while the other hung half over the balustrade, as if by an habitual instinct of female coquetry. From the almost devout attention with which she watched Le Kain, a spectator would have said that she trembled lest she should lose a sound of his voice, a glance of his eye, and as often as he surpassed himself in some moment of more than usual inspiration, she at once, by a quick and significant gesture, prevented the boisterous approbation of the pit and galleries. An actor, more than any one, appreciates the value of attention, and Le Kain saw at once that no person in the house listened so carefully and so well as the beautiful spectatress in the front box. From an impulse of gratitude, easily to be comprehended, he hastened to repay her; and separating her in his mind from the rest of the audience, as she separated him from the rest of the actors, he began to gaze upon her from his place, as she gazed at him from hers, and thus performed, as it were, the tragedy of Adelaide for her alone. This was the more easy, as this faculty of concentrating the thoughts upon a single isolated object, is a distinctive attribute of good performers, acknowledged by them, and long since remarked by others. There passed, until the end of the piece, a continual interchange of sublime inspirations, and of delicate acknowledgments, between the actor and the beautiful unknown; and not only was the suspension of the mysterious relation between the house and the performer unperceived by the spectators, but even she, who absorbed, as it were, all the thoughts of the actor, did not, in her unaffected attention, appear to perceive the flattering homage of which she was the involuntary object. Le Kain, on his part, did not lose a single impression, however trivial, which his acting produced upon her. Sometimes he saw her testify her satisfaction by a graceful movement of the head, or her admiration by an almost imperceptible tremor. Sometimes he distinguished, as he fancied, the violence or the mildness of her emotions, by the heaving, more or less rapid, of her respiration. Sometimes he felt with pride that she contemplated him from the heights of extacy, or through the dreamy veil of revery. When reciting the melancholy passages of his part, the moist light of his half-closed eyes were reflected in the softened orbs of his lovely listener. When the piece drew near its close, he saw that her agitation increased; that her manifestations of terror and of pity grew more frequent. She placed her hand at times upon her heart to repress its beatings, and to her eyes to wipe away the tears; sighs and stifled sobs hovered upon her trembling lips; finally, when, at the last words of Vendome, the curtain fell, she started up in haste, and unable longer to control her emotions, mingled her convulsive plaudits with the approving clamor of the spectators. II. THE LETTER. On the day following this evening, (the fairest which had yet shone upon his life,) Le Kain received a letter without signature, enclosing some verses upon his triumph of the preceding night. Everything about this epistle betrayed the woman; the perfumed paper, th handwriting-even the manner in which it was folded; but from the neatness of the style, above all, from the passionate delicacy of its eulogiums, Le Kain did not hesitate for a moment; he did not doubt that the author of the flattering epistle was his unknown of the front box. A single consideration however was near overthrowing this conviction. To the merited encomiums which were bestowed upon his talent, and especially upon the manner in which he had displayed it in Adelaide, his anonymous correspondent joined others, timid and indirect indeed, but which were far from being marked by the same justice, upon the advantages of his person and the beauty of his features. The words "fine head, superb forehead, majestic glance, kingly stature," occurred in almost every verse. The writer was evidently sincere; the fine head of Vendome had made an impression upon his admirer which she thought she might avow under the mask of an incognito, and which the actor could at pleasure exalt into one of those passions of the stage, which were so much in vogue in those days. Le Kain at last found an explanation of this error, on recalling the representation of the preceding evening; he remembered that his beautiful unknown had gazed at him with the naked eye merely, unaided by any of those optical instruments, the use of which, indeed, was, at that time, far less general than at present. It was evident that the distance and the magic of the scene had caused the illusion of the young dame. Any other than Le Kain would have endeavored, perhaps, to prolong this illusion, and to profit by it; but this actor was both a man of genius and a man of honor. He resolved, therefore, to dispel a delusion so flattering to his personal vanity, and to his talent as an actor. After having satisfied himself by inquiries concerning her box, her carriage, her livery, and ascertaining that she was the Baroness of Rosenberg, the wife of an ambassador extraordinary from Germany, he sent her secretly an excellent opera glass with these enigmatical words: "To Madame, the Baroness of Rosenberg, from Vendome, on the part of Le Kain.” III. THE DISENCHANTMENT. On the following evening Adelaide was repeated at the Théatre Française, and the ambassadress did not fail to be present, and in the same box which she had occupied at the first representation. Among the thousand heads of the crowd which had assembled to witness his performance, Le Kain, on appearing upon the stage, distinguished two objects: the charming face of the young stranger, and between her delicate fingers, which seemed ready to raise it to her eyes, the opera glass which he had sent to her on the preceding evening. Renouncing then, for a moment, the magic of his art, and passing, as it were, beneath the disenchanting instrument, he at once banished the character of Vendome, to appear simply the actor Le Kain, and, for a moment, displayed himself to the eyes of the woman, who, three days before, had so highly admired his beauty-as he had the misfortune to be in reality—that is to say, coarse and ill-favored. The Baroness of Rosenberg trembled from head to foot; the opera glass fell from her hand; she retired suddenly to the farthest extremity of her box, and concealed her face in her hands. After having smiled at the first movement of the young dame, the actor, fearing lest the shock might have been too severe, hastened, on her account as well as upon his own, to resume his part, and, with all the resources of his incomparable talent, he at once gave the best proof of his powers, by reappearing more sublime than ever in a sudden burst of inspiration, which drew an involuntary exclamation from the whole house. He at the same time cast his eyes towards the baroness, to receive her plaudits with those of the rest of the spectators; but judge of his surprise and regret-the box was empty, the young baroness had disappeared. 