Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878, page 159 by Various Authors
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h metal is made this new star. She has as yet appeared but in one rôle, that of Adrienne in Scribe's play, but within the compass of its five acts she runs the wild and weary gamut from crowned love to crowned despair. It is a new interpretation, and a remarkable one--an interpretation that is tinged with the blight of our inquisitive and mournful age: self-consciousness, that terrible tormentor in her soul, sits for ever in judgment upon every impulse of the heart of Adrienne, and makes of pain a stinging poison, and of pleasure but a poor potentiality. Her death-scene is singular and awful--awful in its physical adherence to realism, and singular in that it does not disgust, or even horrify, but leaves a memory of peace with the listener, who has not failed to catch the last strain for sight of the divine and dying eyes." So the critic of the London oracle wrote of Hyacinthe King.
That night the people had crowned her with a wreath of gold laurel-leaves, and she was walking to her dressing-room, when, as she passed the green-room door, a merry laugh made her glance in. There were fifty people there--actors, journalists, swells and hangers-on of the playhouse. A little to the right of the group, and talking and laughing with two or three others, stood a man both young and handsome.
Hyacinthe went toward him, and the people, unused to seeing her there for a long time past, hushed their talk, and one of them marked the newness of the light that shone in her eyes and the happiness that smiled on her lips as she came. He was a poet, and he went home and made verses on her: he had never thought of such a thing before. She raised the wreath of laurel from her brows and lifted it up to the golden head of the man whose laugh she had caught. "My Saxon god!" she murmured, so low that none heard her save him, and then, leaving the crown on his head, she turned and walked away. She went home to the shabby house in Craven street, which was still her home, and before she slept