ve been born with an abnormal
capacity for enduring hardship and mental anguish; so that by a sort of
contradiction they find their happiness in sorrow. Such women are
endowed with a remarkable degree of sensibility. They feel intensely.
In moments of grief and disappointment, and even of despair, there
steals over them a sort of melancholy pleasure. It is as if they loved
dim lights and mournful music and scenes full of sad suggestion.

If everything goes well with them, they are unwilling to believe that
such good fortune will last. If anything goes wrong with them, they are
sure that this is only the beginning of something even worse. The music
of their lives is written in a minor key.

Now, for such women as these, the world at large has very little
charity. It speaks slightingly of them as "agonizers." It believes that
they are "fond of making scenes." It regards as an affectation
something that is really instinctive and inevitable. Unless such women
are beautiful and young and charming they are treated badly; and this
is often true in spite of all their natural attractiveness, for they
seem to court ill usage as if they were saying frankly:

"Come, take us! We will give you everything and ask for nothing. We do
not expect true and enduring love. Do not be constant or generous or
even kind. We know that we shall suffer. But, none the less, in our
sorrow there will be sweetness, and even in our abasement we shall feel
a sort of triumph."

In history there is one woman who stands out conspicuously as a type of
her melancholy sisterhood, one whose life was full of disappointment
even when she was most successful, and of indignity even when she was
most sought after and admired. This woman was Adrienne Lecouvreur,
famous in the annals of the stage, and still more famous in the annals
of unrequited--or, at any rate, unhappy--love.

Her story is linked with that of a man no less remarkable than herself,
a hero of chivalry, a marvel of courage, of fascination, and of
irresponsibility.

Adrienne Lecouvreur--her name was originally Couvreur--was born toward
the end of the seventeenth century in the little French village of
Damery, not far from Rheims, where her aunt was a laundress and her
father a hatter in a small way. Of her mother, who died in childbirth,
we know nothing; but her father was a man of gloomy and ungovernable
temper, breaking out into violent fits of passion, in one of which,
long afterward, he died