GUIMARD THE GRAND: 1743-1816
For some thirty of Madeleine Guimard’s seventy-three years of life
she was the idol of Paris, having risen from obscurity to power, and
returned again from a joyous life set in high places to a lonely
death in obscurity.
Authorities differ, as authorities so often do over the advent of new
stars in the firmament of life, as to the date of Guimard’s birth.
One says the 2nd, and another the 10th, and yet a third the 20th of
October. Edmond de Goncourt--not infallible on other points--gives
the date of her baptism correctly as December 27th, 1743.
She made her _début_ before the Parisian public when she was about
sixteen, at the Comédie Française. She was received into the Academy
in 1762, at the age of nineteen, and at a salary of six hundred
livres.
In face she was not beautiful; some have described her even as ugly.
She certainly had not Sophie Arnould’s shrewish wit, though she had
humour; but her gestures, her face, above all her expressive eyes
spoke eloquently, her dancing seemed ever the true and spirited
expression of sentiments really felt, and in whatsoever _rôle_ she
was always brilliant, entrancing. She had that glamour which makes
up for lack of looks, and had, too, caprice of mood and a commanding
manner, both qualities which susceptible men find adorable.
Her historians have not always been kind. A contemporary wrote: “_La
Guimard a des caprices entre nous. On ne peut compter sur elle....
Son arrogance n’a pas de nom.... Ce que la Guimard veut, bon gré,
mal gré, il faut qu’on le veuille._” And there you have it! “What
Guimard wishes, willy-nilly one must wish.” That is a touch that
tells; the words ring true. Intriguing, capricious--masterful! What
wonder, then, that she came to rise by her own buoyancy, of manner
and morals, and sought the rarefied, but, in the days of Louis XV,
far from inaccessible atmosphere of Court circles.
Guimard made her _début_ at the Opera in May, 1762, as Terpsichore in
a ballet called “Les Caractères de la Danse,” and achieved a triumph.
From that time until she retired from the stage she was practically
without a rival in the affections of the Parisian audiences. One
testimony to her popularity is found in the promptitude with
which she was nicknamed. Guimard, if not beautiful in face, had,
nevertheless, a beautiful figure, was quite unusually graceful,
carried herself nobly, was altogether a commanding and magnetic
personage, but for all her beauty of figure Guimard was amazingly
slim.
Seeing her in a classical ballet dancing as a nymph between two
fauns--impersonated by the celebrated male-dancers Vestris _père_ and
Dauberval--Sophie Arnould said it reminded her of “two dogs fighting
for a bone.” Another of her footnotes on Guimard was her description
of her as “Le Squelette des Grâces,” which also had the saving grace
of being partly a compliment, and it was by this nickname that
Madeleine was generally known throughout Paris.
To judge from this insistence on Madeleine’s thinness one might
imagine that she could not be as attractive, certainly hardly as
graceful as has been said. But such nicknames are, though emphasising
some special characteristic, usually only marks of popularity, and
that Guimard really was graceful can be gathered from the summing-up
of Noverre who had seen her dance for years and knew, as only a great
ballet-master could, what he was talking about when he said that “...
from her _début_ to her retirement she was always graceful, naturally
so. She never ran after difficulties. A lovable and noble simplicity
reigned in her dance; she designed it with perfect taste, and put
expression and sentiment into all her movements.”
Of her performance in Gardel’s ballet, “La Chercheuse d’Esprit,” in
which she played the title-_rôle_, a contemporary wrote that “her
eloquent silences surpassed the vivid, easy and seductive diction
of Mme. Favart;” and he mentions one point that is of interest when
he remembers that the struggle that Noverre had had to achieve
some reform of costume on the opera-stage, namely, that Guimard,
“following the example of Mme. Favart, discarded the panniers and the
cuirasse of conventional costume.”
In the ballet of “Les Fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour,” in 1766,
Guimard had the misfortune to have one of her arms broken by a piece
of falling scenery. Such was her place in public regard even at this
time, that a Mass was said at Notre-Dame for her recovery.
