he facts of Mariette Mazarin's career. She
studied at the Paris Conservatoire; Leloir, of the Comedie Francaise,
was her professor of acting. She made her debut at the Paris Opera as
Aida; later she sang Louise and Carmen at the Opera-Comique. After that
she seems to have been a leading figure at the Theatre de la Monnaie in
Brussels, where she appeared in _Alceste_, _Armide_, _Iphigenie en
Tauride_ and _Iphigenie en Aulide_, even _Orphee_, the great Gluck
repertoire. She has also sung Salome, the three Bruennhildes, Elsa in
_Lohengrin_, Elisabeth in _Tannhaeuser_, in Berlioz's _Prise de Troie_,
_La Damnation de Faust_, _Les Huguenots_, _Griselidis_, _Thais_, _Il
Trovatore_, _Tosca_, _Manon Lescaut_, _Cavalleria Rusticana_,
_Herodiade_, _Le Cid_, and _Salammbo_. She has been heard at Nice, and
probably on many another provincial French stage. At one time she was
the wife of Leon Rothier, the French bass, who has been a member of the
Metropolitan Opera Company for several seasons.

Away from the theatre I remember her as a tall woman, rather awkward,
but quick in gesture. Her hair was dark, and her eyes were dark and
piercing. Her face was all angles; her features were sharp, and when
conversing with her one could not but be struck with a certain eerie
quality which seemed to give mystic colour to her expression. She was
badly dressed, both from an aesthetic and a fashionable point of view. In
a group of women you would pick her out to be a doctor, a lawyer, an
_intellectuelle_. When I talked with her, impression followed
impression--always I felt her intelligence, the play of her intellect
upon the surfaces of her art, but always, too, I felt how narrow a
chance had cast her lot upon the stage, how she easily might have been
something else than a singing actress, how magnificently accidental her
career was!

She was, it would seem, an unusually gifted musician--at least for a
singer,--with a physique and a nervous energy which enabled her to
perform miracles. For instance, on one occasion she astonished even
Oscar Hammerstein by replacing Lina Cavalieri as Salome in _Herodiade_,
a role she had not previously sung for five years, at an hour's notice
on the evening of an afternoon on which she had appeared as Elektra. On
another occasion, when Mary Garden was ill she sang Louise with only a
short forewarning. She told me that she had learned the music of Elektra
between January 1, 1910, and the night of the first perform