Part 9

“I have just had a _grand succès_, and I don’t wish to sleep before thanking you, to whom I owe it. I have never been so happy as I am tonight, and I believe that, if such a thing is possible, even my affection for you has grown. One thing alone distresses me, and that is my inability to repay you for all you have done. At each burst of applause, I thought of you, dear master, who have given me your time and made sure for me my future. No affection has ever been more profound nor any gratitude so sincere, believe me. Without you I would have been nothing, but with you--two hours ago they told me I was an artist! I can open my heart to you. You cannot imagine how much is included in that one word “artist” especially to a young girl, who yesterday had doubts about the future and had need of reading all your letters in order to give courage.... I am doubly happy. Do not mistake for vanity the effects of the great joy I have been experiencing. How I would work, dear master, to do you the honor of registering a multitude of such nights!”

But good parts fell to Réjane’s lot only infrequently. The reigning queen of the _Vaudeville_ was Mme. Bartet, and it was she, naturally, who got most of the leading rôles. The public had begun to like the young newcomer, whom it had come to know in her small but repeated successes; but nevertheless she was kept more or less in the background, encouraged only by Regnier and patiently waiting her opportunities.

It was in this fashion that she spent the remaining time at the _Vaudeville_ until she left it in the spring of 1882. That period, whatever dissatisfactions it brought to her, is not without its high lights. In _Le Club_ she has “_un vrai rôle_,” and played it, with gratifying success, a hundred times. In April, 1879, Mme. Bartet fell suddenly ill, and with only a few hours notice Réjane assumed the older woman’s rôle in _Les Tapageurs_. When _Les Lionnes Pauvres_ was revived, in November 1879, her Séraphine aroused one of those artistic controversies which delight the French mind. Sarcey disapproved, for once. M. Defère advised her to change her costumer. M. Barbey d’Aurevilly on the other hand said she recalled Rachel and was a true artist; Augier, the author of the play, sustained her; and stanch old Regnier wrote her at length, discoursing on the art of acting and of his _affection véritable_. Her Mimi in _La Vie de Bohème_ again saw the critics at odds about her.

Altogether in her eight seasons at the _Vaudeville_, she had played more than a score of parts, some of them genuine successes. Yet she had not won genuine recognition at the hands of the directors, and her position in the company was hardly in accord with her promise and deserts. Sardou and the others responsible for the affairs of the _Vaudeville_ seemed strangely blind to the fact that in Réjane they had a _comédienne_ of the first order. But though she was by her superiors much of the time either kept idle or employed in almost insignificant parts, the rest of Paris speedily knew her for what she was. She was in keen demand for all the special, semi-informal performances that make up so large a part of the artistic life of the normal Paris. The “spectacles” of the _Cercle de la rue Royale_, the _revues_ at the _Epatant_, the dramatic trifles that were the adjuncts of authors’ readings, all found in Réjane a willing and able helper. She took these artistic informalities seriously, rehearsed for them and costumed them with care, and was so particularly well adapted to the work that she became a marked favorite with the very social and artistic circles to which the _Vaudeville_ catered.

As the directors, however, continued to give her insignificant parts, it is not strange that she listened to those friends, like Pierre Berton, who urged her to shake the dust of _Vaudeville_ from her feet. “You are a star,” Berton told her. It happened that a star was the quest just then of M. Bertrand of the _Variétés_ and with him she signed a three years’ contract.

This moment may be said to mark the definite arrival of Réjane. She was no longer to cool her heels in the greenroom or at home, and henceforth she was to play, as a rule, principal parts. Moreover, the agreement with the _Variétés_ was elastic enough to allow appearances at other theatres, often in plays of more import than the light material of which the _Variétés_ was the avowed medium. And when she returned, on occasion, to the _Vaudeville_, it was not in minor rôles. Réjane had assumed her due place on the stage of Paris.