It was not long after success came to her that Guimard accepted the
protection of the notorious Prince de Soubise. One of her first
acquisitions, in 1768, was a superb residence at Pantin, just outside
Paris, which was decorated by Fragonard. It was visited by everybody
who _was_ anybody, for, apart from the charms of its mistress, there
was a theatre in the mansion, where entertainments of a very special
kind were staged, little poetic trifles or risky comedies, which
while delighting a circle of appreciative connoisseurs would not have
been staged in the ordinary way, as being caviare to the general.
The place at Pantin, however, did not suffice the exigent Madeleine,
and a town-house was taken also in the Chaussée d’Antin,--next to
that of Sophie Arnould by the way--where another theatre was built
and where even more festive entertainments were provided, a theatre
which could seat five hundred persons (only present by invitation)
which received the name of The Temple of Terpsichore. It was designed
by the architect Ledoux, decorated by Fragonard, who did numerous
lovely panels in which Guimard appeared; and by David, then a
youthful assistant, whom Madeleine’s generous aid is said to have
sent to Rome for the furtherance of his art education.
Here in the course of time all Paris came. Here Guimard held her
famous receptions--three a week, to the first of which were invited
members of the Court circles, the aristocracy of the aristocracy;
to the second--artists, actors, actresses, musicians, poets, the
aristocracy of the world of intellect; to the third--all the polished
rakes and roués, with their attendant Phrynes, the aristocracy of
vice.
There seem to have been wild times in the Chaussée d’Antin Hôtel, and
some of Madeleine’s private theatrical productions must have been
worthy of tottering Rome. Well might discreet Abbés, and reputedly
virtuous ladies of the Court hide behind the curtains of the darkened
and mysterious boxes with which her theatre was provided. Not be seen
while seeing was their only chance to retain a virtuous reputation!
It was now doubtless that after having long danced _le genre
sérieux_, Guimard abandoned it as one record says for the _genre
mixte_, and was “inimitable” in “les ballets Anacréontiques!”
One example of the sort of dramatic fare Madeleine was giving her
guests on occasion at Pantin, or at the Chaussée d’Antin residence,
will suffice. In 1721 at the Château of St. Cloud, in the presence
of the Duc d’Orléans as Regent, there had been given a ballet called
“Les Fêtes d’Adam.” Some of her friends suggested that Madeleine
should go one better and produce a ballet on a classic subject with
herself as Venus rising from the sea. But the Archbishop of Paris
got news of the affair and managed to nip the suggestion in the bud.
Perhaps it was never seriously intended; it may have been “merely a
suggestion--nothing more.”
One of her first lovers was Delaborde the financier, poor only as
an amateur musician, who directed her theatre at Pantin till it
was closed in 1770; and only of greater importance in her life,
financially, was Soubise. But Madeleine had a particular _penchant_
for bishops it seems, and incidentally some of her later and most
devoted friends were De Jarente, Bishop of Orleans, De Choiseul, the
Archbishop of Cambrai, and Desnos, Bishop of Verdun.
The first-named of these clerical worthies had the disposal of a
whole sheaf of livings, that is to say, he was supposed to have, but
it was really Madeleine who allotted them--abbeys, priories, chapels
and so forth. She did not forget her friends, and De Jarente found
himself unable to resist. “What Guimard wishes one must wish!” It was
this allotment of the bishops’ _feuille des bénéfices_ which drew
from Sophie Arnould the whimsical remark that “_Ce petit ver à soie_
(Guimard) _devrait être plus gras. Elle ronge une si bonne feuille._”
Another favour which, through the Prince de Soubise, Madeleine was
able to dispense among her friends was permission to hunt in the
Royal forests, and it led to trouble on more than one occasion--her
friends were so much of a _genre mixte_.
