was showing what Rachel did not do, and wouldn't do, in the last scene
of Adrienne Lecouvreur, with extraordinary force and intensity."

At the house of another great artist, Madame Viardot,[202] the sister of
Malibran, Dickens dined to meet Georges Sands, that lady having
appointed the day and hour for the interesting festival, which came off
duly on the 10th of January. "I suppose it to be impossible to imagine
anybody more unlike my preconceptions than the illustrious Sand. Just
the kind of woman in appearance whom you might suppose to be the Queen's
monthly nurse. Chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed. Nothing of the
blue-stocking about her, except a little final way of settling all your
opinions with hers, which I take to have been acquired in the country
where she lives, and in the domination of a small circle. A singularly
ordinary woman in appearance and manner. The dinner was very good and
remarkably unpretending. Ourselves, Madame and her son, the Scheffers,
the Sartorises, and some Lady somebody (from the Crimea last) who wore a
species of paletot, and smoked. The Viardots have a house away in the
new part of Paris, which looks exactly as if they had moved into it last
week and were going away next. Notwithstanding which, they have lived in
it eight years. The opera the very last thing on earth you would
associate with the family. Piano not even opened. Her husband is an
extremely good fellow, and she is as natural as it is possible to be."

Dickens was hardly the man to take fair measure of Madame Dudevant in
meeting her thus. He was not familiar with her writings, and had no very
special liking for such of them as he knew. But no disappointment,
nothing but amazement, awaited him at a dinner that followed soon after.
Emile de Girardin gave a banquet in his honour. His description of it,
which he declares to be strictly prosaic, sounds a little Oriental, but
not inappropriately so. "No man unacquainted with my determination never
to embellish or fancify such accounts, could believe in the description
I shall let off when we meet of dining at Emile Girardin's--of the three
gorgeous drawing rooms with ten thousand wax candles in golden sconces,
terminating in a dining-room of unprecedented magnificence with two
enormous transparent plate-glass doors in it, looking (across an
ante-chamber full of clean plates) straight into the kitchen, with the
cooks in their white paper caps dishing the dinner. From his seat