It was almost a truism in the nineteenth century that, as Maurice Baring expressed it in his monograph on Sarah Bernhardt, ‘the actor's art dies almost wholly with the actor’. Only those who had seen Bernhardt on the stage could truly comprehend her greatness; others would have to take it on trust. Once his own generation had died out, wrote Baring, nothing of her would survive but the echo of her fame, ever more dimly reverberating down the halls of time. Those who come after him ‘will not know, nor will anyone be able to tell them or explain to them what Sarah Bernhardt could do with a modulated inflection, a look, a gesture, a cry, a smile, a sigh; nor the majesty, poetry, and music which she could suggest by the rhythm of her movements and her attitudes’. Much the same idea was expressed, but in softer, elegiac accents, in the obituary article Gautier published in La Presse on 24 May 1847 t o salute the passing of Bernhardt's distant predecessor, Mademoiselle Mars.