How could they help falling in love? Handsome and famous as they both
were, singing in the same operas, living each night during five whole
acts the same artificial and passionate existence. You cannot play with
fire without being burnt. You cannot say twenty times a month: "I love
you!" to the sighing of a flute or the tremolos of a violin, without at
last being caught by the emotion of your own voice. In course of time,
passion awoke in the surrounding harmonies, the rhythmical surprises,
the gorgeousness of costume and scenery. It was wafted to them through
the window that Elsa and Lohengrin threw wide open on a night vibrating
with sound and luminousness:
"Come let us breathe the intoxicating perfumes."
It slipped in between the white columns of the Capulets' balcony, where
Romeo and Juliet linger in the dawning light of day:
"It was the nightingale, and not the lark."
And softly it caught Faust and Marguerite in a ray of moonlight, that
rose from the rustic bench to the shutters of their little chamber, amid
the entangled ivy and blossoming roses:
"Let me once more gaze upon thy face."
Soon all Paris knew their love and became interested in it. It was the
wonder of the season. The world came to admire the two splendid stars
gently gravitating towards each other in the musical firmament of the
Opera House. At last one evening, after an enthusiastic recall, as the
curtain fell, separating the house full of noisy applause and the
stage littered with bouquets, where the white gown of Juliet swept
over scattered camellia blossoms, the two singers were seized with an
irresistible impulse, as though their love, a shade artificial, had but
awaited the emotion of a splendid success to reveal itself.
[Illustration: p077-088]
Hands were clasped, vows exchanged, vows consecrated by the distant
and persistent plaudits of the house. The two stars had made their
conjunction.
After the wedding, some time passed before they were again seen on the
stage. Then, when their holiday was ended, they reappeared in the
same piece. This reappearance was a revelation. Until then, of the two
singers, the man had been the most prized. Older and more accustomed to
the public, whose foibles and preferences he had studied, he held the
pit and boxes under the spell of his voice. Beside him, the other one
seemed but an admirably gifted pupil, the promise of a future genius;
but her voice was young and had angles in it, just as her shoulders were
too slight and thin. And when on her return she appeared in one of her
former parts, and the full rich, powerful sound poured out in the very
first notes, abundant and pure, like the water of some sparkling spring,
there ran through the house such a thrill of delight and surprise, that
all the interest of the evening was concentrated on her. For the young
woman, it was one of those happy days, in which the ambient atmosphere
becomes limpid, light and vibrating, wafting towards one all the
radiance and adulations of success. As for the husband, they almost
forgot to applaud him, and as a dazzling light ever seems to make the
shade around it darker, so he, found himself relegated, as it were, to
the most insignificant part of the stage, as if he were neither more nor
less than a mere walking gentleman.
After all, the passion that was revealed in the songstress's acting, in
her voice full of charm and tenderness, was inspired by him. He alone
lent fire to the glances of those deep eyes, and that idea ought to have
made him proud, but the comedian's vanity proved stronger. At the end
of the performance he sent for the leader of the _claque_ and rated him
soundly. They had missed his entry and his exit, forgotten the recall at
the third act; he would complain to the manager, &c.
Alas! In vain he struggled, in vain did the paid applause greet him,
the good graces of the public, henceforth bestowed on his wife, remained
definitively acquired to her. She was fortunate too in a choice of parts
appropriate to her talent and her beauty, in which she appeared with all
the assurance of a woman of the world entering a ball-room, dressed in
the colours best suited to her, and certain of an ovation. At each fresh
success the husband was depressed, nervous, and irritable. This vogue
which left him and so absolutely became hers only, seemed to him a kind
of robbery. For a long while he strove to hide from every one, more
especially from his wife, this unavowable anguish; but one evening, as
she was going up the stairs leading to her dressing-room, holding up
with both hands her skirt-laden with bouquets, carried away by her
triumphal success, she said to him with a voice still overcome by the
excitement of applause: "We have had a magnificent house to-night." He
replied: "You think so!" in such an ironical and bitter tone, that the
young wife suddenly understood all.
Her husband was jealous! Not with the jealousy of a lover, who will
only allow his wife to be beautiful for him, but with the jealousy of an
artist, cold, furious, implacable. At times, when she stopped at the end
of an air and multitudes of bravos were thrown to her from outstretched
hands, he affected an indifferent and absent manner, and his listless
gaze seemed to say to the spectators: "When you have finished
applauding, I'll sing."
