This author who could when he liked depict with the greatest subtlety
was no fit person to preside over a temperance society. When we reached
the little theatre where _La Duchesse Blue_ was being performed he was a
little more jolly than the beautiful women who drove up in their
carriages from all corners of fashionable Paris, suspected. I still felt
the inexplicable attraction, a mixture of antipathy and admiration, of
which I have spoken. I listened to Jacques as he told me his plans for
new works, and I forgot his horrible failings of heart and character in
my admiration for the imagination from which ideas spurted, as I had
seen the lava in the crater of Vesuvius do, while fiery stones of the
size of a man shot into the air with a report like a cannon. There the
atmosphere is suffocating and full of stench. The sulphur smokes beneath
your feet and burns them. Tears trickle from your eyes. Your breath
fails. It is unbearable. But this brutal outburst of the forces of
nature keeps you there, hypnotizes you.
Jacques, too, in his way is a force of nature. His artistic vitality
will always overwhelm me, and it did so this evening in proportion
with such a hypnotism. For between the formidable exterminating
monster which waves its column of smoke above the devastated Pompeii,
and the inoffensive cerebral volcano whose smoky eruptions overflow
into yellow volumes, or crystallize into three, four or five act
plays, the difference is really very great. Without ironical
extenuation such a comparison would be rather comic. Whether justified
or not, I gave myself up to this sensation without discussion. Wearied
as I was by my day of moral lassitude, was not this way of spending my
evening an unexpected pleasure? The comedy might interest me, for this
foppish egoist had great talent. The actress might be pretty, although
doubtless Jacques’ fatuity had transformed for my astonishment a
Conservatoire fool into a bird of paradise. I had too often
accompanied Claude Larcher into Colette Rigaud’s dressing-room not to
know these footlight-mistresses and their vulgarity. But there are
always exceptions, and Madam Pierre de Bonnivet might be an exception
to her class, although a rich woman who collects celebrities was
hardly likely to please me. In any case, it was worth the trouble of
accompanying Molan to the Vaudeville simply to have the pleasure of
seeing him enter the theatre.
“We will go in by the stage door,” he said “in the Rue de la Chaussée
d’Antin. It is very charming here in the two little stage boxes, and
upon the stage behind the curtain. We can get to the boxes through the
wings, if either of them is vacant.”
He got out of the carriage before me as he said this; he greeted the
door-keeper and went through a doorway and up a staircase with the gait
which is unique in the world: that of the fashionable author visiting
his paper, his editor, or his theatre. Every gesture seemed to say, “The
house belongs to me”; his foot was lighter, his cane waved in his hand,
and his shoulders involuntarily swaggered. These things are in
themselves of no importance, but we painters who have studied
portraiture make it our business to seize upon these trifles. The
theatre staff, when they saw “their author” pass, displayed
inexpressible and unconscious respect. How I should like to inspire some
picture dealer with like respect! When shall I have in displaying my
pictures to a friend, the peaceful and innocently puerile pride which
Jacques displayed in opening for me the door of one of the stage boxes,
fortunately unoccupied, where we sat down while he whispered to me—
“The first act has been in progress for five minutes. You will follow it
directly. A former mistress of the Duke’s is trying to make the Duchess
jealous. Was I lying to you when I said that little Favier is pretty?
She has caught sight of me. Fortunately she has nothing to say for a
minute or two, or she would have forgotten her lines. She is looking at
you. You interest her. She knows the three or four friends I usually
bring. Now hear her speak. Is not the timbre, the music of her voice,
exquisite? Listen to what she is saying.”
