not speak its prose properly or
tolerably. She disliked the hair-powder necessary to Adrienne
Lecouvreur and Gabrielle de Belle Isle, although her beauty, for all
its severity, did not lose picturesqueness in the costumes of the time
of Louis XV. As Gabrielle she was more girlish and gentle, pathetic,
and tender, than was her wont, while the signal fervor of her speech
addressed to Richelieu, beginning, "Vous mentez, Monsieur le Duc,"
stirred the audience to the most excited applause.

Rachel was seen upon the stage for the last time at Charleston on
December 17, 1856. She played Adrienne Lecouvreur. She had been
tempted to America by the prospect of extravagant profits. It had been
dinned into her ears that Jenny Lind, by thirty-eight performances in
America, had realized seventeen hundred thousand francs. Why might not
she, Rachel, receive as much? And then, she was eager to quit Paris.
There had been strange worship there of Madame Ristori, even in the
rejected part of Medea. But already Rachel's health was in a
deplorable state. Her constitution, never very strong, had suffered
severely from the cruel fatigues, the incessant exertions, she had
undergone. It may be, too, that the deprivations and sufferings of her
childhood now made themselves felt as over-due claims that could be no
longer denied or deferred. She forced herself to play, in fulfilment
of her engagement, but she was languid, weak, emaciated; she coughed
incessantly, her strength was gone; she was dying slowly but certainly
of phthisis. And she appeared before an audience that applauded her,
it is true, but cared nothing for Racine and Corneille, knew little of
the French language, and were urgent that she should sing the
"Marseillaise" as she had sung it in 1848! It was forgotten, or it was
not known in America, that the actress had long since renounced
revolutionary sentiments to espouse the cause of the Second Empire.
She performed all her more important characters, however, at New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston. Nor was the undertaking commercially
disappointing, if it did not wholly satisfy expectation. She returned
to France possessed of nearly three hundred thousand francs as her
share of the profits of her forty-two performances in the United
States; but she returned to die. The winter of 1856 she passed at
Cairo. She returned to France in the spring of 1857, but her
physicians forbade her to remain long in Paris. In September she moved
again