Ah! the applause, that sound like hail reechoing so delightfully through
the lobbies, the house, and the side scenes, once the sweets of it are
tasted, it is impossible to live without it. Great actors do not die of
illness or old age, they cease to exist when applause no longer greets
them. At the indifference of the public, this one was really seized with
a feeling of despair. He grew thin, became peevish and bad-tempered. In
vain did he reason with himself, look his incurable folly well in the
face, repeat to himself before he came on the stage:
"And yet she is my wife, and I love her!"
In the artificial atmosphere of the stage the true sentiment of life
vanished at once. He still loved the wife, but detested the singer. She
realized it, and as one nurses an invalid, watched the sad mania. At
first she thought of lessening her success, of making a sparing use and
not giving the full power of her voice and talent; but her resolutions
like those of her husband could not withstand the glare of the
footlights. Her talent, almost unconsciously, overstepped her will. Then
she humbled herself before him, belittled herself. She asked his advice,
inquired if he thought her interpretation correct, if he understood the
part in that way.
Of course he was never satisfied. With assumed goodnature, in the tone
of false friendship that comedians use so much amongst each other, he
would say, on the evenings of her greatest successes:
"You must watch yourself, dear, you are not doing very well just now,
not improving."
At other times he tried to prevent her singing:
"Take care, you are lavishing yourself. You are doing too much. Don't
wear out your luck. Believe me, you ought to take a holiday."
He even condescended to the most paltry pretexts. Said she had a cold,
was not in good voice. Or else he would try to pick some mean stage
quarrel:
"You took up the end of the duet too quickly; you spoilt my effect. You
did it on purpose."
He never saw, poor wretch, that it was he who hindered her bye play,
hurrying on with his cue in order to prevent any applause, and in his
anxiety to regain the public ear, monopolizing the front of the stage,
leaving his wife in the background. She never complained, for she loved
him too well; moreover success makes us indulgent and every evening
she was compelled to quit the shade in which she strove to conceal and
efface herself, to obey the summons enthusiastically calling her to the
footlights. This singular jealousy was soon noticed at the theatre, and
their fellow actors made fun of it. They overwhelmed the singer with
compliments about his wife's singing. They thrust under his eyes the
newspaper article in which after four long columns devoted to the star,
the critic bestowed a few lines to the fast fading vogue of the husband.
One day, having just read one of these articles, he rushed into his
wife's dressing-room, holding the open paper in his hand and said to
her, pale with rage:
"The fellow must have been your lover." He had indeed reached this
degree of injustice. In fact the unhappy woman, praised and envied,
whose name figured in large type on the play bills and might be read on
all the walls of Paris, who was seized upon as a successful advertising
medium and placed on the tiny gilt labels of the confectioner or
perfumer, led the saddest and most humiliating of lives. She dared not
open a paper for fear of reading her own praises, wept over the flowers
that were thrown to her and which she left to die in a corner of her
dressing-room, that she might avoid perpetuating at home the cruel
memories of her triumphant evenings. She even wanted to quit the stage,
but her husband objected.
[Illustration: p084-095]
"It will be said that I make you leave it." And the horrible torture
continued for both.
One night of a first representation, the songstress was going to the
front, when somebody said to her: "Mind what you are about. There is
a cabal in the house against you." She laughed at the idea. A cabal
against her? And for what reason, Good Heavens! She who only met with
sympathy, who did not belong to any coterie! It was true however. In
the middle of the opera, in a grand duet with her husband, at the moment
when her magnificent voice had reached the highest pitch of its compass,
finishing the sound in a succession of notes, even and pure like the
rounded pearls of a necklace, a volley of hisses cut her short. The
audience was as much moved and surprised as herself. All remained
breathless, as though each one felt prisoner within them the passage
she had not been able to finish. Suddenly a horrible, mad idea flashed
across her mind. He was alone on the stage, in front of her. She gazed
at him steadily and saw in his eyes the passing gleam of a cruel smile.
The poor woman understood all. Sobs suffocated her.
She could only burst into tears and blindly disappear through the
crowded side scenes.
It was her own husband who had had her hissed!
[Illustration: p086-097]
[Illustration: p088-099]