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.
The beauty, youth, and talent of Mdlle. Georges would probably have
secured her seat on an undisputed throne, only for the caprices that
accompany those three inestimable possessions. The youthful muse
suddenly disappeared. She rose again in Russia, whither she had been
tempted by the imperial liberality of Alexander the Czar. She was
queening it there in more queenly fashion than ever; her name glittered
on the walls of Moscow, when the Grand Army of France scattered all
such glories and wrecked its own. A quarter of a million of men
perished in that bloody drama, but the tragedy queen contrived to get
safe and sound over the frontier.
Thenceforth she gleamed like a meteor from nation to nation. Mdlle.
Duchesnois and Mdlle. Mars held the sceptres of tragedy and comedy
between them. They reigned with glory, and when their evening of life
came on they departed with dignity--Duchesnois in 1835. The more
impetuous Mdlle. Georges flashed now here now there, and blinded
spectators by her beauty, as she dazzled them by her talent. The joy of
acting, the ecstasy of being applauded, soon became all she cared for.
One time she was entrancing audiences in the most magnificent theatres;
at another, she was playing with strollers on the most primitive of
stages; but always with the same care. Now, the Parisians hailed the
return of their queen; in a month she was acting Iphigenia to the
Tartars of the Crimea!
When the other once youthful queens of tragedy and comedy were
approaching the sunset glories of their reigns, Mdlle. Georges, in
her mature and majestic beauty too, seized a new sceptre, mounted
a new throne, and reigned supreme in a new kingdom. She became the
queen of drama--not melodrama--of that prose tragedy, which is full of
action, emotion, passion, and strong contrasts. Racine and Corneille
were no longer the fountains at which she quaffed long draughts of
inspiration. New writers hailed her as their muse and interpreter.
She was the original Christine at Fontainebleau, in Dumas’s piece so
named; and Victor Hugo wrote for her his terrible ‘Mary Tudor’ and his
‘Lucretia Borgia.’ It was a delicious terror, a fearful delight, a
painful pleasure, to see this wonderful woman transform herself into
those other women, and seem the awful reality which she was only--but
earnestly, valiantly, artistically--acting. She could be everything by
turns: proud and cruel as Lady Macbeth; tender and gentle as Desdemona.
Mdlle. Georges, however, found a rival queen in drama, as she had
done in tragedy--Madame Allan Dorval, who made weeping a luxury worth
the paying for. Competitors, perhaps, rather than rivals. There was
concurrency, rather than opposition. One of the prettiest incidents
in stage annals occurred on the occasion of these artists being twice
‘called,’ after a representation of ‘Mary Tudor,’ in which Mdlle.
Georges was the Queen and Madame Dorval Lady Jane Grey. After the
two actresses had gracefully acknowledged the ovation of which they
were the objects, Madame Dorval, with exquisite refinement and noble
feeling, kissed the hand of Mdlle. Georges, as if she recognised in her
the still supremely reigning queen. It was a pleasure to see this;
it is a pleasure to remember it; and it is equally a pleasure to make
record of it here.
When all this brilliant talent began to be on the wane, and play-goers
began to fear that all the thrones would be vacant, a curious scene
used to occur nightly in summer time in the Champs Élysées. Before
the seated public, beneath the trees, an oldish woman used to appear,
with a slip of carpet on her arm, a fiddle beneath it, and a tin cup
hanging on her finger. She was closely followed by a slim, pale, dark,
but fiery-eyed girl, whose thoughts seemed to be with some world far
away. When the woman had spread the carpet, had placed the cup at one
corner, and had scraped a few hideous notes on the fiddle, the pale
dark-eyed girl advanced on the carpet and recited passages from Racine
and Corneille. With her beautiful head raised, with slight, rare, but
most graceful action, with voice and emphasis in exact accord with
her words, that pale-faced, inspired girl, enraptured her out-of-door
audience. After a time she was seen no more, and it was concluded that
her own inward fire had utterly consumed her, and she was forgotten.