It had not been a difficult rise. Though it is not possible to overlook the elements of steadfast ambition, patience, and hard work in Réjane’s early career, it is true that her native spirits, her _flair_, and the training and friendship of Regnier made inevitable her right to a prominent place on the stage of Paris.

With that place assured, we see her thenceforth steadily enlarging it, progressing from part to part, appearing now in this theatre of Paris and now in that, shortly venturing into the other capitals of Europe, then making a tour--to be later repeated--in America, and finally acquiring a theatre of her own in Paris,--an international figure, a queen of comedy.

M. Porel, whom Réjane afterward married, has given a graphic account of one of her earlier triumphs--and a typical Parisian first night. The play was de Goncourt’s _Germinie Lacerteux_, the date, 1888; the theatre the _Odéon_.

“Oh, that première! The beautiful theatre was crowded to the last inch with an audience that was restless and seemed none too good-natured. The journalists were furious because the dress rehearsal had been behind closed doors. The women were puzzling themselves about the subject of the play, and some of the literary gossips were loudly telling all they thought they knew. The _cafétiers_ of the neighborhood, disgruntled because the usual five _entr’actes_ had been cut down to two, were protesting to the _claque_ against the change, which interfered with the sale of the usual five bocks. Amid the confusion of the lobbies were heard remarks that the piece was impossible.

“The curtain rises; Réjane makes her appearance, with her arms as red as those of a kitchen-girl. In the ball gown of a servant-maid she is indeed amazing. This little scene she plays well, and wins applause. In the scene of the fortifications, some of the hissers are in evidence before she enters; and then Réjane, so prettily modest, plays her idyllic scene so well that the delighted audience breaks into cries of ‘Bravo!, and the curtain is raised and raised again.... In one of the following scenes, some of the audience refuse to listen to Mme. Crosnier; she becomes confused, loses her head and begins over again. Some cry aloud, some laugh, some hiss. Without Réjane the piece will go on the rocks. A gesture, a poignant, sincere cry, and Réjane has the house with her again. They applaud her, they recall her again and again. During the _entr’acte_, there is a stormy time. Antoine is indignant over the sneering of his neighbors and calls them scoundrelly imbeciles. There is shaking of fists, challenges are exchanged, some hiss, others applaud. It is in this atmosphere that the scene in the creamery begins. Then it was that she quite won the house. She is again recalled again and again, applauded by the whole audience. She is acclaimed again, after the fall of the curtain in the scene of the _Rue du Roiher_. The ladies were completely upset; they wept, they clapped their hands. Even without Réjane, the two last scenes finished themselves somehow. After that, de Goncourt’s play was to live more than one night; and after that Réjane was assuredly a great _comédienne_.”

Two years later, when _Ma Cousine_, a comedy in three acts by Henri Meilbac, was produced, Paris saw that Réjane had again made extraordinary progress. “Playing,” says M. Huret, “in a vast auditorium, a rôle that demanded large dramatic power, she responded to that demand, and, exhibited new poise, control of voice, and exactness of articulation. She who had heretofore almost expired of apprehension at each new impersonation, was now calm, sure of herself, almost indifferent. She sensed the authority that had come to her; she held the audience in her hand. In _Décoré_, in _Monsieur Betsy_, she had been one of a remarkable trio of actresses; now, in _Ma Cousine_, she outshone her _confrères_ at all points. The author had set her the difficult task of playing an act three quarters of an hour long without rising from her couch. But she was equal to the occasion, and, by the intelligence and sprightliness of her inflections, gestures and facial expression, she made that chair itself a miniature theatre.” It was in _Ma Cousine_ that Réjane introduced on the boards of the _Variétés_, after careful study, a bit of dancing like that on view at the _Elysée-Montmartre_; “she seized on and imitated the grotesque effrontery of Mlle. Grille-d’Egout.” In other words the sprightly Gabrielle performed a veritable can-can.