But if men were weak where Guimard was concerned, there is no need
to consider her as infamous. There is so often a tendency among
chroniclers to consider that because a pretty woman, with every
inducement to succumb to temptation, had a “protector,” all her men
friends found her equally ready to receive their attentions. Nothing
could be more unjust. There may have been reasons why Madeleine did
not marry sooner than she did, and she may not have been quite that
paragon of virtue our present time prefers, but in an age notorious
for its callousness and cruelty as well as for its moral laxity she
was distinguished as a woman not merely of fascination but of good
heart and generous impulses.
Did not one writer say of her that “_En quittant le théâtre, cette
virtuose emporta le genre agréable avec elle_?” Did not Marmontel,
referring to her well-known acts of charity, write of her the poem
beginning:
“Est-il bien vrai, jeune et belle damnée
Que, du théâtre embelli par tes pas,
Tu vas chercher dans le froid galetas,
L’humanité plaintive abandonnée?”
Did not a preacher speak of her in the pulpit as “Magdalen not yet
repentant, but already charitable?” and add, too, that “The hand
which gives so well will not be refused when knocking at the gates
of Paradise?” And why? Because all who were in trouble had but to
turn to Guimard for help--poor players, artists, poets, all. Because,
though every year she received a handsome present from Soubise, one
year, in 1768, when the winter had dealt cruelly with the Paris poor,
she begged that instead of sending her jewellery, the Prince would
send her the equivalent in money, and when she received it she added
more, and herself went to all the poor folk in her neighbourhood and
fed the starving; went unostentatiously, from simple good-heartedness
and sympathy; and it was the populace who spoke of it, not she.
She had her foibles, her little vanities perhaps, as when at
Longchamps one summer she appeared in an equipage most gorgeously
embellished with somewhat startling arms--mistletoe growing out of a
gold mark, which glowed in the middle of a shield, the Graces serving
as supports, with a group of Cupids as a crown.
Guimard could be jealous on occasion. A Mlle. Dervieux, appearing
as a singer at the Academy without success, had the audacity to
reappear as a dancer and triumph. This Madeleine would possibly not
have minded, but her own pet poet Dorat celebrated Mlle. Dervieux’s
success in verse, and this poetic infidelity was more than Madeleine
could stand, with the consequence that all the pamphleteers of Paris
were forthwith ranged on sides and a paper war took place between the
rival supporters of the two fair dancers, characters were torn to
rags, and in the course of time the battle burnt itself out, as such
usually do, without anyone being seriously the worse.
Strangely enough it was just at this time that Guimard herself
elected to make an appearance as a singer. When there was a revival
of some of the old pieces in the repertoire of the Royal Academy,
including “Les Fêtes d’Hébé ou les Talents Lyriques,” for which
Rameau had written the music, Guimard appeared in this as Aglaia, one
of the three Graces--“with song and dance,” as one might say to-day.
But it was, as so often the case in modern days, only the charm of
the dance that made it possible to forgive the disillusion of the
song, for Madeleine’s voice was thin and hard.
It was as a dancer and always as a dancer that Guimard excelled.
It was as a dancer she won her chief successes in the ballets “La
Chercheuse d’Esprit” (1778), “Ninette à la Cour” (1778), “Mirza”
(1779), “La Rosière” (1784) and “Le Premier Navigateur” (1785), all
of which, by the way, were by Maximilien Gardel. Of her work in these
one historian has written: “Her dance was always noble, full of life,
light, expressive and voluptuous; her acting naïve, gay, piquante,
tender and pathetic.” Connoisseurs reproached her at times for having
grown a little “mannered,” but she always preserved in her dance that
finish, even preciosity, and those delicate _nuances_ of style of
which later times have proved the rarity.