66 Unhappy creature!" he thought, as he mangled, for the first time, the lines of Voltaire, notwithstanding the repeated whispers of the prompter, "this woman loved Vendome, and Le Kain has been his executioner!" This supposition was but too correct. A month passed; the ambassadress did not appear again at the Théatre Française, and when he ventured to make inquiries after her, he learned that she had returned to Germany. FIFTEEN years afterwards, in the first days of February, 1778, Le Kain, exhausted by his labors, discouraged by the injustice of his rivals, and weary of the triumphs which had failed to secure his repose, was confined to his chamber by a lingering illness. For several weeks, to the great disappointment of the court and the city, he had been unable to appear on the stage, and his physician, seated near the fire with a few of his intimate friends, had just informed him that his convalescence was yet distant, when a domestic suddenly entered the apartment with a letter; he placed it in his master's hands; it was post-marked Strasburg. Le Kain opened it carelessly, but an exclamation of delight and surprise broke from his lips, upon reading the following lines: "The Baroness of Rosenberg will be in Paris in three days. On the evening of the fifth of February she will appear in the front box of the Theatre Française, and will depart on the following day for Italy." 66 My dear doctor," said Le Kain, rising suddenly, like a man completely restored to health, "I am delighted to be able to give an immediate refutation to your sad predictions. I no longer need your cares nor your prescriptions. I shall appear upon the boards next Saturday, the fifth of February." "Have you lost your senses?" cried his physician and his friends, alarmed at his sudden enthusiasm. "By no means," he replied, with great energy; "on the contrary, I have found both health and strength, as you can see." It was impossible to convince him of the contrary, when everything, in truth, seemed to announce his recovery, and, in spite of the remonstrances of the doctor and of his friends, it was decided that Le Kain should make his appearance on the following Saturday at the Théatre Française. He resolved to appear in Adelaide, and the joyful tidings was soon spread throughout all Paris. "It is in the character of Vendome that she must see me again," exclaimed the great actor, grown younger by fifteen years, and rejoiced to find, at last, a noble occasion to bid farewell to the toils of his profession. On the appointed evening, Le Kain and the Baroness of Rosenberg found themselves face to face with each other, on the same spot where they had first met, and with still greater pleasure; for, besides that this pleasure was shared equally by both, its value was heightened by the charm of the purest remembrances. The ambassadress could now contemplate, without peril and without disappointment, both the poetic personage which she had dared to love in imagination, and the modest actor who had had the courage to arouse her from her dream; the latter endowed no longer with the sad power of injuring the former, both forming in her eyes but one and the same artist, and this artist unequalled, acting once more for her alone, as he had acted fifteen years before, displaying before her, in a part consecrated by their mutual predilections, a talent and a power which he had never exhibited before. "I do not fear to assert," says the Baron de Grimm, in speaking of this representation, that the scene which we beheld on the fifth of February in the Théatre Française, is not only a spectacle unique in Europe, but that it is the wonder of our age-a wonder which no other age can hope to see revived. I have felt the empire of the scenic art in its highest perfection, and my soul has been so deeply moved that it has required several days to calm it, and to restore it to its balance." "On this evening," says La Harpe," the play of Le Kain's features was not owing merely to the action of his muscles; it arose from the agitation of a soul moved to its very depths, yet revealing but a part of its torture, repressing far more than it displayed on the surface. His cries and his tears were the result of real sufferings; the gloomy, fearful fire of his glances, the stamp of grandeur impressed upon his brow, the frightful contraction of his muscles, the tremor of his lips, and the wild disorder of his features, all testified to a heart full to overflowing-a heart impatient of constraint-impatient to pour forth its griefs, which, when revealed, found no relief. We heard the echo of the inward storm, and we felt that the unhappy man, like the ancient priesteses, was crushed by the divinity which had descended upon his bosom. It is necessary, therefore, to have seen the effect that he produced, in order to imagine it and to credit it. One could never conceive that profound terror, that appalling silence, interrupted at times by the accents of grief, which responded to those of the actor, by the sobs which testified to the agitation of every heart, by the tears which had need to flow, to relieve the suffocated bosom. What a moment! what a spectacle! From the weeping which was heard on every side of the house; from the multiplied signs of general desolation, one would have thought that he beheld a people, who had just been smitten with some great calamity." This calamity was but too soon to be realized, both for the world of art and for the public; and this desolation was doubtless a presentiment. For, stricken with an incurable malady on that very evening, as he left the scene of a triumph unexampled in the annals of the stage, Le Kain died, three days after, a victim to a noble sentiment of his heart, and to the supreme enthusiasm of his genius. By a sad but remarkable coincidence, he died on the evening preceding Voltaire's triumphant return to Paris; so that the humble hearse of the actor crossed the passage of the brilliant car which bore the friend to whose glory he had so greatly contributed, and who had come at last, after an absence of thirty years, but too late, to see him reign unrivalled upon the scene where he had guided his first steps. The Baroness of Rosenberg delayed her departure, in order to be present at the funeral of Le Kain. She followed him, bathed in tears, in a mourning carriage, to his last resting place. DEATH OF RINGGOLD. AMID the carnage thick he lay, |
