Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SARAH COWELL LEMOYNE. Sarah Cowell Lemoyne is identified in the public mind with the r6le of the Dowager Duchess de Coutras in Henri Lavedan's comedy, " Catherine," and those that saw the play in this country will not soon forget the womanly sympathy and the matronly tenderness with which she invested that very interesting character. If ever an actress lived a part, Mrs. LeMoyne lived the Duchess, and the fineness of her art, the sincerity of her sentiment, and the completeness of her conception left absolutely no loop-hole through which could enter false touches and broken illusions. " Mrs. Sarah Cowell LeMoyne's assumption of the Dowager Duchess de Coutras," wrote Henry Austin Clapp, " it is not absurd to say, in its appeal to the artistic sense, has in recent years seldom been surpassed upon our stage. Its suavity, directness, elegance, and distinction of style are remarkable indeed. Practising, like Miss Annie Russell, a method never violent, seldom even vehement, and, like her, almost never lifting her voice above an ordinary conversational tone, Mrs. LeMoyne, by the power of her pure and unaffected enunciation, of her vitally sympathetic tones, and of her frank and beautiful manners, at once convinces every auditor of the refinement, the genuineness, the breadth, and the loveliness of the Duchess's character. Whenever she moves or speaks, she charms and engages. All her dialogues are quiet, yet all are keenly interesting, and several of them are deeply stirring. Seldom is anything better witnessed here than her scenes in the firstact with the duke, her son, where her shrewdness, her sympathy, and her experience of life are all in evidence as she listens to his confession of love for Catherine, and the intent to make Catherine his wife ; the mother's com...