Part 11

Racine, as Madame de Sévigné said, wrote pieces for his mistress, and not for posterity. ‘If ever,’ she remarked, ‘he should become less young, or cease to be in love, it will be no longer the same thing.’ The interpreter of the poet produced her wonderful effects dressed in exaggerated court costume, and delivering her _tirades_ in a cadenced, sing-song, rise-and-fall style, marking the rhymes rather than keeping to the punctuation. It was the glory of the well-educated _arlequin_ and _columbine_, ‘dans leur Hostel de Bourgogne,’ to act whole scenes of mock tragedy in the manner of La Champmeslé and her companions. It was such high-toned burlesque as the gifted Robson’s Medea was to the Medea of Ristori.

Lovers consumed fortunes to win the smiles they sought from the plain but attractive actress. Dukes, courtiers, simple gentlemen, flung themselves and all they had at her feet. La Fontaine wrote verses in worship of her, when he was not helping her complaisant husband to write comedies. Boileau, in the most stinging of epigrams, has made the conjugal immorality immortal, and de Sévigné has made the nobly-endowed actress live for ever in her letters.

After Racine shut his eyes, as complaisantly as the husband, to the splendid infidelities of La Champmeslé--when temptation was powerless, and religion took the place of passionate love--he moralised on the sins of his former mistress. ‘The poor wretch,’ he wrote contemptuously to his son, ‘in her last moments, refused to renounce the stage.’ Without such renunciation the Church barred her way to heaven! Racine, however, was misinformed. La Champmeslé died (1698) like so many of her gayest fellows, ‘_dans les plus grands sentiments de piété_.’ Her widowed husband, when the rascal quality died out of him, kept to drink, and he turned now and then to devotion. One morning, in the year 1708, he went to the church of the Cordeliers, and ordered two masses for the repose of the souls of his mother and of his wife; and he put thirty sous into the hand of the _sacristain_ to pay for them. The man offered him ten sous as change. But M. Champmeslé put the money back: ‘Keep it,’ he said, ‘for a third mass for myself. I will come and hear it.’ Meanwhile he went and sat at the door of a tavern (_L’Alliance_) waiting for church time. He chatted gaily with his comrades, promised to join them at dinner, and as he rose to his feet he put his hand to his head, uttered a faint shriek, and fell dead to the ground.

As Racine formed La Champmeslé, so did the latter form her niece as her successor on the stage--Mdlle. Duclos, who reigned supreme; but she was a less potential queen of the drama than her mistress. Her vehemence of movement once caused her to make an ignoble fall as she was playing Camille in ‘Les Horaces.’ Her equally vehement spirit once carried her out of her part altogether. At the first representation of La Motte’s ‘Inés de Castro’ the sudden appearance of the children caused the pit to laugh and to utter some feeble jokes. Mdlle. Duclos, who was acting Inés, was indignant. ‘Brainless pit!’ she exclaimed, ‘you laugh at the finest incident in the piece!’ French audiences are not tolerant of impertinence on the stage; but they took this in good part, and listened with interest to the remainder of the play.

Mdlle. Duclos, like her aunt, chanted or recitatived her parts. The French had got accustomed to the sing-song cadences of their rhymed plays, when suddenly a new charm fell upon their delighted ears. The new charmer was Adrienne Lecouvreur--a hat-maker’s daughter, an amateur actress, then a strolling player. In 1717 she burst upon Paris, and in one month she enchanted the city by her acting in Monimia, Electra, and Bérénice, and had been named one of the king’s company for the first parts in tragedy and comedy. Adrienne’s magic lay in her natural simplicity. She spoke as the character she represented might be expected to speak. This natural style had been suggested by Molière, and had been attempted by Baron, but unsuccessfully. It was given to the silver-tongued Adrienne to subdue her audience by this exquisite simplicity of nature. The play-going world was enthusiastic. Whence did the new charmer come? She came from long training in the provinces, and was the glory of many a provincial city before, in 1717, she put her foot on the stage of the capital, and at the age of twenty-seven began her brilliant but brief artistic career of thirteen years. Tracing her early life back, people found her a baby, true child of Paris. In her little-girlhood she saw ‘Polyeucte’ at the playhouse close by her father’s house. She immediately got up the tragedy, with other little actors and actresses. Madame la Présidente La Jay, hearing of the ability of the troupe and of the excellence of Adrienne as Pauline at the rehearsals in a grocer’s warehouse, lent the court-yard of her hotel in the Rue Garancière, where a stage was erected, and the tragedy acted, in presence of an audience which included members of the noblest families in France. All Paris was talking of the marvellous skill of the young company, but especially of Adrienne, when the association called the ‘Comédie Française,’ which had the exclusive right of acting the legitimate drama, arose in its spite, screamed ‘Privilege!’ and got the company suppressed.

