more store by these poetic dramas than he did by the Italian operas with
their shrill mellifluous airs and their ornamental vocal exercises. He
was much more interested in the actors than the plays. And the authors
had tried hard to imitate them. "_It was hopeless to think that a play
could be performed with any success unless the author had looked to it
that his characters were modeled on the vices of the actors_." The
situation was hardly at all changed since the time when Diderot wrote
those lines. The actors had become the models of the art of the theater.
As soon as any one of them reached success, he had his theater, his
compliant tailor-authors, and his plays made to measure.

Among these great mannikins of literary fashions Francoise Oudon
attracted Christophe. Paris had been infatuated with her for a couple of
years or so. She, too, of course, had her theater and her purveyors of
parts: however, she did not only act in plays written for her: her mixed
repertory ranged from Ibsen to Sardou, from Gabriele d'Annunzio to Dumas
_fils_, from Bernard Shaw to the latest Parisian playwrights. Upon
occasion she would even venture into the Versailles' avenues of the
classic hexameter, or on to the deluge of images of Shakespeare. But she
was ill at ease in that galley, and her audience was even more so.
Whatever she played, she played herself, nothing but herself, always. It
was both her weakness and her strength. Until the public had been
awakened to an interest in her personality, her acting had had no
success. As soon as that interest was roused, everything she did
appeared marvelous. And, indeed, it was well worth while in watching her
to forget the usually pitiful plays which she betrayed by endowing and
adorning them with her vitality. The mystery of the woman's body, swayed
by a stranger soul, was to Christophe far more moving than the plays in
which she acted.