After her critical period of apprenticeship was successfully passed and she was free to govern herself, she rose to be queen of the French stage—­a position which she held for eighteen years, during which she was worshipped and petted by the whole world.  As a social leader, she was received and made much of by the great ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.  Her taste in dress was exquisite in its simplicity, being in perfect harmony with the reserved, retiring, and amiable actress herself.

Possibly no actress, singer, or other public woman ever received such homage and general recognition.  With all her great qualities as an actress, vigor, grandeur, wild, savage energy, superb articulation, irreproachable diction, and a marvellous sense of situations, she lacked the one quality which we miss in Sarah Bernhardt also—­a true tenderness and compassion.  As a tragedienne she can be compared to Talma only.  Her greed for money soon ended her brilliant career; unlike her sister in art, she amassed a fortune, leaving over one million five hundred thousand francs.

Compared with Bernhardt, Rachel is said to have been the greater in pure tragedy, but she did not possess as many arts of fascination.  There are many points of similarity between the two actresses:  Rachel was at times artificial, wanting in tenderness and depth, while at times she was superhuman in her passion and emotion, and often put more into her role than was intended; and the acting of Sarah Bernhardt has the same characteristics.  Rachel, however, was much more subject to moods and fits of inspiration than is Bernhardt—­especially was she incapable of acting at her best on evenings of her first appearance in a new role.  Her critical power was very weak in comparison with her intellectual power, the reverse being true of her modern rival.  Rachel’s greatest inspiration was Phedre, and in this role Bernhardt “is weak, unequal.  We see all the viciousness in Phedre and none of her grandeur.  She breaks herself to pieces against the huge difficulties of the conception and does not succeed in moving us....  Rachel was the mouthpiece of the gods; no longer a free agent, she poured forth every epithet of adoration that Aphrodite could suggest, clambering up higher and higher in the intensity of her emotions, whilst her audience hung breathless, riveted on every word, and dared to burst forth in thunders of applause only after she had vanished from their sight.”

Both of these artists were children of the lower class, and struggled with a fate which required grit, tenacity, and determination to win success.  The artist of to-day is no social leader—­“never the companion of man, but his slave or his despot.”  It is entirely her physical charms and the outward or artificial requisites of her art that make her what she is.  According to Mr. Lynch, her tragedy “is but one of disorder, fury, and folly—­passions not deep, but unbridled and hysterical in their intensest