It was as a dancer she had the good fortune to please the King who,
always a generous patron of the arts--with the nation’s money!--gave
her for one dance she performed before him and the Queen, a pension
of six thousand livres a year, giving at the same time a pension of
one thousand a year to the man who danced with her, Despréaux, who
later became her husband. This pension came to her the year following
her appearance in “Le Premier Navigateur,” in 1786, apparently
just at a time she was much in need of money. One may believe that
Madeleine’s impulsive generosity had helped to bring about that need,
as well as her known extravagance. For one thing, apart from her
being ready to assist less fortunate artists, she had been the prime
mover in an act of wholesale renunciation.
The Prince of Soubise, in the manner of his King, a generous patron
of the arts, had been allowing a handsome annual pension to a number
of dancers at the Opera, as well as treating them all to periodical
supper-parties of most sumptuous kind. Suddenly the supper-parties
ceased, the Prince was no longer seen among the audiences at the
Opera and it came to be known that his son-in-law, the Prince de
Gueméné, had become bankrupt, disastrously so, and that the entire
family were doing their best to meet the creditors honourably. When
this was known all the dancers foregathered in Madeleine’s _loge_
at the Opera and a stately, kindly, tactful letter was drawn up and
signed by all the _pensionnaires_, some thirty or more, headed by
Guimard. The length of it precludes entire quotation in a chapter
all too short to cover Madeleine’s crowded seventy-three years,
but after referring to their regret at the Prince’s absence, to a
delay in approaching him due to fear lest they be thought wanting
in consideration, and to the urgent motive which had overcome such
delicate scruples on hearing the news of the bankruptcy confirmed on
all sides, the writers of the letter proceed that, finding there can
be no prospect of the position improving, they feel they would be
guilty of ingratitude were they not to imitate the Prince’s exemplary
renunciations on behalf of his relative, and restore the pensions
with which his generosity had provided them. “Apply,” the letter
continues, “these revenues, Monseigneur, to the relief of so many
old soldiers, poor men of letters, and such unhappy retainers as the
Prince de Gueméné draws with him in his downfall. As for us, other
resources remain. We shall have lost nothing, Monseigneur, if we
retain your esteem. We shall even have gained if in refusing to-day
your kindly gifts we force our detractors to acknowledge that we were
not unworthy of them. We are, with deep respect, Monseigneur, your
Serene Highness’s very humble servants, Guimard, Heinel, Peslin,
Dorival, etc., etc.” The letter is dated 6th December, 1782.
It was now that Guimard was paying periodical summer visits to London
for the Opera seasons. Edmond de Goncourt in his monograph on the
dancer gives two very interesting letters written by Guimard apropos
to these London sojourns, one to Perregaux the Banker, dated 20th
June, 1784, the other to M. de la Ferté, Director of the Académie,
dated 26th May, (1786) and both addressed from No. 10, Pall Mall.
In the former she gives a spirited and amusing account of the way in
which Gallini and Ravelli, then directing the Opera in London, had
sought to take advantage of a fire at the old Opera House in order to
break through the contract with Guimard by which she was to receive
six hundred and fifty guineas for the season. The fire seemed at
first likely to put a closure on the season, but Covent Garden was
placed at the disposal of the Opera. Gallini, making alleged losses
the excuse, tried to persuade Madeleine to lower her terms for the
rest of the season. Finding she would only agree to providing her
own costumes--no light consideration--he pretended satisfaction and
departed. Ravelli, however, followed and, evidently by arrangement,
informed her that Gallini was several kinds of idiot, and that he had
been deposed in favour of Ravelli who, as the new stage-manager, came
to offer her fresh terms--twenty-five louis a performance, on behalf
of Gallini.
Guimard smiled and expressed astonishment that Ravelli should make
such propositions from Gallini since the latter was no longer in
power, and added that she held them to her contract. When she turned
up at rehearsal with a couple of witnesses and having consulted
solicitors, Ravelli “looked green” and Gallini “stupefied.” They
offered fresh proposals and tried hard to wriggle out of their
contract but Guimard won, of course, and the more so in that though
her chief friends among the English aristocracy, notably the Duchess
of Devonshire, were out of town, enough were left to make things
uncomfortable for Gallini, who found his conduct the talk of the town.
