, raving and yelling like a maniac.

Adrienne was brought up at the wash-tub, and became accustomed to a
wandering life, in which she went from one town to another. What she
had inherited from her mother is, of course, not known; but she had all
her father's strangely pessimistic temper, softened only by the fact
that she was a girl. From her earliest years she was unhappy; yet her
unhappiness was largely of her own choosing. Other girls of her own
station met life cheerfully, worked away from dawn till dusk, and then
had their moments of amusement, and even jollity, with their
companions, after the fashion of all children. But Adrienne Lecouvreur
was unhappy because she chose to be. It was not the wash-tub that made
her so, for she had been born to it; nor was it the half-mad outbreaks
of her father, because to her, at least, he was not unkind. Her
discontent sprang from her excessive sensibility.

Indeed, for a peasant child she had reason to think herself far more
fortunate than her associates. Her intelligence was great. Ambition was
awakened in her before she was ten years of age, when she began to
learn and to recite poems--learning them, as has been said, "between
the wash-tub and the ironing-board," and reciting them to the
admiration of older and wiser people than she. Even at ten she was a
very beautiful child, with great lambent eyes, an exquisite complexion,
and a lovely form, while she had the further gift of a voice that
thrilled the listener and, when she chose, brought tears to every eye.
She was, indeed, a natural elocutionist, knowing by instinct all those
modulations of tone and varied cadences which go to the hearer's heart.

It was very like Adrienne Lecouvreur to memorize only such poems as
were mournful, just as in after life she could win success upon the
stage only in tragic parts. She would repeat with a sort of ecstasy the
pathetic poems that were then admired; and she was soon able to give up
her menial work, because many people asked her to their houses so that
they could listen to the divinely beautiful voice charged with the
emotion which was always at her command.

When she was thirteen her father moved to Paris, where she was placed
at school--a very humble school in a very humble quarter of the city.
Yet even there her genius showed itself at that early age. A number of
children and young people, probably influenced by Adrienne, formed
themselves into a theatrical company from the pu