built up her
art. She told how she studied the words of her songs, how she planned
them, what a large part the plasticity of her body played in their
interpretation, and when she was done all she had said only went to
prove that there is but one Yvette Guilbert.

She stripped all pretence from her vocal method, explained how she sang
now in her throat, now falsetto. "When I wish to make a certain sound
for a certain effect I practise by myself until I succeed in making it.
That is my vocal method. I never had a teacher. I would not trust my
voice to a teacher!" Her method of learning to breathe was a practical
one. She took the refrain of a little French song to work upon. She made
herself learn to sing the separate phrases of this song without
breathing; then two phrases together, etc., until she could sing the
refrain straight through without taking a breath. Ratan Devi has told me
that Indian singers, who never study vocalization in the sense that we
do, are adepts in the art of breathing. "They breathe naturally and with
no difficulty because it never occurs to them to distort a phrase by
interrupting it for breath. They have respect for the phrase and sing it
through. When you study with an occidental music teacher you will find
that he will mark little Vs on the page indicating where the pupil may
take breath until he can capture the length of the phrase. This method
would be incomprehensible to a Hindu or to any other oriental." The
wonderful breath control of Hebrew cantors who sing long and florid
phrases without interruption is another case of the same kind.

Mme. Guilbert finds her effects everywhere, in nature, in art, in
literature. When she was composing her interpretation of _La Soularde_
she searched in vain for the cry of the thoughtless children as they
stone the poor drunken hag, until she discovered it, quite by accident
one evening at the Comedie Francaise, in the shriek of Mounet-Sully in
_Oedipe-Roi_. In studying the _Voyage a Bethleem_, one of the most
popular songs of her repertoire, she felt the need of breaking the
monotony of the stanzas. It was her own idea to interpolate the
watchman's cry of the hours, and to add the jubilant coda, _Il est ne,
le divin enfant_, extracted from another song of the same period. With
Guilbert nothing is left to chance. Do you remember one of her most
celebrated chansons, _Notre Petite Compagne_ of Jules Laforgue, which
she sings so strikingly to a Waldteufel