I have heard _La Duchesse Blue_ many times since till I know by heart
every phrase. It is a fine delicate play in spite of the affectation of
the title. It contains an extremely good study of a rare but very human
jealousy. It is the story of a friend who is amorous of his friend’s
wife, and who remains faithful to his friendship in his love. He never
mentioned his feelings to the woman. He has never admitted it to
himself, and he cannot bear any one else to pay court to this young
woman. He ends by saving her from a irreparable mistake, without her
knowing the reason or who he is. The first scene in which the childish
Duchess confides in her husband’s former mistress, without suspecting
the recollections she is awakening by the avowal of her own joys, is a
marvel of moving, vibrating analysis, which might be called tenderly
cruel. This play is a little masterpiece of to-day by Marivaux—a
Marivaux whose airy gaiety would be like lace upon a wound. But I did
not perceive the real value of the comedy on this first evening;
although Molan was present to comment upon its smallest details. The
painter in me was too keenly attracted by the extraordinary appearance
of this Camille Favier, whom my friend had so carelessly called his
mistress. The box being almost on the stage allowed me to follow the
smallest movements of her face, her most furtive winks, and the most
rapid knitting of her brows. I could see the layers of cream and rouge
unequally distributed on her face, and the lengthening of her lashes
with black crayon. Even made up in this way she realized in an
extraordinary way the ideal type created by the most refined English
artists: Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris. Her fine features were
almost too slight for the perspective of the stage. Her large, slightly
convex forehead seemed clouded with dreams. The elongated oval of her
face made her smile float into her cheeks. Her straight nose, rather
short, ennobled her profile. Her full lips drooped at the corners and
were at the same time sad and sensual, voluptuous, and bitter. This make
up even gave to her beauty a particular charm, which touched me
strangely in its mixture of the real and the artificial. Her rosy cheeks
were visible through her rouge, the fringe of her long lashes beneath
the crayon, the fresh purple of her lips through the carmine, just as in
her playing of the part she represented; a true, sincere and tender
woman, was visible or seemed to be visible.
“It is the thunder-clap,” he said, “you have just felt! You can listen,
too. Your sublimes will amalgate, as Saint Simon said of some one. But
now turn and look with your glasses in the fourth box of the first tier
on the left. You see a woman in white, fanning herself with a fan, with
silk muslin flounces, white too, and an invention of her own? That is
Madam Pierre de Bonnivet. What do you think of her? It is amusing, is it
not, to play the game of love and hazard with these two pretty creatures
as partners?”
I looked in the direction Jacques indicated, and I soon had my glasses
fixed on the fashionable rival of the Bohemian Camille Favier.
The fatuous insolence which my comrade affected then appeared to me
justified, and more than justified, by the beauty of this elegant female
who coquetted with him, as he told me. I knew he was too daring a fellow
not to go on quickly from liberty to liberty. If Camille recalled, even
with her rouge and patches, the Psyches and Galateas of the most suave
of the Pre-raphaelite Brothers, Madam Pierre de Bonnivet, with her
arched nose, her wilful chin, the fine line of the cheek, her elegant
haughty mouth, had beauty enough to justify the most aristocratic
pretensions. How, coming of a poor family—I have found out since that
she was a Taraval—she inevitably recalled one of those princesses so
dear to Van Dyck, that incomplete master, whom no other has equalled, in
the art of portraying breeding, and the indomitable pride and heroic
energy concealed beneath the fragility of feminine grace. The habits of
wealth for two or three generations produce these mirages.
It is certain that the painter of the divine Marquise Paola Brignole, of
the Red Palace at Genoa, never found a model more suited to his genius.
His brush alone could have properly reproduced the glory of that tint
whose dead white was not anæmic—the red lips told that—with the cloud of
blonde hair which paled in the light. The simple sight of the thick
rolls of golden hair lying upon her neck, when she turned her head,
betokened that physiological vitality of one of those slender persons
who conceal beneath the tenderness of a siren the courage of a captain
of dragoons. Her neck, though a little long, was well developed, and the
fingers of her nervous hands were a little long also; her bust, which
was outlined at each movement by her supple white corsage, was so young,
so elegant, and so full. But the most significant thing to me about this
creature of luxury was her blue eyes, as blue as those of the other
woman, with this difference, that the blue of Camille Favier’s eyes
recalled the blue of the petals of a flower; while Madam de Bonnivet’s
eyes were the azure of metal or precious stone. They gave one the idea
of something implacable, in spite of their charm, something hard and
frigidly dangerous in their magnetism. To complete this singular
sensation of graceful cruelty, when the young woman laughed her lips
were raised a little too much at the corners displaying sharp white
teeth close together, almost too small, like those of a precious animal
of the chase.
In to-day trying to exactly reproduce the impressions, which I felt in
the presence of Jacques Molan’s two partners in his favourite game of
heartless love, I am taking into account that my actual knowledge of
their characters influences my recollection of this first meeting. I do
not think I am giving too powerful a touch to this souvenir. I can still
hear myself say, while applause was being showered upon little Favier,
to Jacques—
“You make a good choice, when you like.”
“I do what I can,” he said as he nodded his head.
“I am asking myself,” I continued, “with mistresses of such beauty——”
“One mistress,” he corrected me. “Madam de Bonnivet is not my mistress.”