The little Adrienne, however, devoted herself to the stage; and when she came to Paris, after long and earnest experience in the provinces, her new subjects hailed their new queen--queen of tragedy, that is to say; for when she took comedy by the hand the muse bore with, rather than smiled upon her; and, wanting sympathy, Adrienne felt none. Outside the stage her heart and soul were surrendered to the great soldier and utterly worthless fellow, Maurice de Saxe. He was the only man to whom she ever gave her heart; and he had given his to so many there was little left for her worth the having. What little there was was coveted by the Princesse de Bouillon. Adrienne died while this aristocratic rival was flinging herself at the feet of the handsome Maréchal; and the wrathful popular voice, lamenting the loss of the dramatic queen, accused the princess of having poisoned the actress.

Adrienne Lecouvreur (whose story has been twice told in French dramas, and once marvellously illustrated by the genius of Rachel), before she made her exit from the world, thought of the poor of her district, and she left them several thousands of francs. The curé of St.-Sulpice was told of the death and of the legacy. The good man took the money and refused to allow the body to be buried in consecrated ground. Princes of the church went to her _petits soupers_, but they would neither say ‘rest her soul’ nor sanction decent rest to her body; and yet charity had beautified the one, as talent and dignity had marked the other. The corpse of this exquisite actress (she was only forty when she died) was carried in a _fiacre_, accompanied by a faithful few, to a timber yard in the Faubourg St.-Germain; a hired porter dug the shallow grave of the tragedy queen; and I remember, in my youthful days, a stone post at the corner of the Rue de Bourgogne and the Rue de Grenelle which was said to stand over the spot where Monimia had been so ingloriously buried. It was then a solitary place, significantly named La Grenouillière.

And when this drama had closed, a valet of Baron, the great tragedian, looked at an old woman who attended in a box lobby of the Comédie Française, and they mutually thought of their daughter as the successor to poor Adrienne Lecouvreur. Their name was Gaussem; but when, a year after Adrienne’s death, they succeeded in getting the young girl--eighteen, a flower of youth, beauty, and of simplicity, most exquisite, even if affected--they changed their name to Gaussin. As long as she was young, Voltaire intoxicated her with the incense of his flattery. He admired her Junie, Andromaque, Iphigénie, Bérénice; but he worshipped her for her perfect acting in parts he had written--Zaïre (in which there is a ‘bit of business’ with a veil, which Voltaire stole from the ‘handkerchief’ in ‘Othello,’ the author of which he pretended to despise)--Zaïre, Alzire; and in other characters Voltaire swore that she was a miracle of acting. But La Gaussin never equalled Adrienne. She surpassed Duclos in ‘Inés de Castro:’ she was herself to be surpassed by younger rivals. At about forty Voltaire spoke of his once youthful idol as _that old girl_!

La Gaussin had that excellent thing in woman--a sympathetic voice. Her pathos melted all hearts to the melodious sorrow of her own. In Bérénice, her pathetic charm had such an effect on one of the sentinels, who, in those days, were posted at the wings, that he unconsciously let his musket fall from his arm. Her eyes were as eloquent as her voice was persuasive. In other respects, Clairon (an actress) has said of her that La Gaussin had instinct rather than intelligence, with beauty, dignity, gracefulness, and an invariably winning manner which nothing could resist. Her great fault, according to the same authority, was sameness. Clairon added that she played Zaïre in the same manner as she did Rodogune. It is as if an English actress were to make no difference between Desdemona and Lady Macbeth.

