MADAME JUDITH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
My Autobiography. By Mme. Judith (of the Comt.die Francaise). Edited by Paul G'Sell, and translated by Mrs. Arthur Bell. (Eveleigh Nash. 108. 6d. net.)—"Now I begin to feel a little weary, and one of these days I shall get up from my seat in the dress circle and go away. I shall leave the great play- house and go to rejoin elsewhere the dear children I so loved to see about me, but who, alas ! left the theatre before me." So Mme. Judith wrote the end of her autobiography ; a little later the newspapers were full of her death and of her memoirs. She was really justified in writing her autobiography, not because she had known or seen a great number of people, but because those whom she knew she knew with the intimacy of a thoroughly unconventional life, and because her friends were all people of singular interest. The first few chapters of her book she has given over to a careful study of the great Rachel, crowding them with admiration of her art and private experience of her jealousy and temper. Later Dumas shoulders his way into the Memoirs, "this giant of a mulatto," with his rough, free-and-easy, good temper ; later still, Victor Hugo and Marie Duplessis, the " Dame aux Camelias," play their parts. From the early days of real hard- ship to success and retirement Mme. Judith was faithful to her resolve only to show forth herself by means of her relations with others. " If I was an actress," she says, "I was also a spectator." All whom she met, she has, as it were, held at arm's length and studied carefully and written down in her book; so that now her autobiography is honestly worthy of a good translation—which Mrs. Arthur Bell has given to it.
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