By-and-by there descended on the deserted temple of tragedy a new
queen--nay, a goddess, bearing the name of Rachel. As the subdued and
charmed public gazed and listened and sent up their incense of praise
and their shout of adulation, memories of the pale-faced girl who
used to recite beneath the stars in the Champs Élysées came upon them.
Some, however, could see no resemblance. Others denied the possibility
of identity between the abject servant of the muse in the open air,
and the glorious, though pale-faced, fiery-eyed queen of tragedy,
occupying a throne which none could dispute with her. When half her
brief, splendid, extravagant, and not blameless reign was over, Mdlle.
Rachel gave a ‘house-warming’ on the occasion of opening her new and
gorgeously-furnished mansion in the Rue Troncin. During the evening the
hostess disappeared, and the _maître d’hôtel_ requested the crowded
company in the great saloon so to arrange themselves as to leave space
enough for Mdlle. Rachel to appear at the upper end of the room, as
she was about to favour the company with the recital of some passages
from Racine and Corneille. Thereupon entered an old woman with strip
of carpet, fiddle, and tin pot, followed by the queen of tragedy, in
the shabbiest of frocks, pale, thoughtful, inspired, and with a sad
smile that was not altogether out of tune with her pale meditations;
and then, the carpet being spread, the fiddle scraped, and the cup
deposited, Rachel trod the carpet as if it were the stage, and recited
two or three passages from the masterpieces of the French masters in
dramatic poetry, and moved her audience according to her will, in
sympathy and delight. When the hurricane of applause had passed,
and while a murmuring of enjoyment seemed as its softer echo, Rachel
stooped, picked up the old tin cup, and, going round with it to collect
gratuities from the company, said, ‘Anciennement, c’était pour maman; à
présent, c’est pour les pauvres.’
The Rachel career was of unsurpassable splendour. Before it declined
in darkness and set in premature painful death, the now old queen of
tragedy, Mdlle. Georges, met the sole heiress of the great inheritance,
Mdlle. Rachel, on the field of the glory of both. Rachel was then at
the best of her powers, at the highest tide of her triumphs. They
appeared in the same piece, Racine’s ‘Iphigénie.’ Mdlle. Georges was
Clytemnestre; Rachel played Ériphile. They stood in presence, like the
old and the young wrestlers, gazing on each other. They each struggled
for the crown from the spectators, till, whether out of compliment,
which is doubtful, or that she was really subdued by the weight, power,
and majestic grandeur of Mdlle. Georges, Ériphile forgot to act, and
seemed to be lost in admiration at the acting of the then very stout,
but still beautiful, mother of the French stage.
The younger rival, however, was the first to leave the arena. She acted
in both hemispheres, led what is called a stormy life, was as eccentric
as she was full of good impulses, and to the last she knew no more of
the personages she acted than what she learned of them from the pieces
in which they were represented. Rachel died utterly exhausted. The wear
and tear of her professional life was aggravated by the want of repose,
the restlessness, and the riot of the tragedy queen at home. She was
royally buried. In the _foyer_ of the Théâtre Français Rachel and Mars,
in marble, represent the Melpomene and Thalia of France. They are both
dead and forgotten by the French public.
For years after Mdlle. Duchesnois had vanished from the scene, Mdlle.
Georges may be said to have languished out her life. One day of snow
and fog, in January 1867, a funeral procession set out from Passy,
traversed the living city of Paris, and entered through the mist the
city of the dead, Père la Chaise. Alexandre Dumas was chief mourner.
‘In that coffin,’ said Jules Janin, ‘lay more sorrows, passions,
poetry, and hopes than in a thousand proud tombs in the cemetery of
Père la Chaise.’ She who had represented and felt and expressed all
these sentiments, emotions, and ideas, was the last survivor of the
line of dramatic queens in France.
That line had its Lady Jane Grey, its queen for an hour; one who was
loved and admired during that time, and whose hard fate was deplored
for full as long a period. About the year 1819-20 there appeared at
the Odéon a Mdlle. Charton. She made her _début_ in a new piece,
‘Lancastre,’ in which she acted Queen Elizabeth. Her youth and beauty,
combined with extraordinary talent, took the public mind prisoner.