“It comes to the same thing, as far as it concerns what I am going to
say. I am asking myself, how you manage to escape scandal.”
“I am like Proudhon,” he replied with a laugh, “whom Hugo pretended had
the skin of a toad in his pocket. It appears that this charm protects
one from every danger.”
“Do you think your luck will hold? Then what of the women themselves?”
“Larcher has an axiom: 'a woman is the best antidote against another
woman.’”
“But the result of that is spiteful vengeance, vitriol, and the
revolver. One of these two women, I should not trust.”
As I said that, I pointed with my cane to Madam Bonnivet.
“Really! beautiful Queen Anne gives you the impression, also, of a
coquettish bird of prey, of a little spitfire of a falcon, whom it is
not wise to tease. Ah, well! If you like,” he went on as he got up, “the
act is over, I will present you to one or the other of them. It is very
funny. Would you believe that in my stories I have always more or less
need of a looker-on; when we think that there are people foolish enough
to criticize the classic tragedies on this account? In my opinion there
is no more natural person.”
He took my arm as he said this, assigning me the part of witness, of
satellite borne along in the orbit of its sun. It is a strange thing
that I am really made for those secondary parts, Pylades to an Orestes,
Horatio to Hamlet; and his coolness did not wound me. Alas! it has been
decreed that I should be, like Horatio, always and everywhere an
unsuccessful man. What irony to have as my Hamlet the implacable egotist
who was showing me the way to little Favier’s dressing-room! I followed
him behind the scenes, up a staircase crowded with dressers and
supernumeraries, and along corridors full of doors from behind which
came the sounds of laughter, singing, argument, and of expressions used
at a card-party.
Previously, I had only been behind the scenes at the Comédie Française
of the famous theatres; where I often accompanied the unfortunate
Claude. At that theatre, was to be found the correct and conventional
respectability, which too often spoils the acting of members of the
company of that famous house. My horror of pretentiousness has always
made me dislike the Comédie, with its elegant appearance, its secular
portraits, its venerable busts, and its elegant green room. There, more
than elsewhere I have experienced the disenchantment of the contrast
between the play and the back of the stage, between theatrical prestige
and its kitchen. On the contrary, behind the scenes of the smaller
theatres, where my friends have taken me, the Varieties, the Gymnase and
the Vaudeville on that evening, I have felt the picturesque antitheses,
the supple improvization, the animal energy which constitute an actor’s
business. Chance willed that in the company of Jacques Molan, after
being a prey to impuissance for the entire day, I should find a complete
cure for my vitality. Did we not hear, as we knocked at the door of
Mademoiselle Favier’s dressing-room, the following dialogue exchanged by
two actors playing the piece, the famous Bressoré, and a gentleman in a
frock coat and tall hat, whose clean-shaven face and bluish cheeks
showed he was an actor of this or some other company.
“I was not up to much in my new part,” the latter asked, “was I? Tell me
the truth.”
“You were very good,” Bressoré replied, “but you have one failing.”
“What is that?”
“You don’t stand firm and look the audience straight in the face.”
“That fellow has just mentioned the secret of success in the arts,”
Jacques Molan said to me with a laugh; “between ourselves as friends,
you are a little lacking in assurance yourself. If I met you more often
I would give you——”
In saying this he did not suspect how gaily and hardly he was touching a
sore in my artistic conscience; and I did not give him the answer which
rose to my lips. “That simply proves the baseness and brutality of
success, and that the artist who succeeds is often a charlatan in
disguise.”
He had just knocked at the dressing-room door. A voice had answered,
“Who is there?” then without waiting for a reply the door opened and
Camille Favier appeared with a smile of happiness upon her pretty face
which changed into a constrained expression when she saw that her lover
was not alone.
“Ah!” she said, slightly confused, “I did not think you would bring any
one, and my dressing-room is untidy.”
“That does not matter,” said Jacques as he gently pushed her back into
the room with one hand and introduced me with the other. “My friend is
no one of importance as you think he is, little Blue Duchess. He is a
very old friend of mine and a painter, a very great painter, you
understand. All our friends are great men. He is used to disorder in his
own studio, so make your mind easy. He asked to be introduced to you
because he has long wished to paint your portrait.” He nudged me with
his elbow to warn me not to contradict his delicate handling of the
truth. “I forgot to mention his name, M. Vincent la Croix. Do not say
you have seen his work, for he shows very little. He belongs to the
timid school. You are warned. Now the ice is broken let us sit down.”