When La Gaussin had reached the age of forty-seven the French pit did what the French nation invariably does--smote down the idol which it had once worshipped. The uncrowned queen married an Italian ballet dancer, one Tevolaigo, who rendered her miserable, but died two years before her, in 1767. It is, however, said that Mdlle. La Gaussin was led to withdraw from the stage out of sincerely religious scruples. A score of French actresses have done the same thing, and long before they had reached the _quarantaine_.

There is a good illustration of how unwilling the French audiences were to lose a word of La Gaussin’s utterances in Cibber’s ‘Apology.’ ‘At the tragedy of “Zaïre,”’ he says, ‘while the celebrated Mdlle. Gossin (_sic_) was delivering a soliloquy, a gentleman was seized with a sudden fit of coughing, which gave the actress some surprise and interruption, and, his fit increasing, she was forced to stand silent so long that it drew the eyes of the uneasy audience upon him; when a French gentleman, leaning forward to him, asked him if this actress had given him any particular offence, that he took so public an occasion to resent it? The English gentleman, in the utmost surprise, assured him that, so far from it, he was a particular admirer of her performance; that his malady was his real misfortune, and that if he apprehended any return of it he would rather quit his seat than disoblige either the actor or the audience.’ Colley calls this the ‘publick decency’ of the French theatre.

The Mdlle. Clairon, named above, took up the inheritance which her predecessor had resigned. Claire Joseph Hippolyte Legris de Latude were her names; but, out of the first, she made the name by which she became illustrious. Her life was a long one--1723-1803. She acted from childhood to middle age; first as sprightly maiden, then in opera, till Rouen discovered in her a grand _tragédienne_, and sent her up to Paris, which city ratified the warrant given by the Rouennais. She made her first appearance as Phèdre, and the Parisians at once worshipped the new and exquisite idol.

The power that Mdlle. Clairon held over her admirers, the sympathy that existed between them, is matter of notoriety. She was once acting Ariane in Thomas Corneille’s tragedy, at Marseilles, to an impassioned southern audience. In the last scene of the third act, where she is eager to discover who her rival can be in the heart of Theseus, the audience took almost as eager a part; and when she had uttered the lines in which she mentions the names of various beauties, but does not name, because she does not suspect, her own sister, a young fellow who was near her murmured, with the tears in his eyes, ‘It is Phædra! it is Phædra!’--the name of the sister in question. Clairon was one of those artists who conceal their art by being terribly in earnest. In her days the pit stood, there were no seats; _parterre_ meant exactly what it says, ‘on the ground.’ The audience there gathered as near the stage as they could. Clairon, in some of her most tragic parts, put such intensity into her acting that as she descended the stage, clothed in terror or insane with rage, as if she saw no pit before her and would sweep through it, the audience there actually recoiled, and only as the great actress drew back did they slowly return to their old positions.

The autobiographical memoirs of Mdlle. Clairon give her rank as author as well as actress. Her style was declamatory, rather heavy, and marked by dramatic catchings of the breath which were among the faults that weaker players imitated. It was the conventional style, not to be rashly broken through in Paris; she accordingly first tried to do so at Bordeaux in 1752. ‘I acted,’ she tells us, ‘the part of Agrippina, and from first to last I played according to my own ideas. This simple, natural, unconventional style excited much surprise in the beginning; but, in the very middle of my first scene, I distinctly heard the words from a person in the pit, “That is really fine!”’ It was an attempt to change the sing-song style, just as Mdlle. Clairon attempted to change the monotonous absurdity of the costume worn by actresses; but she was preceded by earlier reformers, Adrienne Lecouvreur, for instance. Her inclination for natural acting was doubtless confirmed on simply hearing Garrick recite passages from English plays in a crowded French drawing-room. She did not understand a word of English, but she understood Garrick’s expression, and, in her enthusiasm, Mdlle. Clairon kissed Roscius, and then gracefully asked pardon of Roscius’s wife for the liberty she had taken.

