When _la femme de Claude_ is trapped by the man who has come in
search of the husband's secret, and when she is obliged to sit and listen
to her own evil history as he tells it her, she does not interrupt the
telling with the outcries that might be imagined by a lesser actress, she
accompanies it. Her lips are close, but her throat is vocal. None who
heard it can forget the speech-within-speech of one of these
comprehensive noises. It was when the man spoke, for her further
confusion, of the slavery to which she had reduced her lovers; she
followed him, aloof, with a twang of triumph.
If Parisians say, as they do, that she makes a bad Parisienne, it is
because she can be too nearly a woman untamed. They have accused her of
lack of elegance--in that supper scene of _La Dame aux Camelias_,
for instance; taking for ill-breeding, in her Marguerite, that which is
Italian merely and simple. Whether, again, Cyprienne, in _Divorcons_,
can at all be considered a lady may be a question; but this is quite
unquestionable--that she is rather more a lady, and not less, when
Signora Duse makes her a savage.
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