The second letter, to M. la Ferté, is mainly good advice on the
direction of the Opera and encouragement of rising talent, and for
this giving of counsel she begs that he will excuse her since it
is out of friendship for him and also on account of her desire, in
her own words, “_ne pas voir détruire entièrement la belle danse,
que j’ai vu exister à l’Opéra_.” In both letters she sends--in
the inevitable postscript!--charming messages to the wives of her
correspondents and mentions some little commissions with which they
had entrusted her.
That she did not have a bad time in London may be gathered from the
fact that she excuses herself for not having written sooner because
since she arrived in town she had not been left a minute to herself
by “_les plus grandes dames_,” and principally by the Duchess of
Devonshire with whom she spent most of the time that she had away
from the theatre; and of the London audiences generally she remarks:
“_Ils m’aiment à la folie, ces bons Anglais!_” Not the first time a
charming foreign dancer has been beloved of “_ces bons Anglais!_”
But with all the friendship of the great and the love of the populace
and her six hundred and fifty guineas for the London season,
Guimard’s financial position was not what it had been. The Soubise
pension had been relinquished; that she received from the King in
view of twenty years’ service at the Opera hardly sufficed her rather
magnificent requirements, and the time came, in 1786, when she found
it convenient to dispose of her mansion in the Chaussée d’Antin.
This she did by arranging, without police sanction, a lottery, the
tickets for which numbered two thousand five hundred, at a hundred
and twenty livres each, a total sum of three hundred thousand livres.
There was a fierce demand for the tickets, and twice the number could
have been sold. The drawing took place in a salon of the Hôtel des
Menus-Plaisirs, Rue Bergère, on the 1st of May, 1786, and Madeleine’s
mansion with all its furniture went to the Comtesse du Lau, who, by
the way, had only taken one ticket!
It is worth noting now that Madeleine had reached the age of
forty-three, that she had never been pretty and that she was marked
with smallpox, with which--a current danger at those times--she had
been attacked in 1783. To a clever and magnetic personality age
matters not, nor do looks mean everything since in any case they are
bound to alter in the course of a few decades; and even smallpox is
not fatal to fascination. But these things, nevertheless, have to be
admitted when one comes to years of discretion, and forty-three may
be accounted such. One wonders whether Madeleine, who was eminently
a woman of sense, began about now to face facts and the future, and
whether the doing so, or else mere circumstances, political and
social, impelled her to the next step in her career.
People had wondered how Guimard had managed to keep exactly the
same appearance for so many years. This was the secret! When she
was twenty she had a portrait painted that was true to life and
afterwards, for some twenty years or so, every morning she would
study this and make herself up to resemble it exactly; and neither
lover nor friend was ever admitted to this toilette.
This was an ingenious idea, but it could not last for ever. It is
all the more interesting then to note the next important incident in
Guimard’s career. Ninon de l’Enclos, acting on the principle that
it’s never too late to have a lover, flirted when she was ninety.
Guimard gave up lovers when she was past forty and took a husband, a
man, moreover, whom she had known for years.
In 1789, Guimard retired from the Opera; in 1789 she married Jean
Despréaux, dancer and poet; and in 1789 the gathering storms of
Revolution broke and Paris, smitten first by famine, became for the
next few years a hell, in which strangely enough, there was still a
demand for entertainment lighter and less fervid than massacre.
When Guimard and Despréaux--comrades for at least twenty-five
years--married, they settled down, on a fairly comfortable income,
derived from their pensions and acquired property, at Montmartre
and one of Jean’s poems gives a charming picture of their retreat
in those troubled times. But during the Revolution, State finances
were in disorder, and pensions were curtailed or discontinued and
all the old favourites of the Opera were more or less involved in
difficulties. In 1792, the city of Paris having confided the care
of the Opera to Francoeur and Celerier, they nominated Despréaux
director of the theatre and a member of the administrative committee,
but this did not last. The following year Francoeur and Celerier
were imprisoned, the actors were authorised to manage the theatre
themselves and Despréaux--whose father, by the way, who had been
leader of the orchestra at the Opera, killed himself the same year
from despair at the general ruin around him--was allotted some part
in the management of the public fêtes.