It is said that Clairon was one of those actresses who kept themselves throughout the day in the humour of the character they were to act at night. It is obvious that this might be embarrassing to her servants and unpleasant to her friends, family, and visitors. A Lady Macbeth vein all day long in a house would be too much of a good thing; but Mdlle. Clairon defended the practice, as others did: ‘How,’ she would say, ‘could I be exalted, refined, imperial at night, if through the day I had been subdued to grovelling matters, every-day commonness, and polite servility?’ There was something in it; and in truth the superb Clairon, in ordinary life, was just as if she had to act every night the most sublimely imperious characters. With authors she was especially arbitrary, and to fling a manuscript part in the face of the writer, or to box his ears with it, was thought nothing of. Even worse than that was ‘only pretty Fanny’s way.’

The cause of Mdlle. Clairon’s retirement from the stage was a singular one. An actor named Dubois had been expelled from membership with the company of the Théâtre Français, on the ground that his conduct had brought dishonour on the profession. An order from the King commanded the restoration of Dubois, till the question could be decided. For April 15, 1765, the ‘Siege of Calais’ was accordingly announced, with Dubois in his original character. On that evening, Lekain, Molé, and Brizard, advertised to play, did not come down to the theatre at all. Mdlle. Clairon arrived, but immediately went home. There was an awful tumult in the house, and a general demand that the deserters should be clapped into prison. The theatre was closed: Lekain, Molé, and Brizard suffered twenty-four days’ imprisonment, and Mdlle. Clairon was shut up in Fort L’Évêque. At the re-opening of the theatre Bellecourt offered a very humble apology in the names of all the company; but Mdlle. Clairon refused to be included, and she withdrew altogether from the profession.

On a subsequent evening, when she was receiving friends at her own house, the question of the propriety of her withdrawal was rather vivaciously discussed, as it was by the public generally. Some officers were particularly urgent that she should return, and play in the especially popular piece the ‘Siege of Calais.’ ‘I fancy, gentlemen,’ she replied, ‘that if an attempt was made to compel you to serve with a fellow-officer who had disgraced the profession by an act of the utmost baseness, you would rather withdraw than do so?’ ‘No doubt we should,’ replied one of the officers, ‘but we should not withdraw on a day of _siege_.’ Clairon laughed, but she did not yield. She retired in 1765, at the age of forty-two.

Clairon, being great, had many enemies. They shot lies at her as venomous as poisoned arrows. They identified her as the original of the shameless heroine in the ‘Histoire de Frétillon.’ With her, however, love was not sporadic. It was a settled sentiment, and she loved but one at a time; among others, Marmontel (see his Memoirs), the Margrave of Anspach, and the comedian Larive. After all, Clairon had a divided sway. The rival queen was Marie Françoise Dumesnil. The latter was much longer before the public. The life of Mademoiselle Dumesnil was also longer, namely, from 1711 to 1803. Her professional career in Paris reached from 1737, when she appeared as Clytemnestra, to 1776, when she retired. For eleven years after Clairon’s withdrawal Dumesnil reigned alone. She was of gentle blood, but poor; she was plain, but her face had the beauty of intelligence and expression. When Garrick was asked what he thought of the two great _tragédiennes_, Clairon and Dumesnil, he replied, ‘Mdlle. Clairon is the most perfect actress I have seen in France.’ ‘And Mdlle. Dumesnil?’ ‘Oh!’ rejoined Garrick, ‘when I see Mdlle. Dumesnil I see no actress at all. I behold only Semiramis and Athalie!’--in which characters, however, she for many years wore the _paniers_ that were in vogue. She is remembered as the first tragic actress who actually ran on the stage. It was in ‘Mérope,’ when she rushed to save Ægisthe, exclaiming, ‘Hold! he is my son!’ She reserved herself for the ‘points,’ whether of pathos or passion. The effect she produced was the result of nature; there was no art, no study. She exercised great power over her audiences. One night having delivered her famous fine in Clytemnestra,

Je maudirais les dieux, s’ils me rendaient le jour,

an old captain standing near her clapped her on the back, with the rather rough compliment of ‘Va-t-en chienne, à tous les diables!’ Rough as it was, Dumesnil was delighted with it. On another occasion, Joseph Chénier, the dramatist, expressed a desire, at her own house, to hear her recite. It is said that she struck a fearful awe into him, as she replied, ‘Asséyez-vous, Néron, et prenez votre place!’--for, as she spoke, she seemed to adopt the popular accusation that Joseph had been accessory to the guillotining of his brother, the young poet, André Chénier. Her enemies asserted that Dumesnil was never ‘up to the mark’ unless she had taken wine, and a great deal of it. Marmontel insists that she caused his ‘Héraclides’ to fail through her having indulged in excess of wine; but Fleury states that she kept up her strength during a tragedy by taking chicken broth with a little wine poured into it.

