irtually closed, or at the best uncertain.

I enjoyed but two snatches of the older representational art--no
particular of either of which, however, has faded from me; the earlier
and rarer of these an evening at the Gymnase for a _spectacle coupe_,
with Mesdames Rose Cheri, Melanie, Delaporte and Victoria (afterwards
Victoria-La-fontaine). I squeeze again with my mother, my aunt and my
brother into the stuffy baignoire, and I take to my memory in especial
Madame de Girardin's Une Femme qui Deteste son Mari; the thrilling
story, as I judged it, of an admirable lady who, to save her loyalist
husband, during the Revolution, feigns the most Jacobin opinions,
represents herself a citoyenne of citoyennes, in order to keep him the
more safely concealed in her house. He flattens himself, to almost
greater peril of life, behind a panel of the wainscot, which she has a
secret for opening when he requires air and food and they may for a
fearful fleeting instant be alone together; and the point of the picture
is in the contrast between these melting moments and the heroine's
_tenue_ under the tremendous strain of receiving on the one side the
invading, investigating Terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious but
successfully baffled, and on the other her noble relatives, her
husband's mother and sister if I rightly remember, who are not in the
secret and whom, for perfect prudence, she keeps out of it, though alone
with her, and themselves in hourly danger, they might be trusted, and
who, believing him concealed elsewhere and terribly tracked, treat her,
in her republican rage, as lost to all honour and all duty. One's sense
of such things after so long a time has of course scant authority for
others; but I myself trust my vision of Rose Cheri's fine play just as I
trust that of her _physique ingrat_, her at first extremely odd and
positively osseous appearance; an emaciated woman with a high bulging
forehead, somewhat of the form of Rachel's, for whom the triumphs of
produced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth great dramas of
the younger Dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscence
of this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the old
dingy Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where I saw in my brother's
company a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired Ponsard, Ce
qui Plait aux Femmes; a piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success,
but that was to leave with me ineffaceable im