Part 10

The _Barbier_ is not much more than a Commedia dell’ Arte. It is a play of manœuvring, intrigue the whole affair. Stock characters will do for that, and you can manage without humour, if you have a sufficiency of wit. There is perhaps more effervescence than wit, and what wit there is not of the best kind. It is not concerned with ludicrous appositions; rather it is paradox, verbal antithesis, the Gratiano vein. Here is an example. Figaro is reporting to Rosine that Lindor is her lover, and asks leave to tell her so:

“_Rosine_: Vous me faites trembler, monsieur Figaro.

“_Figaro_: Fi donc, trembler! mauvais calcul, madame. Quand on cède à la peur du mal, on ressent déjà le mal de la peur....

“_Rosine_: S’il m’aime, il doit me le prouver en restant absolument tranquille.

“_Figaro_: Eh! madame! amour et repos peuvent-ils habiter en meme cœur? La pauvre jeunesse est si malheureux aujourd’hui, qu’elle n’a que ce terrible choix: amour sans repos, ou repos sans amour.”

Beaumarchais can better that, though it is a fair sample of his handling. In the second Act, where Bartholo (Pantaloon) has patched up a reconciliation with Rosine (Columbine), whom he intends to marry, he closes the scene like this:

“_Bartholo_: Puisque la paix est faite, mignonne, donne-moi ta main. Si tu pouvais m’aimer, ah! comme tu serais heureuse!

“_Rosine_ (baissant les yeux): Si vous pouviez me plaire, ah! comme je vous aimerais!

“_Bartholo_: Je te plairai, je te plairai; quand je te dis que je te plairai! (Il sort.)”

That is very happy, because it has humour as well as wit. Pantaloon and Columbine have become human beings.

It is not all so good as that, and some of it is not good at all. It was written originally for an opera libretto, for which it is well suited. It would do equally well for marionettes. To such things the spectator can lend himself, because in the former the music, and in the latter the puppets, take the responsibility off him; nothing of his own is involved. But in a play the action and the dialogue perform the resolution of life into art, with the audience as accomplice. Human nature is implicated; if we allow the cheap, we must cheat ourselves. If there is any resolution in the _Barbier_, it is into a jig, and condescension is difficult. Life is only there in so far as some of the personages wear breeches, and some petticoats. It is a mere trifle that the scene is laid in Spain, while all the characters are Italian.

The _Mariage de Figaro_ is a more considerable work, if only because it is much longer and more complicated. Everybody is older, including Beaumarchais. Since the end of the _Barbier_, Count Almaviva has pursued hundreds of ladies, Rosina has almost left off being jealous, Figaro has become a cynic, and is inclined to give lectures. The romance would seem to have been rubbed off seduction, as you might expect when you consider that the Count has been at it all his life, and is now a middle-aged man, old enough to be Ambassador. It has been said--and Mr. Rivers says it--that Beaumarchais was deliberate in contriving the effect of satiety, which he certainly obtains--as if an author would set himself to work to be wearisome! Subversion, Mr. Rivers thinks, was his aim, moral revolt. He wrote, and it was played, on the eve of the Revolution. Was the _Mariage_ not, therefore, a contributory cause?

“_Figaro_, soliloquising: Parceque vous êtes un grand seigneur, vous vous croyez un grand génie!... Noblesse, fortune, un rang, des places, tout cela rend si fier! Qu’avez-vous fait pour tant de biens? Vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus. Du reste, homme assez ordinaire; tandis que moi, morbleu! perdu dans la foule obscure, il m’a fallu déployer plus de science et de calculs pour subsister seulement, qu’on n’en a mis depuis cent ans à gouverner toutes les Espagnes: et vous voulez jouter ...!”

Is that contributory to revolution--or revolution contributory to it? It was surely current coin in 1784. Voltaire and Rousseau had encouraged cats to look at kings; everybody had made fun of the nobility. Titles of honour can have held little intimidation since Louis XIV had had the handling of them, and turned out dukes where his grandfather made marquises. What little there might be left to do had been done handsomely by his grandson. It is far more likely that Beaumarchais was easing grudges of his own, or that in the famous flight of paradoxes aimed at “la politique” he was recalling recent experiences in London and Vienna, where he came into collision with the real thing. Much out of character as it is, it is a good example of what both Figaro and Beaumarchais had become by 1784:

“Feindre ignorer ce qu’on sait, de savoir tout ce qu’on ignore; d’entendre ce qu’on ne comprend pas, de ne point ouïr ce qu’on entend; surtout de pouvoir au delà de ses forces; avoir souvent pour grand secret de cachet qu’il n’y en a point; s’enfermer pour tailler des plumes, et paraître profond quand on n’est, comme on dit, que vide et creux; jouer bien ou mal un personnage; répandre des espions et pensionner des traîtres; amollir des cachets, intercepter des lettres, et tacher d’ennoblir la pauvreté des moyens par l’importance des objets: voilà toute la politique, ou je meure!”

