e role of Robert Macaire
had not had all the development of which it was capable. He associated
with himself two authors, Antier and Saint-Amant, who accepted his ideas
and wove them into a new play under his direction, bearing the name of
his thieving hero. The success the piece achieved was something
prodigious. All Paris ran to see it, and it was played for an
unparalleled length of time. Lemaitre was so in love with the part that
he used often to play it off the stage. Thus, one day at the Cafe de
Malte they brought him his bill after breakfast. He arose, threw ten
francs on the counter, and was leaving. "But the bill is ten francs
fifty," said the cafe-master. "Very good," said Lemaitre: "the fifty
centimes are for the garcon." The stage and caricature have since
dressed up this _mot_ in various forms, but Lemaitre was its first
publisher. During this same winter of 1836 he was skating one afternoon
on the basin in the Luxembourg garden, where he was the object of great
admiration for his graceful evolutions. Presently one of a group of
women, as he passed near, recognized him and cried out, "My fifteen
francs, Monsieur Frederic: have you forgotten my fifteen francs?" The
actor stopped. The woman was his former hostess of the Latin quarter,
with whom he had lived in the days of his impecuniosity during his first
connection with the Odeon. Putting on the air of Robert Macaire,
Lemaitre replied, "Your fifteen francs, madam? You are mighty
impertinent. Under the alcove in my room I left an old wig. That wig
cost me thirty-five francs: you owe me a louis. I will send for it
to-morrow." And he skated calmly away. Next day, however, the hostess
received her due.

After having played this wicked and trivial thief so long that people
began to say (as they say now of the creator of Rip Van Winkle) that he
could not play anything else, Lemaitre startled the town with a new
creation, utterly distinct from anything he had hitherto done. From
depicting the most abject rascality he passed in a moment, as it seemed,
to the representation of delicacy of sentiment and grandeur of soul in
Alexandre Dumas's play of _Richard d'Arlington_, and again as Gennaro in
Victor Hugo's _Lucretia Borgia_. Yet the wild dissipation of the man's
life was never so great as at this precise period of his career. Harel,
the manager of the theatre where he was now playing (the Porte
Saint-Martin), was obliged almost every night to send emissaries after