ng
except making his fortune by staking this money and a faint dull kind of
love for the child. It is quite impossible to satisfy one's self by
saying enough of such a magnificent performance. I have never seen him
come near its finest points in anything else. He said two things in a
way that would put him far apart from all other actors. One to his wife,
when he has exultingly shown her the money, and she has asked him how he
got it--'I found it;' and the other to his old companion and tempter,
when he charged him with having killed that traveler, and he suddenly
went headlong mad and took him by the throat and howled out, 'It wasn't
I who murdered him--it was misery!' And such a dress! such a face! and,
above all, such an extraordinarily guilty, wicked thing as he made of a
knotted branch of a tree which was his walking-stick from the moment
when the idea of the murder came into his head! I could write pages
about him. It is an impression quite ineffaceable. He got half boastful
of that walking-staff to himself, and half afraid of it, and didn't know
whether to be grimly pleased that it had the jagged end, or to hate it
and be horrified at it. He sat at a little table in the inn-yard
drinking with the traveler; and this horrible stick got between them
like the Devil, while he counted on his fingers the uses he could put
the money to."

It will be a surprise to many readers to learn that Frederic Lemaitre is
still living and still playing. On the evening of March 25, 1874, I went
to this same old theatre of the Ambigu to see him play Feuillantin in
_Le Portier du Numero 15_. The part is that of an old man, and the
actor played it "in his habit as he lived," without artificial make-up
or wig. His own long iron-gray hair floated on the air; the wrinkles in
his old face were painted there by the hand of Time; his voice was
cracked and broken, and his gait that of advanced age. I had formed the
impression, beforehand, that Lemaitre was simply a tottering old wreck,
a painful and pitiable sight; and I went to the theatre prepared to be
saddened by the spectacle of a ruin. A ruin it was, perhaps, but what a
grand and impressive one! The old man was magnificent! So far from
exciting pity, he roused in me feelings of the warmest enthusiasm. So
far from seeming to ask for sympathy, he compelled admiration by force
of his splendid pantomime, in witnessing which one forgot he had no
voice, or remembered it only to see in the fact