YVETTE GUILBERT

Who Is Soon to Tour America in Vaudeville

Arthur Symons

I HAD long been curious to know the real Yvette, and this afternoon my wish has been gratified.

Well, she is what I expected: not extraordinary, or perverse, or eccentric, but simple, straightforward; with something of the child and something of the artist. Her cheeks are plumper than they look on the stage; her hands and wrists rather large, a little thick. The face is full of intelligence, but coarse and irregular in outline: a long nose, a retreating chin, an uninteresting fleshiness about the cheeks. Her eyes are very curious, golden eyes, a sort of sleepy, gold fire, and the tone (dyed,

I believe) of her tufted hair, which seems to spring out of her forehead in bunches, repeats, in its bronzed red, almost the color of her eyes. The whole face is full of good humor, and of a bright, companionable quality; a little fatigued; with a suspicion of wrinkles beneath the eyes when the face relaxes into repose.

Immediately her turn was over, at the special matinee at the Empire Theater in London, I went round to see Yvette in her dressing-room. She sat down in her white stage-dress, her make-up still on. Then, chattering mostly in English, she jumped up and began to undo her dress; her maid helped her off with it, and she came and sat down at the dressing-table, by my side, with nothing on but a white petticoat and a white chemise. She has a charming figure, smooth, plump, slim but perfectly rounded, with slim legs, and not excessively small feet.

She got off most of her make-up, and

eventually put on her stays, and finally dressed.

This time I was fairly fascinated. She said, "I am glad I am ugly—oh, yes, I am ugly, and I am proud of it, for now no one can say (as they like to say in Paris about women) that I owe my success to my beauty. No, I owe it entirely to myself, and I have been very lucky. I can't tell you how lucky I have been!"

"Luck?" I queried. "It is not luck; it is all due to yourself." "Well, but it is luck," and she came up close to me, and shook her fingers in my face and seized my arm, as she said slowly, and with immense emphasis: "You cannot imagine what a will I have got. I have never made up my mind to do anything, never, without succeeding. I have said, 'I will do that,' and I work, and work, and work at it, until I do it, always. I have never failed. And it is luck to have the will, to have a will like that. Other women are clever enough, but they don't stick at a thing, they let things go."

THEN she talked to me about Zola; about Maupassant, whom she admired beyond everybody and who was a great admirer of hers.

I asked if it took her long to studyanew song. It all depended, she said, and she named "Les Demoiselles de Pensionnat" as an easy one, and "La Soularde" as a difficult one—difficult, she explained, because she could never decide on the way to sing it. "I can sing that song," she said, "in five different ways. I vary the ways, according as to whether I want to please the stall or the gallery. I try to get my effect, and also to get art. To be artistic and yet to be popular,— ah, that is the supreme difficulty."