Very brisk. But when Count Almaviva shortly comments, “Ah! c’est l’intrigue que tu définis!” the criticism is final, because it is completely just. Curious that a playwright should light up his Roman candle, and damp it down the next moment. Such speeches imperil the character of Figaro by making him so dominant a personality that there can be no fun in seeing him dupe his betters. Beaumarchais, I think, may have felt that objection, and attempted to restore the balance by having Figaro duped himself in the last act.

The balance is really adjusted in quite another way. Two new characters are brought in, one of whom, Marceline, a _vieille fille_, designs to marry Figaro, but presently finds out that she is his long-lost mother! The other is Chérubin, who saves the play, to my thinking, just as surely as Polly Peachum saves _The Beggar’s Opera_. Chérubin--“création exquise et enchanteresse,” says Sainte-Beuve--is the making of the _Mariage_, partly because he keys it down to its proper pitch, which is that of children playing grown-ups, and partly because he is truly observed and poetically presented. I don’t see how the adage, “Si jeunesse savait,” could be more tenderly exploited. All his scenes are good--the first with Suzanne, in which the young scamp, after betraying his occupation with three love affairs at once, snatches his mistress’s hair-ribbon and dodges behind tables and chairs while the maid pursues him; the second, with the Countess, where she is dressing him as a girl, and discovers her ribbon staunching a cut in his arm: in each of these scenes the delicious distress of his complaint is painted with a subtlety and sensibility combined which are first-rate art. Delicate provocation can go no further, or had better not. Beaumarchais’ triumph is that he knows that, and does not add a touch in excess. The final touch is that the Countess, instead of feigning a desire for the restoration of the ribbon (which she did very badly), now really does desire, and obtains it. Enough said: there is no more. “Tu sais trop bien, méchante, que je n’ose pas oser,” says the youth to Suzanne. That is his trouble, and a real one it is.

The imbroglio in this play is a thing of nightmare. “Que diable est-ce qu’on trompe ici?” The answer is the audience. Everybody deceives everybody, twice over and all the time. It surprises, if you like, by “a fine excess.” It is not surprising, anyhow, that the last act was too much for Sainte-Beuve, has been too much for Mr. Rivers, and is too much for me. I do not, simply, know what is happening, but I do know that none of it is very funny. Compare it with _Sganarelle_, and you will see. In that little masterpiece you have four characters: Lélie and Clélie, the lovers, Sganarelle the jealous husband, and Sganarelle’s wife. Clélie lets drop Lélie’s portrait in the street, Sganarelle’s wife picks it up, and is caught by Sganarelle admiring it. Presently, when Clélie faints, and is picked up by Sganarelle, it is his wife’s turn to be jealous. Then Lélie, overcome by his feelings, is pitied by Madame Sganarelle and helped into her house. The fat is in the fire. Madame Sganarelle flies at Clélie for carrying on with her husband; Lélie believes that Sganarelle has married Clélie. Sganarelle pursues Lélie with a sword, and when he is confronted, pretends that he brought it out because the weather looked threatening. It is a complete cat’s cradle of a play, and as easily untied. The action is swift, the intrigue is easy to follow, the appositions are really comic. But who believes that Almaviva seriously wants Suzanne, or that Figaro has really promised Marceline, or that the Countess really loves Chérubin? The lack of plausibility causes the _Mariage_ to turn unwillingly, like a mangle. It took four hours and a half to play: I can hardly believe that Figaro’s inordinate soliloquy in the last act survived the first night. Figaro himself is overweight; Marceline is a very bad shot. She has at first a good Polly-and-Lucy slanging match with Suzanne; but in the discovery scene she grows serious--very serious, and rightly serious, no doubt, in any other play but this. But to suspend all the gallantries in progress for the sake of her diatribes upon gallantry, to shake the head over them, to say “True,” and “Too true”--and then immediately to resume gallantries, has the effect of exhibiting neither gallantry nor the reprobation of it as serious; and as something in a play must be taken seriously, the Comédie Française, rightly deciding in favour of gallantry, cut out the whole scene; and it is so marked in my edition of Beaumarchais. It would have been a pleasant toil for Edward FitzGerald, who loved such work, to hew and shape this comedy. It has fine moments, but wants both the speed and the gaiety of the _Barbier_. Mozart gave it them--we owe to Beaumarchais the most delightful opera in the world.

