“What, ladies!” said I, “is not M. de Voltaire good-natured, polite, and affable to you who have been kind enough to act in his plays with him?”

“Not in the least.  When he hears us rehearse he grumbles all the time.  We never say a thing to please him:  here it is a bad pronunciation, there a tone not sufficiently passionate, sometimes one speaks too softly, sometimes too loudly; and it’s worse when we are acting.  What a hubbub there is if one add a syllable, or if some carelessness spoil one of his verses.  He frightens us.  So and so laughed badly; so and so in Alzire had only pretended to weep.”

“Does he want you to weep really?”

“Certainly.  He will have real tears.  He says that if an actor wants to draw tears he must shed them himself.”

“I think he is right there; but he should not be so severe with amateurs, above all with charming actresses like you.  Such perfection is only to be looked for from professionals, but all authors are the same.  They never think that the actor has pronounced the words with the force which the sense, as they see it, requires.”

“I told him, one day, that it was not my fault if his lines had not the proper force.”

“I am sure he laughed.”

“Laughed?  No, sneered, for he is a rude and impertinent man.”

“But I suppose you overlook all these failings?”

“Not at all; we have sent him about his business.”

“Sent him about his business?”

“Yes.  He left the house he had rented here, at short notice, and retired to where you will find him now.  He never comes to see us now, even if we ask him.”

“Oh, you do ask him, though you sent him about his business?”

“We cannot deprive ourselves of the pleasure of admiring his talents, and if we have teased him, that was only from revenge, and to teach him something of the manners of good society.”

“You have given a lesson to a great master.”

“Yes; but when you see him mention Lausanne, and see what he will say of us.  But he will say it laughingly, that’s his way.”

During my stay I often saw Lord Rosebury, who had vainly courted my charming Dubois.  I have never known a young man more disposed to silence.  I have been told that he had wit, that he was well educated, and even in high spirits at times, but he could not get over his shyness, which gave him an almost indefinable air of stupidity.  At balls, assemblies—­in fact, everywhere, his manners consisted of innumerable bows.  When one spoke to him, he replied in good French but with the fewest possible words, and his shy manner shewed that every question was a trouble to him.  One day when I was dining with him, I asked him some question about his country, which required five or six small phrases by way of answer.  He gave me an excellent reply, but blushed all the time like a young girl when she comes out.  The celebrated Fox who was then twenty, and was at the same dinner, succeeded in making him laugh, but it was by saying something in English, which I did not understand in the least.  Eight months after I saw him again at Turin, he was then amorous of a banker’s wife, who was able to untie his tongue.