oethe. By
every expedient that mimicry could suggest day after day he studied to
give forth that terrible laugh, but all his efforts were useless: he
could not satisfy his conception with his execution. Then the idea came
into his head to abandon the laugh altogether, and substitute for it
that diabolical grimace which every Mephisto of the grand opera in our
day strives again to repeat. But, unless all testimony is to be utterly
flouted, there has never since been seen a grimace so inexpressibly
hideous and terrifying as that of Lemaitre. He practiced it before the
glass for days, and at last, succeeding in a play of muscles which gave
an expression to his face as sinister and frightful as he wished, he
walked to the window of his room to try the effect of it upon the
passers-by in the street. A woman who chanced to look up at him while he
stood there grinning fell to the ground in a swoon. "Good!" said the
artist, turning away from the window: "I have succeeded at last."

It does not seem wonderful at the present day that Robert Macaire or
Mephistopheles should be played in the manner which all play-goers are
so familiar with, and recognize as the correct mode of embodying the
part; but he who _creates_ the idea that is afterward accepted as a
matter of course is a very different being from him who repeats it. In
our day and country the actor who creates _one_ role in the way Lemaitre
created a score is a made man in his profession. Jefferson created Rip
Van Winkle--Sothern created Dundreary. But Lemaitre, in addition to the
parts already named, created Ruy Blas, Don Caesar de Bazan, Gennaro,
Corporal Cartouche, and a host of others familiar as household words to
American play-goers through the grand army of his imitators who have
played them since.

When Macaire, Germany and Mephisto had successively dawned on the
delighted consciousness of the Parisians--those most insatiate of all
theatre-goers--Lemaitre had won the sceptre of the Paris stage. He
reigned over the public with despotic sway, and the public adored its
theatrical monarch. With his subjects he could do anything, take any
liberty, without fear of dethronement. One evening, during an act in
which he had not to appear on the stage, he was leaning while chatting
with a comrade against that part of the wings known in French as
"harlequin's cloak"--in our stage language the prompt-place. A brass
knob was under his elbow. "What's this machine for?" he said, e