Mademoiselle Dumesnil retired, as we have said, in 1776. The stage was next not unworthily occupied by Mdlle. Raucourt. But meanwhile there sprang up two young creatures destined to renew the rivalry which had existed between Clairon and Dumesnil. While these were growing up the French Revolution, which crushed all it touched, touched the Comédie Française, which fell to pieces. It pulled itself together, after a manner, but it was neither flourishing nor easy under the republic. The French stage paid its tribute to prison and to scaffold.

When the storm of the Revolution had swept by, that stage became once more full of talent and beauty. Talma reappeared, and soon after three actresses set the town mad. There was Mdlle. Georges, a dazzling beauty of sixteen, a mere child, who had come up from Normandy, and who knew nothing more of the stage than that richly dressed actors there represented the sorrows, passion, and heroism of ancient times. Of those ancient times she knew no more than what she had learned in Corneille and Racine. But she had no sooner trod the stage, as Agrippina, than she was at once accepted as a great mistress of her art. Her beauty, her voice, her smile, her genius and her talent, caused her to be hailed queen; but not quite unanimously. There was already a recognised queen of tragedy on the same stage, Mdlle. Duchesnois. This older queen (originally a dressmaker, next, like Mrs. Siddons, a lady’s-maid), was as noble an actress as Mdlle. Georges, but her noble style was not supported by personal beauty. She was, perhaps, the ugliest woman that had ever held an audience in thrall by force of her genius and ability alone. While song-writers celebrated the charms of Mdlle. Georges, portrait-painters, too cruelly faithful, placed the sublime ugliness of Mdlle. Duchesnois in the shop windows. There she was to be seen in character, with one of the lines she had to utter in it, as the epigraph:

Le roi parut touché de mes faibles attraits.

Even Talleyrand stooped to point a joke at her expense. A certain lady had no teeth. Mdlle. Duchesnois _had_, but they were not pleasant to see. ‘If,’ said Talleyrand, alluding to the certain lady, ‘If Madame ---- had teeth, she would be as ugly as Mdlle. Duchesnois.’

Between these two queens of tragedy the company of the Théâtre Français were as divided in their allegiance as the public themselves. The Emperor Napoleon and Queen Hortense were admirers of Mdlle. Georges; he covered her with diamonds, and he is said to have lent her those of his wife Josephine, who was the friend of Mdlle. Duchesnois. Bourbonites and Republicans also adopted Mdlle. Duchesnois, who was adopted by Mdlle. Dumesnil. Talma paid allegiance to the same lady, while Lafon swore only by Mdlle. Georges, in whose behalf Mdlle. Raucourt once nearly strangled Duchesnois. In society, every member of that awful institution was compelled to choose a side and a night. One queen played on a Monday, the other on a Wednesday; Mdlle. Georges on a Friday, and Duchesnois again on Sunday; and on the intervening nights the brilliant muse of comedy, Mdlle. Mars (as the daughter of Monvel, the actor, always called herself), came and made Paris ecstatic with her Elmire, her Célimène, and other characters. Of these three supreme actresses, Mdlle. Mars alone never grew old on the stage, in voice, figure, movement, action, feature, or expression. I recollect her well at sixty, creating the part of Mdlle. de Belleisle, a young girl of sixteen; and Mdlle. Mars that night was sixteen, and no more. It was only by putting the _binocle_ to the eyes that you might fancy you saw something older; but the voice! It was the pure, sweet, gentle, penetrating, delicious voice of her youth--ever youthful. Jules Janin describes the nights on which the brilliant and graceful Mdlle. Mars acted as intervals of inexpressible charm, moments of luxurious rest. Factions were silenced. The two queens of tragedy were forgotten for a night, and all the homage was for the queen of comedy.