This little incident turned the conversation on the modern French drama, whereof Rossi spoke rather slightingly, stigmatizing it as mechanical, being composed of plays written to be performed and not to live.  “In Victor Hugo’s dramas,” he remarked, “there are some fine lines and noble passages, but the characters are always Victor Hugo in a mask:  they are never real personages.  It is always the author who speaks—­never a new individuality.  As to the classic dramatists of France, they are intolerable.  Corneille is perhaps a shade better than Racine, but both are stiff, pompous and unnatural:  their characters are a set of wooden puppets that are pulled by wires and work in a certain fixed manner, from which they never deviate.

“It was Voltaire that taught the French to despise Shakespeare.  He called him a barbarian, and the French believe that saying true to the present time.  Yet he did not hesitate to steal Othello when he wanted to write Zaire, or, rather, he went out on the boulevards, picked out the first good-looking barber he could find, dressed him up in Eastern garments, and then fancied that he had created a French Othello.”

“I saw Mounet-Sully at one of the performances of your Othello” I remarked.  “I wonder what he thought of his own personation of Orosmane when he witnessed the real tragedy?”

“Had Mounet-Sully been able to appreciate Othello” answered Rossi, “he never could have brought himself to personate Orosmane.”

Some one then asked Rossi what he thought of the Comedie Frarcaise.

“The Comedie Francaise,” said Rossi, “like every school of acting that is founded on art, and not on Nature, is falling into decadence.  It is ruled by tradition, not by the realities of life and passion.  One incident that I beheld at a rehearsal at that theatre in 1855 revealed the usual process by which their great performers study their art.  I was then fulfilling an engagement in Paris with Ristori, and, though only twenty-two years of age, I was her leading man and stage-manager as well.  The Italian troupe was requested to perform at the Comedie Francaise on the occasion of the benefit of which I have spoken, and we were to give one act of Maria Stuart, When we arrived at the theatre to commence our rehearsal the company was in the act of rehearsing a scene from Tartuffe which was to form part of the programme on the same occasion.  M. Bressant was the Tartuffe, and Madeleine Brohan was to personate Elmire.  They came to the point where Tartuffe lays his hand on the knee of Elmire.  Thereupon, Mademoiselle Brohan turned to the stage-manager and asked, ‘What am I to do now?’ ‘Well,’ said that functionary, ’Madame X——­ used to bite her lips and look sideways at the offending hand; Madame Z——­ used to blush and frown, etc.’  But neither of them said, What would a woman like Elmire—­a virtuous woman—­do if so insulted by a sneaking hypocrite?  They took counsel of tradition, not of Nature.  In fact, the French stage is given over to sensation dramas and the opera bouffe, and such theatres as the Comedie Francaise and the Odeon have but a forced and artificial existence.”