A little later M. Meunier, who was not remarkable for his kindness in print to the dean of his craft, wrote: “Sarcey’s exultation knew no bounds when, in 1890, Réjane again appeared in _Décoré_. Time, that had metamorphosed the lissom critic of 1875 into a round and inert mass of solid flesh, cruel Father Time, gave back to Sarcey, for this occasion only, a flash of youthful fire, which stirred his wits to warmth and animation. He shouted out hardly articulate praise; he literally rolled in his stall with pleasure; his bald head blushed like an aurora borealis. ‘Look at her!’ he cried, ‘See her malicious smiles, her feline graces, listen to her reserved and biting diction; she is the very essence of the Parisienne! What an ovation she received! How they applauded her! and how she played!’ From M. Sarcey the laugh spreads; it thaws the skepticism of M. Jules Lemaître, engulfs the timidity of the public, becomes unanimous and universal, and is no longer to be silenced.”

The day of Réjane’s greatest and most lasting success came with the production, in 1893, of _Madame Sans-Gêne_, by Sardou, the latest of the Parisian dramatists to answer the call of the great _comédienne_ in their midst.

“Just as the first dressmakers of Paris measure Réjane’s fine figure for the costumes of her various rôles, so the best writers of the French Academy now make plays to her measure,” wrote M. Meunier in 1894. “They take the size of her temperament, the height of her talent, the breadth of her acting; they consider her taste, they flatter her mood; they clothe her with the richest draperies she can covet. Their imagination, their fancy, their cleverness, are all put at her service. The leaders in this industry have hitherto been Messrs. Meilhac and Halévy, but now M. Victorien Sardou is ruining them. _Madame Sans-Gêne_ is certainly, of all the rôles Réjane has played, that best suited to bring out her manifold resources. It is not merely that Réjane play the washerwoman, become a great lady, without blemish or omission; she _is Madame Sans-Gêne_ herself, with no overloading, nothing forced, nothing caricatured. It is portraiture; history.

“Many a time has Réjane appeared in cap, cotton frock, and white apron; many a time in robes of state, glittering with diamonds; she has worn the buskin or the sock, demeaned herself like a gutter heroine, or dropped the stately curtsey of the high-born lady. But never, except in _Madame Sans-Géne_, has she been able to bring all her rôles into one focus, exhibit her whole wardrobe, and yet remain one and the same person, compress into one evening the whole of her life.”

What sort of woman presented herself to the gaze of her Parisian admirers--and soon to American eyes--at this, the time of her greatest triumph? Whatever other gifts she brought to her work, sheer beauty was not one of them. “Is it her beauty?” asked M. Filon, seeking the source of her power, and of her perfect understanding with her audiences. “Certainly not. She is not pretty; one might even say ... but it is more polite not to say it. To quote a famous _mot_, ‘She is not beautiful, she is worse.’”[99]

Though Réjane never had the least claim to Mr. Vance Thompson’s rhapsodic description of her as “amazingly and diabolically beautiful,” she really has no quarrel with the fate that made her as she is. Comedy was to be her mission, and if Wilde was right in his dictum that “what serves its purpose is beautiful,” beautiful she is, after all. For plain though it be, her face is a true comedy mask. “There is comedy in every line of her face, in the arched eyebrows, the well opened, dancing eyes, the tip-tilted nose, and the wonderful, mobile, expressive mouth,” says William Archer. “This mouth is unquestionably the actress’ chief feature; it conditions her art. With a different mouth she might have been a tragedian or a heroine of melodrama, which would have been an immense pity. It is not a beautiful feature from the sculptor’s point of view; even from the painter’s it is not so much a rose-bud as a full-blown rose. It has almost the wide-lipped expansiveness of a Greek mask, but it is sensitive, ironic, amiable, fascinating.”