“You can do so,” the young woman said with a laugh. My companion’s
banter, though not very flattering to me, had already transformed her.
“You will allow me to tidy up a little?” she went on as with almost
incredible rapidity she spread a clean towel over a basin of soapy water
in which she had just washed her hands. She rolled up and threw under
the dressing-table several other dirty towels. She put the lids on three
or four boxes of pomade, and hung a red wrapper over a chair, on which I
had noticed a well worn pair of common corsets, which she generally wore
for economy’s sake. She did all this with a smile, and then noticed a
pair of pale green stockings which she wore upon the stage. These she
picked up with wonderful quickness, and I thought I could detect a
tremor of shame in her as she did so. Those silk stockings which still
displayed the shape of her fine leg and tiny foot were a small part of
her nudity. She concealed them in the first object which came to hand,
and it turned out to be a hat-box. “That is all,” she said as she turned
to Jacques. “Do you think I anticipated your visit and changed my
costume in ten minutes, watch in hand? You will not have to endure the
presence of my dresser, who, poor woman, displeases you.” She went on in
a caressing and frightened tone: “Were you satisfied with me this
evening? Did I play my great scene well?”
If she had seduced me the moment I saw her on the stage by her charming
finesse and ingenuous grace, how the charm worked with more powerful
magic in these common surroundings still more unworthy of her! This
simple dressing-room, so untidy, so lacking in embroidery and ornaments,
where everything seemed a makeshift for the sake of economy, recalled to
me by its contrast the sumptuousness and luxury of the dressing-room
where Colette Regaud reigned at the Français. Ah, if Colette had only
had for Claude, when I accompanied that unfortunate fellow to her
dressing-room, the evident love which the Blue Duchess showed for
Jacques Molan even in the tones of her most ordinary conversation, the
ardour of her most fleeting glances, and the fever of her smallest
gestures! She was a delightful child, who loved as she gave herself,
with her whole being, naturally and spontaneously. What divine
tenderness my companion enjoyed simply out of vanity! I felt how
delighted he was while talking to his mistress, at directing this little
performance! His eyes became shining instead of tender. I could see that
he was studying me in a mirror in front of us, instead of looking at the
love-sick girl as he answered her—
“You were exquisite as you always are. Ask Vincent if I did not say so?”
“Is that true?” she asked.
“Quite true,” I replied.
“He echoed my remarks too, I assure you,” Jacques continued.
“Then I really acted my scene well,” she said, with a naïve gleam of
contentment in her eyes; then she knitted her brows and nodding her
pretty head said: “ah, well, I am surprised at it.”
“Why?” I asked her in my turn.
“You ought not to ask her that,” Jacques said, with a laugh. “I know
beforehand what her answer will be.”
“No,” she said quickly, and her mobile mouth assumed the bitter curve it
had in repose. “Do not listen to him, sir. His is going to tease me, and
it is very unkind of him, about one of the nervous impressions which we
all have—you two as well. Do you not sometimes experience a shudder of
antipathy in the company of certain people, whose presence alone freezes
you and takes away all at once your memory, your power, and your mind?
Their presence alone produces a feeling that one cannot breathe the same
air as them without being stifled.”
“Yes, I do know those antipathies!” I cried. “I feel them for people I
meet by chance, whom I have never seen before, who are nothing to me,
but their approach is quite intolerable to me, just as if they were my
avowed enemies. Once I used to try and resist this instinctive feeling
of repulsion. I found from experience that I was always wrong not to
yield to it, and I am sure to-day that an antipathy of this kind, either
strong or slight, is nature’s second sight, and an infallible warning
that a danger threatens us through the being whose existence annoys us
thus.”
“You see,” Camille said turning to Molan, “I am not so ridiculous after
all.”
I had at once guessed the name of the person whose presence in the
theatre so disconcerted this frail Burne-Jones nymph, transformed by the
bad fairy presiding over her destiny into a poor devil of an actress in
love with the writer in Paris the most incapable of love. If I had not
guessed the name Jacques would not have left me in ignorance of it for
long. He is no worse than any one else. I have heard of his good actions
and seen his generosity. To my knowledge he has put his purse at the
disposal of colleagues whom he had more or less slandered. It is
difficult to reconcile that, for example, with the indelicate unkindness
which made him name his mistress’ rival at a time when he saw the pretty
child was so troubled. The explanation, however, is quite simple. Such a
thing as good or evil, unkindness or generosity, never entered into his
calculations. He always played to the gallery, and a single spectator
sufficed to compose this gallery, which in turn made him perform the
best or worst actions, and made him magnanimous or mean. While playing
the part of looker-on for him I realized how correct are the casuists
who pretend that our actions are nothing, but our motives everything.
