The interest of the French plays is now at its
acme : Monsieur BouFEE appeared last night, and was welcomed in a way that showed his consummate art was appreciated. He played in Clermont, ou une Femme &Artiste ; and made a deep and powerful impression. Clermont is a painter, who is suddenly struck with blindness ; and whose afflic- tion is aggravated by a suspicion of his wife's infidelity. The gradual change from the light-hearted, sanguine artist, indulging in visions of fame and fortune, to the dark and solitary man, brooding over his affliction and maddened with jealousy, is marked by BOUFFE with masterly skill : his exclamation of alarm and horror at the approach of blindness—the bloodless face, the quivering lip, the blank look of the eyes, and the paralyzed form—sent a thrill through the au- dience. His altered aspect subsequently, bespeaks the dejected, care- worn, repining, yet not wholly unhappy man : but when the latent feeling of jealousy is again aroused, a sense of utter wretchedness comes over him. The burst of anguish at this climax of his misery was heart-rending; and the expression of despairing weakness in his countenance was pitiable in the extreme : all fortitude seemed to have forsaken him. The difference between the suffering caused by bodily affliction and by mental torture, was depicted by BouFFi so distinctly, that the cause of his distraction is apparent. The actor who can pro- duce such effects in a French vaudeville, where at the moment of ex- tremity he soothes his sorrow with a song, and who can afterwards divert the same audience with the gambols and tricks of a Gamin de Paris, as BOUFFE did last night, must be an artist of extraordinary powers : not to mention his playing a boy of sixteen, and an old man of ninety, in the same evening. To know what perfect acting is, both in personation of character and expression of emotion, Bourek should be seen in three or four different parts : one is not enough ; for you might suppose he was peculiarly fitted by nature for that one part, as most people do on first seeing him, whatever he plays.
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