Here was a young goddess who would shower delight when the maturer
divinities had gone back to Olympus. The lithographed portrait of
Mdlle. Charton was in all the shops and was eagerly bought. Suddenly
she ceased to act. A jealous lover had flung into that beautiful
and happy face a cup of vitriol, and destroyed beauty, happiness,
and partially the eyesight, for ever. The young actress refused to
prosecute the ruffian, and sat at home suffering and helpless, till she
became ‘absorbed in the population’--that is to say, starved, or very
nearly so. She had one poor female friend who helped just to keep her
alive. In this way the once proud young beauty literally went down life
into old age and increase of anguish. She dragged through the horrible
time of the horrible Commune, and then she died. Her body was carried
to the common pauper grave at Montmartre, and one poor actor who had
occasionally given her what help he could, a M. Dupuis, followed her to
that bourn.
Queens as they were, their advent to such royalty was impeded by every
obstacle that could be thrown in their way. The ‘Society’ of French
actors has been long noted for its cruel illiberality and its mean
jealousy, especially the ‘Society’ that has been established since the
Revolution--or, to speak correctly, during the Revolution which began
in 1789, and which is now in the eighty-fourth year of its progress.
The poor and modest Duchesnois had immense difficulty in being allowed
to appear at all. The other actors would not even speak to her. When
she was ‘called’ by an enthusiastic audience no actor had the gallantry
to offer a hand to lead her forward. A poor player, named Florence, at
length did so, but on later occasions he was compelled to leave her
to ‘go on’ alone. When Mdlle. Rachel, ill-clad and haggard, besought
a well-known _sociétaire_ to aid her in obtaining permission to make
her _début_ on the stage of the Théâtre Français, he told her to get
a basket and go and sell flowers. On the night of her triumph, when
she _did_ appear, and heaps of bouquets were flung at her feet, on her
coming forward after the fall of the curtain, she flung them all into a
basket, slung it from her shoulders, went to the actor who had advised
her to go and vend flowers, and kneeling to him, asked him, half in
smiles and half in tears, if he would not buy a nosegay! It is said
that Mdlle. Mars was jealous of the promise of her sister, Georgina.
Young _débutantes_ are apt to think that the aged queens should abandon
the parts of young princesses, and when the young _débutantes_ have
become old they are amazed at the impertinence of new comers who expect
them to surrender the juvenile characters. The latest successful
_débutante_, Mdlle. Rousseil and M. Mounae Sully, are where they now
are in spite of their fellows who were there before them.
_SOME ECCENTRICITIES OF THE FRENCH STAGE._
The future historian of the French Stage will not want for matter to
add to a history which has already had many illustrators and writers.
Just a year ago, I saw a magnificent funeral pass from the church of
Notre Dame de Lorette. ‘_C’est Lafont, le grand Comédien!_’ was the
comment of the spectators. ‘Poor Glatigny!’ said another, ‘was not thus
buried--like a prince!’ Wondering who Glatigny might be, I, in the
course of that day, took up a French paper in the reading-room of the
Grand Hôtel, in which the name caught my eye, and I found that Glatigny
had been one of the eccentric actors of the French stage. He was
clever, but reckless; he had a bad memory, but when it was in fault, he
could _improvise_--with impudence, but effect.
Glatigny once manifested his improvising powers in a very extraordinary
manner. The story, on the authority of the Paris papers, runs thus:
Passing in front of the Mont-Parnasse Theatre, he saw the name of his
friend Chevilly in the play-bill. Glatigny entered by the stage-door,
and asked to see him. He was told that Chevilly was on the stage, and
could not be spoken to; he was acting in Ponsard’s ‘Charlotte Corday.’
Glatigny, thereupon, and to the indignant astonishment of the manager,
coolly walked forward to the side of Chevilly, as the latter was
repeating the famous lines--
Non, je ne crois pas, moi,
Que tout soit terminé quand on n’a plus de roi;
C’est le commencement.