Mr. Rivers translates the two plays freely, but I don’t think very successfully. I have said already that Beaumarchais is not a good writer--too diffuse at one time, too terse at others--but no doubt he is very difficult. Literal translation is useless. “Miss” is not a translation of “Mademoiselle.” “Mistress,” or “Young Lady” would be better--and so on. You cannot get the points sharply enough unless you translate ideas as well as idiom; and to do that you must take a wide cast. Rhetoric is rhetoric in whatever language you cast it. It has its own rules. Dialogue is another matter. There come in the familiarities, secrets of the toilette, secrets of the bower. How are these things to be done? I don’t know; but if Andrew Lang could not be natural with the 15th Idyll of Theocritus, it is no shame to Mr. Rivers to have failed with Beaumarchais.

If he desired to try his hand I wonder why he omitted one of his liveliest and wittiest sallies--the letter which he addressed to _The Morning Chronicle_ in 1776, on one of his confidential visits to London. It is too long to give entire, but I must have a shot at pieces of it:

“Mr. Editor,” he says, “I am a stranger, a Frenchman and the soul of honour. If this will not completely inform you who I am, it will at least tell you, in more senses than one, who I am not; and in times likes these, that is not without its importance in London.

“The day before yesterday at the Pantheon, after the concert and during the dancing which ensued, I found at my feet a lady’s cloak of black taffetas, turned back with the same and edged with lace. I do not know to whom it belongs; I have never seen, even at the Pantheon, the person who wore it; all my inquiries since the discovery have taught me nothing about her. I beg of you then, Mr. Editor, to announce in your journal the discovery of the cloak, in order that I may punctually return it to her who may lay claim to it.

“That there may be no possible mistake in the matter, I have the honour to give you notice that the loser, upon the day in question, had a head-dress of rose-coloured feathers. She had, I believe, diamond ear-rings; but of that I am not so positive as of the remainder of my description. She is tall and of elegant appearance; her hair is a flaxen blonde, her skin dazzlingly white. She has a fine and graceful neck, a striking shape, and the prettiest foot in the world. I observe that she is very young, very lively and inattentive, that she carries herself easily, and has a marked taste for dancing.”

He then proceeds to deduce all these charming properties from the taffetas cloak--some from a single hair which he finds in the hood, some from minute particles of fluff and fur; others, more carefully, from measurements; others, again, from the position in which the cloak was lying--all of which led him to conclude infallibly that “the young lady was the most alert beauty of England, Scotland and Ireland, and if I do not add, of America, it is because of late they have become uncommonly alert in that particular country.” Sherlock Holmes!

“If I had pushed my inquiries,” he concludes, “it is possible that I might have learned from her cloak what was her quality and rank. But when one has concluded that a woman is young and handsome, has one not in fact learned all that one needs to learn? That at any rate was the opinion held in my time in many good towns in France, and even in certain villages, such as Marly, Versailles, etc.

“Do not then be surprised, Mr. Editor, if a Frenchman who all his life long has made a philosophical and particular study of the fair sex, has discovered in the mere appearance of a lady’s cloak, without ever having seen her, that the fair one with the rosy plumes who let it fall unites in her person the radiance of Venus, the free carriage of the nymphs, the shape of the Graces, the youth of Hebe; that she is quick and preoccupied, and that she loves the dance, to the extent of forgetting everything else in order to run to it, on a foot as small as Cinderella’s, and as light as Atalanta’s own.”

He has done it with the unfailing humour and neatness which carried him in and out of the lawcourts, took him to prison and enlarged him again. And he was then only forty-four, and had another twenty years before him. Impudence and good humour. The first was his shield and buckler--triple brass. The other enabled him to support it in all companies without offence. When at long last his suit with La Blache was ended, and in his favour, the Comte not only restored the estate without a murmur, but gave him a fine portrait of the testator. Beaumarchais may have been a bad lot; but he was evidently a good sort.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] “Figaro: the Life of Beaumarchais,” by John Rivers. Hutchinson. 18s.

THE CARDINAL DE RETZ

No student of France and literature can afford to neglect this gay and hardy little sinner, though the use of that very word might show that I was not fitted to expound him. It has here, however, an æsthetic significance and not an ethical. Poets and moralists have this in common that, owing their power to the strength of their prejudice, they make bad historians. Carlyle, very much of a poet, illuminating his heroes with his own fire, did no harm to Cromwell, whose wart was a part of his glory; but Frederick the Great showed up oddly. The higher the light rayed upon him the more ghastly stared his gashes under the paint. Michelet was a good deal of a poet too, and rootedly a moralist. Naturally he came to blows with the history of his country. The Fronde made him angry, the _grand siècle_ shocked him. Edification may be served that way, not truth. It is, I grant, difficult to read the History of France as that of a sane, hard-working, penurious people; difficult to decide why the Revolution, instead of coming in 1789, did not come in 1689; or why, having begun in 1649, it did no more, as Bossuet said, than “enfanter le siècle de Louis.” To understand that would be to understand the Fronde, but not how the state of things which evoked the Fronde and made possible the Memoirs of de Retz, could have come about. A royal minority, a foreign regent, a foreign minister, and a feudal aristocracy will account for a good deal--not for all. The Italianisation of manners which began with the last Valois kings, and was renewed by Henry’s Florentine wife, has to be reckoned up. To a nobility convinced of privilege it opened the ways of _Il Talento_.