To others, her eyes have been her chief charm. They are large and gray, changeful with the flexibility of Réjane’s whole nature, surmounted by extraordinarily lofty and expressive brows, and often half covered by eyelids almost languorous. Her hair is, or at least was, golden brown. She is not tall. She is by no means commanding in figure. There is nothing of the imposing stage queen about her; yet, in figure, as in face, she has been perfectly equipped for her work as _comédienne de Paris_. Being just that, she makes her hands and her body means to her histrionic ends. Those who have repeatedly studied her art have found the subtlety, the distinction, and the perfect command of her gestures and her poses more than a match for even the brightness, or the sadness or the tenderness of her face. In every critique of Réjane there crops out a pointed reference to her wonderful fluency and flexibility of style, her fertility of invention of expressive detail, the naturalness of her transitions of mood. “Elasticity, dexterity and rapidity she has in a superlative degree, and with them grace and geniality, together with simple pathos and honest heat of temper. And of course she possesses that peculiar fineness of taste which belongs to her nation and which is very apparent in _Madame Sans-Gêne_, whose heroine may be crude and uncultivated, but is never boorish or clownish, is awkward but not ugly. Her voice is clear and pleasant, but her elocution is less distinct than that of many other French artists, although her tones mark unmistakably the spiritual and intellectual differences which fluctuate through her speeches. She has an unfailing regard for the proportions of her scenes, and never obtrudes herself into a prominent place just because she is the star of the company.”[100]

We have heard much of the comic finesse of Réjane’s _Madame Sans-Gêne_. Now listen to one acute observer (Arthur Symons) of another side of her genius: “Réjane can be vulgar, as nature is vulgar; she has all the instincts of the human animal, of the animal woman, whom man will never quite civilize.... Réjane, in _Sapho_ or _Zaza_ for instance, is woman ... loving and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable, horribly human thing, whose direct appeal, like that of a sick animal, seizes you by the throat at the instant in which it reaches your eyes and ears. More than any actress she is the human animal without disguise or evasion; with all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements. In _Sapho_ or _Zaza_ she speaks the language of the senses, no more.... In being _Zaza_, she is so far from being herself (what is the self of a great actress?) that she has invented a new way of walking, as well as new tones and grimaces. There is not an effect in the play which she has not calculated; only, she has calculated every effect so exactly that the calculation is not seen.”

M. Filon confessed himself baffled by the question of whether Réjane’s marvelous liquidness of mood and method is due to something essential in her nature, or merely to an incomparable power of imitation. “If I shut my eyes,” he says, “I sometimes think I can hear the nasal intonation, the little squeaky voice which belonged to Céline Chaumont. A minute later this voice has the cadence, the sustained vibration, the artistic break with which Sarah Bernhardt punctuates her diction, and the transition is so skillfully managed that all these different women--the woman who mocks, the woman who trembles, the woman who threatens, the woman who desires, the woman who laughs, and the woman who weeps--seem to be one and the same woman. For the matter of that, I have set myself a problem which I should not be able to solve even with the help of Réjane herself. Let us be content with what lies on the surface. I am inclined to think that her resources consist of a host of petty artifices, each more ingenious and more imperceptible than the last. If one studied her secret one might draw up a whole set of rules for the use of _comédiennes_.”

With _Sans-Gêne_ among her achievements, more and more word of her became known outside of France. Unmitigatedly French though she was, though there was little in her to suggest the universal appeal that has made world artists of other actresses, by the sheer merit of the thing she did, and because she was so complete an epitome of one phase of her nation’s art, she was bound to become an international figure. Her first appearance in London was in June, 1894. Her _Sans-Gêne_ there instantly won her the recognition she deserved. America had not long to wait. On February 27, 1895 she appeared in _Madame Sans-Gêne_ in New York. She remained there several weeks, playing in _Divorçons_, _Sapho_, _Ma Cousine_, the one act play _Lolotte_, and _Maison de Poupée_ (Ibsen’s _A Doll’s House_), besides _Sans-Gêne_. Ten years later[101] she made her second and last tour in America. In the meantime Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Russia, Austria, Roumania, Italy, Spain and Portugal had all seen her. Regnier’s nose rubbing had assuredly been to good purpose.

