ance
of public sentiment this was on Lemaitre's part. He did it, however,
and the action was received in silence. This indulgence encouraging him,
he took the wig off again and wiped his face with it: still no
expression from the audience. Lemaitre then put the wig in his pocket:
the audience remained silent. Surprised at their indulgence, the actor
advanced to the prompter's hole at the front of the stage, bent down
grotesquely, took out his snuff-box and offered some to the invisible
functionary: the audience broke out in a fury. Lemaitre drew the wig
from his pocket and threw it at the _souffleur's_ head: a frightful
tumult followed. The pit climbed over the footlights, determined to make
the insolent actor offer apologies: he refused. The play was stopped,
and the commissaire of the theatre sent the offending actor to prison,
where he remained thirty-nine days. When he got out again Lemaitre
hastened to make his peace with the public. It was easy enough. He had
only to act in the superb manner of which he was master, and everything
was forgiven.

The great genius of the actor finally triumphed over the erratic
dispositions of the man so far as to secure for him a call to that
theatrical holy of holies, the stage of the Comedie Francaise. He made
his debut at the theatre in the Rue Richelieu in _Fredegonde et
Brunehaut_. The frigid array of respectable and scholarly old men who
sit in solemn state in the orchestra-stalls of the Francaise, holding
their seats from year to year by subscription, cabaled against Lemaitre,
and endeavored to drive him from the stage. But the audience with a
tumult of applause stifled the rancor of the classic phalanx of
orchestra-ancients. Lemaitre afterward, in _Othello_, conquered even the
prejudices of these stern stage-censors, and they applauded with the
rest. The actor was in his place at the Comedie Francaise, because it is
by common consent the leading theatre of the world; but the man was
sadly out of his element there. In the "House of Moliere" there is an
atmosphere of respectability as severe among the artists as that of the
most dignified college in America, and the stage is bound round with a
solemn network of dignified forms and sacred traditions, amid which
Lemaitre chafed and fretted like a caged lion. His strolling-player
instincts, his lack of self-respect, his bacchanalian habits and his
irregularities generally unfitted him for association with the scholarly
and corre