_Il Talento_ is the Italian description of the state of mind induced by desire and the means to gratify it on the spot. Iago is the standing type; but Cæsar Borgia is a better. For him and his likes, _The Prince_ of Machiavelli was the golden book. In France the princely families--those of Lorraine, Bouillon, Condé and Savoie--found it a kindly soil; and one of its best products was naturally the Cardinal de Retz, whose memoirs are as good as Dumas, very much like him, and the source of the best chapters of _Vingt Ans Après_. Here was _Il Talento_ in fine flower, existing for its own sake; whereas Mazarin hid it in avarice, and Richelieu had lost it in statecraft. You cannot read Retz with pleasure, to say nothing of profit, if you do not allow for the point of view--which you will have no difficulty in doing if you remember that, less than a hundred years before the Cardinal’s day, his ancestor, Alberto Gondi, had been as familiar with the Ponte Vecchio as he himself was with the Pont-Neuf.

In his “portrait” of Mazarin, Retz accused his brother-cardinal of common origin, but if you went back to his own family’s beginnings I do not know that the Gondis were more than respectable according to French standards. But the future Cardinal, Jean-Francois-Paul, was born the son of a Duc de Retz, a great man of Brittany, was a Knight of Malta in the cradle, and when, later, it was thought well to make a churchman of him, tumbled into abbacies as became a young prince, and had a bishopric as soon as he cared. He says of Mazarin’s youth that it was shameful, that he was by bent and disposition a cardsharper. He might have said worse and not been wrong; yet the account he gives of himself is so frank, shameless and extremely flagrant that the reproof has an odd sound.

“I did not affect devotion,” he says of himself as Abbé, “because I could never be sure that I should be able to keep up the cheat. But I had great consideration for the devout, and from their point of view that is in itself a mark of piety. I suited my pleasures to the rest of my habits. I could hardly get on without gallantry, but I continued it with Madame de Pommereux, young and a coquette, whose ways suited me because, as she had all the young people not only about her but in her confidence, her apparent affairs with them were a mask for mine with her.”

This equivocal conduct so far succeeded that the pious agreed with St. Vincent de Paul that, though the Abbé de Retz was not truly religious, he was “not far from the Kingdom of Heaven”--quite as near, in fact, as the young gentleman desired to be. And then he tells a story which he thinks is to his credit:

“A short time after I left college, my governor’s valet, who was my humble servant, found living with a wretched pin-maker a niece of hers, fourteen years old and of remarkable beauty. After he had shown her to me, he bought her for one hundred and fifty pistoles, took a little house for her at Issy, and put his sister in to look after her. I went there the day after she was installed, and found her extremely cast down, but attributing it to her modesty, was not at all surprised. She was still more so the next day, a fact about her even more remarkable than her good looks, which is saying a great deal. She talked with me straightforwardly, piously, without extravagance, and cried no more than she could possibly help. I saw that she was so much afraid of her aunt that I felt truly sorry for her, admired her disposition, and presently her virtue. I tested that so far as it could be done, and took shame to myself. I waited till it was dark, then put her into my coach and took her to my aunt de Meignelais. She put the child into a convent of religious, where eight or ten years later she died in the odour of sanctity.”

One must not expect too much from a _grand seigneur_ in a cassock. The story has more implication than he was able to perceive; but at least it shows that he had pity in him, if not piety.

In time he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, with a promise of survivorship, and a fancy title of Archbishop of Corinth. He tells us that he took six days to consider how he should regulate his conduct, how restore the credit of the archiepiscopate (which was very necessary) without losing any of his pleasures. “I decided to do evil with deliberation--no doubt the most criminal course in the eyes of God, but no doubt also the most discreet in those of the world.” In his opinion that was the only way open to him of avoiding “the most dangerous _absurdity_ which can be met with in the clerical profession, that of mixing sin and devotion.” “Absurdity” is remarkable.

His first duty as coadjutor was a severe trial to his fortitude. It was necessary to make a Visitation of the Nuns of the Conception; and as the convent held eighty young ladies, “of whom several were handsome and some adventurous,” he had many qualms about exposing his virtue to such a test. “It had to be done, though; and I preserved it to the edification of my neighbour. I did not see the face of a single one, and never spoke to one unless her veil was down. This behaviour, which lasted six weeks, gave a wonderful lustre to my chastity. I believe, however, that the lessons which I received every evening from Madame de Pommereux strengthened it materially against the morrow.”