And the sentiment in it is not so much human as French, a
factitious idealism in depravity which one associates peculiarly with
Paris. Marguerite Gautier is the type of the nice woman who sins and
loves, and becomes regenerated by an unnatural kind of self-sacrifice,
done for French family reasons. She is the Parisian whom Sarah Bernhardt
impersonates perfectly in that hysterical and yet deliberate manner
which is made for such impersonations. Duse, as she does always, turns
her into quite another kind of woman; not the light woman, to whom love
has come suddenly, as a new sentiment coming suddenly into her life, but
the simple, instinctively loving woman, in whom we see nothing of the
demi-monde, only the natural woman in love. Throughout the play she has
moments, whole scenes, of absolute greatness, as fine as anything she
has ever done: but there are other moments when she seems to carry
repression too far. Her pathos, as in the final scene, and at the end of
the scene of the reception, where she repeats the one word "Armando"
over and over again, in an amazed and agonising reproachfulness, is of
the finest order of pathos.
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