As Chevilly concluded these words, he stared in inexpressible surprise
at Glatigny, and exclaiming: ‘What, you here!’ shook him cordially by
the hand, as if both were in a private room, and not in the presence of
a very much perplexed audience. The audience did not get out of their
perplexity by finding that Ponsard’s play was altogether forgotten, and
that the two players began talking of their private affairs, walking
up and down the stage the while, as if they had been on the boulevards
or in the gardens of the Tuileries. At length, said Glatigny, ‘I am
afraid, that I perhaps intrude?’ ‘Not at all!’ said Chevilly. ‘I am
sure I do,’ rejoined Glatigny, ‘so farewell. When you have finished,
you will find me at the café, next door.’ The eccentric player had
reached the wing, when he returned, saying: ‘By-the-by, before we
part, shall we sing together a little _couplet de facture_?’ ‘With
all my heart,’ was the reply; and both of them, standing before the
foot-lights, sang a verse from some old vaudeville, on the pleasure of
old friends meeting unexpectedly, and which used to bring the curtain
down with applause.
At this duet, the public entered into the joke--they could not hiss,
for laughing,--and the most joyous uproar reigned amongst them, till
Glatigny retired as if nothing had happened, and Chevilly attempted
seriously to resume his part in ‘Charlotte Corday.’
There was a serious as well as a comic tinge in Glatigny’s experiences.
On one morning in February, 1869, some country folk, returning from the
market at Tarbes, saw a man stretched fast asleep on the steps of the
theatre. It was early dawn, and snow was gently falling. The peasants
shook the sleeper, told him, when half awake, of the danger he was
in by thus exposing himself, and asked him what he was doing there?
‘Well,’ said Glatigny, ‘I am waiting for the manager;’ he turned round
to go to sleep again, and the country folk left him to his fate. Later
in the day, he shook himself, by way of toilet and breakfast, and made
his call upon the manager. ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Albert Glatigny.
I am a comedian and a poet. At the present moment, I have no money,
but am terribly hungry. Have you any vacancy in your company, leading
tragedian or lamp-cleaner?’ The manager asked him if he was perfect in
the part of Pylades. ‘Thoroughly so!’ was the answer. ‘All the better,’
said the manager; ‘we play “Andromaque,” to-night; my Pylades is ill.
You will replace him. Good morning!’
When the evening came, Glatigny put on the Greek costume, and entered
on the stage, without knowing a single line of his part. That was
nothing. When his turn came, he improvised a little reply to Pyrrhus.
Glatigny now and then had a line too short by a syllable or two, but he
made up for it by putting a syllable or two over measure in the line
that followed. He knew the bearing of the story, and he improvised as
naturally as if he were taking part in a conversation. The audience
was not aware of anything unusual. The manager who, at first, was
ready to tear his hair from his head, wisely let Glatigny take his own
course, and when the play was ended he offered the eccentric fellow an
engagement, at the stupendous salary of sixty francs a month!
Never was there a man who led a more unstable and wandering life. One
day, he would seem fixed in Paris; the week after he was established
in Corsica; and after disappearing from the world that knew him, he
would turn up again at the Café de Suède, with wonderful stories of his
errant experiences. With all his mad ways there was no lack of method
in Glatigny’s mind when he chose to discipline it. French critics
speak with much favour of the grace and sweetness of his verses, and
quote charming lines from his comedy, ‘Le Bois,’ which was successfully
acted at the Odéon. Glatigny had a hard life withal. It was for bread
that he became a strolling player,--that he gave some performances at
the Alcazar, as an improvisatore--and, finally, that he woke up one
fine morning, with republican opinions.
Probably not a few play-goers among us who were in Paris in 1849 will
forget the first representation of ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur,’ in the April
of that year. Among the persons of the drama was the Abbé de Chazeuil,
which was represented by M. Leroux, and well represented; a perfect
_abbé de boudoir_, loving his neighbour’s wife, and projecting a
revolution by denouncing the fashion of wearing patches! M. Leroux,
like Michonnet in the play, was eager to become a _sociétaire_ of
the Théâtre Français, but (like poor Firmin, whose memory was not so
blameless as his style and genius--and who committed suicide, like
Nourrit, by flinging himself out of the window of an upper storey)
Leroux was not a ‘quick study,’ and, year by year, he fell into the
background, and had fewer parts assigned to him. The actor complained.
