her most splendid roles, in Louis Verneuil's play "Daniel"; she played the same role in London in 1922, and in December — that is, after she had reached seventy-seven — she fell into her final illness, and died in Paris in March of 1923.

The contemporaries of this actress describe her matchless power, her wondrous magnetism, her angelic voice, and that gleam-ing radiance that accompanied her all her life long. She acted for the most famous playwrights and played parts in a great many plays, and in all of this she worked with diligence and devotion, lavishing all her artistic gifts upon the piece in her hands. She was generous to those she loved, an exemplary mother to her son, and courageous; and the strangest thing in her was that vitality which her life never exhausted — that, together with her strange madness, endears her to the bosom of history.

"May Agate" relates in her book "Madame Sarah" that while the great actress was performing "L'Aiglon," the author "Rostand" came one night and entered her private suite; she stretched out her hand and began to ruffle the hairs of his head — she was then past sixty, and Rostand, who had loved her a long while, was twenty-three years her junior — and she said to him teasingly: "I see your head is going bald, my dear; you must look after it!!"

When Sarah was exhilarated, and reached the summit in her acting, she would repeat this phrase: "God was present with me tonight." But her rival "Sophie Croizette" drew a portion of the public to her own side, and so the audience of playgoers split into Bernhardtists and Croizettists; on which Sarah remarked: the shopkeepers and property-owners were with Sophie, while the artists and the students crowded

to my side. And she used to insist that the angels were always beside her. What admits of no dispute is that she was a turbulent woman, unsteady of opinion; but she was courageous, devoted to her work, careless

of herself, ablaze with feeling. In sum: she was a genius who shone throughout her life, and one of those whose music, and the splendor of whose light, time grieves to have lost.