Diderot, in that same century, observed that the truest actor is one who does not feel his part at all, but produces his effects by intellectual effort and intelligent observation.  Behind the figure on the stage, torn with passion or rollicking with mirth, there must always be the cool and unemotional mind which directs and governs and controls.  This same theory was both held and practised by the late Benoit Constant Coquelin.  To some extent it was the theory of Garrick and Fechter and Edwin Booth; though it was rejected by the two Keans, and by Edwin Forrest, who entered so throughly into the character which he assumed, and who let loose such tremendous bursts of passion that other actors dreaded to support him on the stage in such parts as Spartacus and Metamora.

It is needless to say that a girl like Adrienne Lecouvreur flung herself with all the intensity of her nature into every role she played.  This was the greatest secret of her success; for, with her, nature rose superior to art.  On the other hand, it fixed her dramatic limitations, for it barred her out of comedy.  Her melancholy, morbid disposition was in the fullest sympathy with tragic heroines; but she failed when she tried to represent the lighter moods and the merry moments of those who welcome mirth.  She could counterfeit despair, and unforced tears would fill her eyes; but she could not laugh and romp and simulate a gaiety that was never hers.

Adrienne would have been delighted to act at one of the theaters in Paris; but they were closed to her through jealousy.  She went into the provinces, in the eastern part of France, and for ten years she was a leading lady there in many companies and in many towns.  As she blossomed into womanhood there came into her life the love which was to be at once a source of the most profound interest and of the most intense agony.

It is odd that all her professional success never gave her any happiness.  The life of the actress who traveled from town to town, the crude and coarse experiences which she had to undergo, the disorder and the unsettled mode of living, all produced in her a profound disgust.  She was of too exquisite a fiber to live in such a way, especially in a century when the refinements of existence were for the very few.

She speaks herself of “obligatory amusements, the insistence of men, and of love affairs.”  Yet how could such a woman as Adrienne Lecouvreur keep herself from love affairs?  The motion of the stage and its mimic griefs satisfied her only while she was actually upon the boards.  Love offered her an emotional excitement that endured and that was always changing.  It was “the profoundest instinct of her being”; and she once wrote:  “What could one do in the world without loving?”