Elsewhere I have referred to the roguish pleasure Field took in ascribing the authorship of “The Wanderer” to Helena Modjeska.  That was before he came to Chicago, and seemed to be the overture to a friendship that continued to exchange its favors and tokens of affection to the close of his life.  The doings of the Madame and Count Bozenta, her always vivacious and enjoyable husband, were perennial subjects for Field’s kindliest paragraphs.  As he says, he was a great theatre-goer, but Field became a constant one when “Modjesky” came to town.  Her Camille—­a character in which she was not excelled by the great Bernhardt herself—­had a remarkable vogue in the early eighties.  She imparted to its impersonation the subtle charm of her own sweet womanliness, which served to excuse Armand’s infatuation and as far as possible lifted the play out of its unwholesome atmosphere of French immorality to the plane of romantic devotion and self-sacrifice.  Her Camille seemed a victim of remorseless destiny, a pure soul struggling amid inexorable circumstances that racked and cajoled a diseased and suffering body into the maelstrom of sin.

Field was so constituted that, without this saving grace of womanliness, the presentation of Camille, with all its hectic surroundings, would have repelled him.  He did not care to see Mademoiselle Bernhardt a second time in the role, and he fled from the powerful and fascinating portrayal of pulmonary emotion which initiated the audiences of Clara Morris into the terrors of tubercular disease.  Night after night, when Modjeska played Camille, Field would occupy a front seat or a box.  When so seated that his presence could not be overlooked from the stage, he was wont to divert Camille from her woes with the by-play of his mobile features.  Wherever he sat, his large, white, solemn visage had a fascination for Madame Modjeska, and from the time she caught sight of it until Camille settled back lifeless in the final scene, she played “at him.”  He repaid this tribute by distorting his face in agony when Camille was light-hearted, and by breaking into noiseless merriment as her woes were causing handkerchiefs to flutter throughout the audience.  When we went to visit her next day, as we often did, she scarcely ever failed to reproach him in some such fashion as:  “Ah, Meester Fielt, why will you seet in the box and talk with your overcoat on the chair to make Camille laugh who is dying on the stage?  Ah, Meester Fielt, you are a very bad man, but I lof you, don’t we, Charlie?” And the count always stopped rolling a cigarette long enough to acknowledge that Field was their dearest friend and that they both loved him, no matter what he did.  Next to his wife, the count was devoted to politics, which he discusses with all the warmth and gesticulations of a Frenchman and the intelligence of a Polish-American patriot.

[Illustration:  FIELD WITNESSING MODJESKA AS CAMILLE. From a drawing by Eugene Field.]