One may as well admit at once that Réjane’s tours in the United States were not successful, in the sense that continuously crowded houses indicate success. The language was, of course, one stumbling block, for a keen understanding of the foreign tongue was more necessary for a taste for Réjane than for the broad effects, say, of a Bernhardt or a Salvini. And if the language fell on baffled ears, the essence of the plays, in some cases, antagonized the more puritanical of our public. For the pieces Réjane played reflected a society and a point of view for which many Americans found it hard to muster much sympathy. So meager was the American response to Réjane’s art during her first visit that she forswore us forever. Nine years sufficed to make her change her mind. “But now (1904) as then,” said the New York _Times_, “she is hampered by the moral bias of American audiences, and by the fact that the manners she so searchingly studies and exquisitely depicts are exotic--foreign alike to our sympathies and our experience.”

Whatever her popular success in America may or may not have been, Réjane--in some of her parts at least--won the enthusiastic praise of the critics and of the restricted public that knew its French well enough to meet her on something like Parisian terms. The _pièce de résistance_ of the first tour was _Madame Sans-Gêne_. Like most of Sardou’s later dramas, it was a “tailor-made” play, written to suit the personality and methods of its principal actress.[102] A secondary object was evident in the effort to take advantage of the revival of interest in Napoleon that marked, for no evident reason, the early nineties. Technically the play was interesting chiefly as showing the author in a new phase, for it was surprising to find Sardou, a notorious disciple of Scribe, writing a piece that was little more than a series of sketches. But Réjane lifted the whole affair to a height at which it could be regarded only as one of the triumphs of the nineteenth century theatre.

Réjane’s freshness, naturalness, tenderness, and charmingly subtle sense of comedy as Catherine Hubscher in _Madame Sans-Gêne_ was instantly recognized and celebrated in every American city that she visited. In _Ma Cousine_, a light farce, she acted the soubrette _Riquette_ with an abandon, a cleverness, a joyousness, that emphasized her new public’s admiration of her. Her Nora, however, in _Maison de Poupée_ (Ibsen’s _A Doll’s House_), revealed her in a new and more serious light, demonstrating at once her genuine versatility and her considerable emotional power. Even the unsavory _Sapho_ she made something new and different, “moderating its excesses and enhancing its better moods. Less pathetic directly than by suggestion, she often moved by simple means a sympathy which _Sapho_ ill deserved.”

Just before Réjane began her second American tour she had an unhappy experience in Havana. She gave there a series of eight performances, the total result being chronicled in the American papers as a “fiasco.” She had a welcome such as no actor or actress had ever before received in Cuba. Thousands gathered at the pier as a private steamer went out to meet her and bring her ashore; formal addresses of welcome and bouquets were showered on her; and the Havana papers were full of odes and eulogies. The first-night audience that gathered to see _Sapho_ was the most brilliant ever seen in Havana, and the applause that greeted Réjane’s entrance was prolonged and hearty. But the audience grew colder and colder as the play progressed. The next day began a festival period for the dramatic critics of Havana. They pounced upon _Sapho_ and Daudet, its author, and declared that while his sort of “esoteric rot” might be what Frenchmen regard as the product of genius, they rejoiced that such stuff could not pass as art in Havana.[103] Matters grew worse with _La Pétite Marquise_ and _Zaza_, the company and the mediocre productions were abused (“What did the actress mean by leaving everything except her costumes in New York?” the papers asked. “Does she believe that ‘any old thing’ is good enough for Havana?”), and the young ladies of Havana were all kept away from Réjane’s improper plays. Personalities became frequent in the papers, and one critic boldly asserted that Réjane’s star had set. Her manager made matters worse by revoking the passes of one paper, the lady herself provoked more criticism by her refusal to be a guest at a reception at the Athenæum, and altogether affairs reached such a pass that every one was immensely relieved when Réjane and her company sailed away for New York. The whole incident indicated more than anything else the narrow outlook of the Cubans. “We are making our political independence apply to everything,” wrote one of the critics. “America for the Americans, and Cuba for the Cubans! Let the foreigner get out!”