His motives I could see as distinctly as the movement of a watch in a
glass case.
“She talks to you in enigmas,” he said to me with a gleam in his eyes
which meant: “You shall see if my diagnosis is correct and if she loves
me.” How could this Tussolin Don Juan resist the chance of satisfying
two vanities at the same time, that of the observer and that of the
seducer? He went on: “I am going to amuse you with the name of the
member of the audience who so troubles her this evening. She is not so
complex as you are, and it is simply a woman who gives her this feeling
of annoyance.”
“Jacques!” the actress cried in a supplicating voice, without noticing
that the use of his Christian name betrayed their secret even more than
her lover’s odious teasing.
“I warn you that Vincent is one of her admirers,” the latter insisted in
spite of this appeal.
“Ah!” Camille said, looking at me with a sudden feeling of distrust;
“does he know her?”
“He is teasing you, mademoiselle; I have seen in the theatre no face to
which I could give a name.”
“Then I am a liar,” Molan went on, “and you did not say just now that
Madam Pierre de Bonnivet was a Van Dyck who had stepped out of a picture
just as, according to you, the Blue Duchess has stepped from a picture
by Burne-Jones. There is no need to be surprised, Camille. Comparison
with pictures is a mania with painters. To them a woman or a landscape
is only a bit of canvas without a frame. This little infirmity is to
their mind what an ink stain is to us authors, and he displayed, in
spite of his elegant attire as a man about town, a slight black stain
upon the middle finger of his right hand where he held his pen. That is
just like the rouge upon the actress’ face, the little professional
mark. Yes or no, did you say that about Madam de Bonnivet?”
“It is quite right I said that,” I quickly replied, “but mention the
fact that it was you who pointed this woman out to me, and that I have
not been introduced to her. I told you, too, that I could see in her
eyes a frightfully hard and bitter look. In spite of her beauty,
elegance, and slenderness to me she seems almost ugly, and more than
that—repulsive; I can quite understand Mademoiselle Favier’s
impression.”
The look of gratitude which the actress threw me was a fresh admission
of her liaison with my friend. Besides she no more thought of concealing
it than he did, though for a different reason. She could not conceal it
because she was so much in love, while he paraded the intrigue because
he was not in love at all. He caught her look and resumed in his
bantering tone—
“Ah, well, Camille, see how good I am. I have brought you some one to
talk to you. He understands you already. Think what it will be when he
has painted your portrait! For he is going to do so for me! Are you
agreeable?”
“Perhaps your friend has not the time just now!”
“Did not I tell you that was the reason of our visit?” he replied. I
myself was rather afraid that this project would fall through. “But time
is up, you must be on the stage when the curtain rises,” I said.
“Good-bye, mademoiselle.”
“No,” he continued, “good-bye till presently. Is it not so, Camille?”
“Certainly,” she said with a laugh. I saw by her eyes that she was
experiencing a little emotion. “Allow me to say a word to your friend?”
she added turning to me.
“Good!” I thought. “She is going to reproach him, and she will be
right.” I fell into a melancholy reverie which contrasted with the place
where I was, at least as much as did the delicate sensibility revealed
by each of the young actress’ gestures and words. We had only been with
her a quarter of an hour, and in that time the appearance of the
corridor had changed. Feverish haste now betokened the approaching rise
of the curtain and the fear of being too late. The call-boy went along
knocking at a door here and there. Visitors hurriedly departed. The game
of bezique went on in a neighbouring dressing-room, that of an actress
who only appeared in the last act.
“Here I am,” Jacques said, interrupting my meditation by touching me on
the shoulder, “let us get back to our box at once. If Camille does not
see me when she appears on the stage, she will look for me in Madam de
Bonnivet’s box and lose her power.”
“Why do you amuse yourself by exciting her jealousy?” I replied. “How
can you be so hardhearted? You pained her just now. She was angry.”
“Angry?” he cried, “angry? Why she has just asked me to see her home
to-night. Her mother is not coming for her. Angry? Why women love
teasing. It troubles them at first, but then they are like all vicious
animals, they can only be subdued by hurting them. I want you now to see
her rival. About the middle of the act Favier goes off the stage, and I
will go to Madam de Bonnivet’s box and ask permission to present you.
You shall see what a different woman she is.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------