n-like
majesty of her bearing compelled silence throughout the house. Even the
hired lackeys were overawed by it. Then Adrienne moved swiftly across
the stage and fronted her enemy, speaking into her very face the three
insulting lines which came to her at that moment of the play:

I am not of those women void of shame,
Who, savoring in crime the joys of peace,
Harden their faces till they cannot blush!

The whole house rose and burst forth into tremendous applause. Adrienne
had won, for the woman who had tried to shame her rose in trepidation
and hurried from the theater.

But the end was not yet. Those were evil times, when dark deeds were
committed by the great almost with impunity. Secret poisoning was a
common trade. To remove a rival was as usual a thing in the eighteenth
century as to snub a rival is usual in the twentieth.

Not long afterward, on the night of March 15, 1730, Adrienne Lecouvreur
was acting in one of Voltaire's plays with all her power and
instinctive art when suddenly she was seized with the most frightful
pains. Her anguish was obvious to every one who saw her, and yet she
had the courage to go through her part. Then she fainted and was
carried home.

Four days later she died, and her death was no less dramatic than her
life had been. Her lover and two friends of his were with her, and also
a Jesuit priest. He declined to administer extreme unction unless she
would declare that she repented of her theatrical career. She
stubbornly refused, since she believed that to be the greatest actress
of her time was not a sin. Yet still the priest insisted.

Then came the final moment.

"Weary and revolting against this death, this destiny, she stretched
her arms with one of the old lovely gestures toward a bust which stood
near by and cried--her last cry of passion:

"'There is my world, my hope--yes, and my God!'"

The bust was one of Maurice de Saxe.

THE STORY OF PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD STUART

The royal families of Europe are widely known, yet not all of them are
equally renowned. Thus, the house of Romanoff, although comparatively
young, stands out to the mind with a sort of barbaric power, more
vividly than the Austrian house of Hapsburg, which is the oldest
reigning family in Europe, tracing its beginnings backward until they
are lost in the Dark Ages. The Hohenzollerns of Prussia are
comparatively modern, so far as concerns their royalty. The offshoots
of the Bourb