tress grander manners. When Mme. Plessy
represents a duchess, you have to make no allowance. Her limitations
are on the side of the pathetic. If she is brilliant, she is cold; and
I cannot imagine her touching the source of tears. But she is in the
highest degree accomplished; she gives an impression of intelligence
and intellect which is produced by none of her companions--excepting
always the extremely exceptional Sarah Bernhardt. Mme. Plessy's
intellect has sometimes misled her--as, for instance, when it whispered
to her, a few years since, that she could play Agrippine in Racine's
"Britannicus," when that tragedy was presented for the _debuts_ of
Mounet-Sully. I was verdant enough to think her Agrippine very fine;
but M. Sarcey reminds his readers of what he said of it the Monday
after the first performance. "I will not say"--he quotes himself--"that
Mme. Plessy is indifferent. With her intelligence, her natural gifts,
her great situation, her immense authority over the public, one cannot
be indifferent in anything. She is therefore not indifferently bad. She
is bad to a point which cannot be expressed, and which would be
afflicting for dramatic art if it were not that in this great shipwreck
there rise to the surface a few floating fragments of the finest
qualities that nature has ever bestowed upon an artist."

Mme. Plessy retired from the stage six months ago, and it may be said
that the void produced by this event is irreparable. There is not only
no prospect, but there is no hope of filling it up. The present
conditions of artistic production are directly hostile to the formation
of actresses as consummate and as complete as Mme. Plessy. One may not
expect to see her like, any more than one may expect to see a new
manufacture of old lace and old brocade. She carried off with her
something that the younger generation of actresses will consistently
lack--a certain largeness of style and robustness of art. (These
qualities are in a modified degree those of Mlle. Favart.) But if the
younger actresses have the success of Mlles. Croizette and Sarah
Bernhardt, will they greatly care whether they are not "robust"? These
young ladies are children of a later and eminently contemporary type,
according to which an actress undertakes not to interest, but to
fascinate. They are charming--"awfully" charming; strange, eccentric,
and imaginative. It would be needless to speak specifically of Mlle.
Croizette; for although she ha