credible fire and magnetism! such subjugation of a vast audience
to his will!--language fails to express the rapturous accounts which
those old Frenchmen now living who saw him then will give you with many
a roll upward of the eyes, many a hopeless shake of head and shrug of
shoulder and agitation of outstretched hand.

Boiling over with health, radiant with youth, full of vigor, Lemaitre
now began to lead a life of extravagance which would almost have given
Bacchus the delirium tremens and driven Hercules into a consumption. But
his excesses seemed to take away nothing from the magnificence of his
physical beauty, and he was petted by the fair sex in a manner to which
the coddlings of a young English unmarried curate are as nothing. Nor
can it be said that the actor was quite an anchorite: few French
bachelors are. It is not meet to dwell on this phase of Lemaitre's
character at length, perhaps; but I should hardly envy the old man's
feelings in these days when, sitting by his lonely hearth, he lets his
fancy wander among the ruins of the dead past, if he ever does such a
thing.

There is a gray-haired and toothless old woman at present engaged in
that menagerie of old women, the old-clo' market of the Temple in Paris,
who might go wandering back with Lemaitre into that dead past of his if
he wanted company. Fifty years ago she was a ruddy-cheeked young girl
from the provinces, who had come up to Paris with a little fortune of
thirty thousand francs, which a relative had left her. Going one night
to the theatre where Lemaitre was playing, she became fascinated with
Georges de Germany, and went to see him evening after evening.
Forty-five nights in succession she attended the theatre to weep, to
shudder and to admire, and ended by offering the actor her heart, her
hand and her fortune. Lemaitre accepted the heart, but declined the
hand; and as for the fortune, pooh! What did he want of the lady's
pin-money? Nevertheless, six weeks saw the end of her little fortune,
and left her with a quantity of elegant dresses and a few diamonds.
Waking up one morning from her dream, she betook herself to the old
market of the Temple, and began to try and get her money back. She is
said to be worth a good deal more to-day than Lemaitre is.

In the drama of _Faust_ Lemaitre's genius took a new development in
creating the part of Mephistopheles. The feature of the part which
balked and baffled him was the infernal laugh indicated by G