seen anything like it in all your life. One goes to hear the
actress, and not the play. I went to see ‘Ariadne’ for her sake
alone. The piece is inspired: the players execrable. But as soon
as La Champmeslé comes upon the stage a murmur of gladness runs
throughout the house, and the tears of the audience flow at her
despair.
The magic of the actress lured Madame de Sévigné’s son, the young
Marquis, from the side of Ninon de l’Enclos. ‘He is nothing but a
pumpkin fricasseed in snow,’ said the perennial beauty. After the young
nobleman thought proper to inform his mother of the interest he took in
La Champmeslé, Madame de Sévigné was so proud that she wrote and spoke
of her son’s mistress as her daughter-in-law! To her own daughter she
wrote as follows of the representation of Racine’s ‘Bajazet,’ in which
La Champmeslé acted Roxane:
The piece appeared to me fine. My daughter-in-law seemed to me
the most miraculously good actress I had ever seen; a hundred
thousand times better than Des Œillets; and I, who am allowed to
be a very fair player, am not worthy of lighting the candles for
her to act by. Seen near, she is plain, and I am not astonished
that my son was ‘choked’ at his first interview with her; but when
she breaks into verse she is adorable. I wish you could have come
with us after dinner; you would not have been bored. You would
probably have shed one little tear, since I let fall a score. You
would have admired your sister-in-law.
Two months later the mother sent to her daughter a copy of the piece,
and wrote: ‘If I could send you La Champmeslé with it you would admire
it, but without her it loses half its value.’
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.’