The answer was that his memory was not to be trusted. He rejoined that
it had never been trustworthy, and yet he had got on, in a certain
sense, without it. The rejoinder was not accepted as satisfactory. The
oblivious player (with all his talent) fell into oblivion. He not only
was not cast for new parts, but many of his old ones that he had really
got by heart were consigned to other members of the company. Leroux
was, before all things, a Parisian, and yet, in disgust, he abandoned
Paris. He wandered through the provinces, found his way to Algiers, and
there, after going deeper and deeper still, did not forget one thing
for which he had been cast in the drama of life--namely, his final exit.
Political feeling has often led to eccentric results on, and in front
of, the French stage. With all the Imperial patronage of the drama,
the public never lost an opportunity of laughing at the vices of the
Imperial _régime_. When Ponsard’s ‘Lucréce’ was revived at the Odéon,
the public were simply bored by Lucretia’s platitudes at home and the
prosings of her husband in the camp. But when Brutus abused the Senate,
and scathing sarcasm was flashed against the extravagance of the
women of the court, and their costume, the pit especially, the house
generally, burst forth into a shout of recognition and derision. It is
to be observed that the acute Emperor himself often led the applause on
passages which bore political allusions, and which denounced tyranny
in supreme lords or in their subordinates. When the Emperor did not
take the initiative, the people did. At the first representation
of Augier’s ‘La Contagion,’ there was a satirical passage against
England. The audience accepted it with laughter; but when the actor
added: ‘After all, the English are our best friends, and are a free
people!’ the phrase was received with a thundering _Bravo!_ from the
famous Pipe-en-bois, who sat, wild and dishevelled, in the middle of
the pit, and whose exclamation aroused tumultuous echoes. At another
passage, ‘There comes a time when baffled truths are affirmed by
thunder-claps!’ the audience tried to encore the phrase. M. Got was too
well-trained an actor to be guilty of obeying, but the house shouted,
‘_Vivent les coups de tonnerre!_’ ‘Thunder-claps for ever!’ and the
passive Cæsar looked cold and unmoved across that turbulent pit.
The French public is cruel to its idols whose powers have passed away.
The French stage is ungrateful to its old patrons who can no longer
confer patronage. When the glorious three days of 1830 had overthrown
the Bourbon Charles X., King of France and Navarre, and put in his
place Louis Philippe, King of the French, and the ‘best of republics,’
the actors at the Odéon inaugurated their first representation under
the ‘Revolution’ by acting Pichat’s tragedy of ‘William Tell’ and
Molière’s ‘Tartuffe.’ All the actors were ignoble enough to associate
themselves with the downfall of a dynasty many kings of which had been
liberal benefactors of the drama. In ‘William Tell’ Ligier stooped to
the anachronism of wearing a tri-coloured rosette on the buffskin tunic
of Tell. In ‘Tartuffe’ all the actors and actresses but one wore the
same sign of idiocy. Tartuffe himself wore the old white ribbon of the
Bourbons, but only that the symbol which once was associated with much
glory might be insulted in its adversity. Dorine, the servant, tore the
white rosette from Tartuffe’s black coat amid a hurricane of applause
from the hot-headed heroes of the barricades, who had by fire, sword,
artillery, and much slaughter, set on the throne the ‘modern Ulysses.’
Eighteen years later, that Ulysses shared the fate of all French
objects of idolatry, and was rudely tumbled down from his high estate.
At the Porte St. Martin, Frederic Lemaître played a chiffonier in one
of the dramas in which he was so popular. In his gutter-raking at
night, after having tossed various objects over his shoulder into his
basket, he drove his crook into some object which he held up for the
whole house to behold. It was a battered kingly crown, and when, with a
scornful chuckle, he flung it among the rags and bones in the basket on
his back, the vast mob of spectators did not hiss him from the stage;
they greeted the unworthy act by repeated salvoes of applause!