In 1796--the year of the establishment of the Directory--Madeleine
made a reappearance at a benefit given on January 23rd for the
veteran performers at the Opera who had all suffered grievous
losses in the Revolution. In 1807, three years after the crowning
of Napoleon, by which time the national ferment had begun to
settle down a little and the languished arts to take hope again,
an Imperial decree dated July 29th, reduced the number of theatres
in Paris to eight, and the Académie Impériale de Musique--as it
was now called--had for Director, Picard, the comic poet, and for
“inspecteur”--Despréaux.
But these casual and precarious employments were not enough to remedy
the losses that husband and wife sustained in the lean and fevered
years from 1789, when they settled down in their high-perched nest
overlooking all Paris in Montmartre until 1807, when Despréaux became
again attached to the Opera, and that this employment too did not
last we know from a letter which Madeleine wrote to a friend in 1814
imploring him to use his influence with people at Court to obtain
from Louis XVIII some position for her husband, a letter in which she
mentions the loss of their entire fortune owing to the Revolution
and pleads that “_nos besoins sont bien urgents_.”
There is then every probability that their needs really were urgent.
Guimard had never been charged with thrift; and Despréaux was a poet.
Both started married life with a fair capital--all things henceforth
held in common of course, according to the law--but fortune was
against them, and though they might perhaps have weathered the storm
had they been twenty years younger, it was almost inevitable that,
their pensions gone, their capital diminishing, they should find the
struggle growing yearly harder and their chances of replenishing
their coffers less and less. De Goncourt gives what one cannot but
feel is a too idyllic picture of the last years of the old couple,
mainly on the basis of Jean’s poems (and _he_ was ever an optimist!)
but he also gives us one true, interesting, and poignant glimpse of
Madeleine as an old lady who, with her toy theatre, would, for the
amusement of friends who chanced to drop in, go through the scenes of
former splendour and with her frail fingers perform the steps that
had made her famous in many a ballet of the past.
Apparently Madeleine’s appeal to friends at Court must have had some
success for Despréaux. In the following year, 1815, he was appointed
inspector-general of the Court entertainments, and professor “_de
danse et de grâces_” at the Conservatoire. But it is probable that
only the last three or four years of their married life brought them
any return of fortune.
[Illustration: Madeleine Guimard
(_From the painting by Fragonard_).]
Madeleine died on May 4th, 1816, and, for years out of sight of
a public which had long had other and less gracious objects for
thought, her death passed almost unnoticed by the populace for whose
amusement she had worked so loyally in her prime. Four years later,
on March 26th, 1820, Despréaux followed her who had been his adored
comrade for the greater portion of their lives. He had seen her,
as little more than a child, win her earliest triumphs at the Opera,
had seen her growing splendour as a woman of fashion, watched her
through many years, danced with her, written for her and about her,
seen her worst and best, and loved her well enough all through to
wait till she would consent to marry him and with him retire from the
stage they had so long adorned; and through the years, troublous for
no fault of theirs, which followed their marriage, he cheered and
consoled her for all she had relinquished, for the public worship all
foregone, and for the neglect of the rising generation.
He it was who, though their means can hardly have permitted it,
instituted the little _déjeuners_ and supper-parties of kindred
spirits, where songs were written and ballads sung in praise of love
and wine and “la Gloire”--the one cry of the French Romanticists;
all, one may well think, to cheer his beloved whose charm and
goodness, poet himself, he never ceased to sing.
All this could not have been had not Guimard, with all her faults had
more reserves of goodness than her earlier circumstances can have
given opportunity for developing. Guimard had been grand; Guimard had
been gay; but through it all Guimard must have been good in heart,
full of sympathy and courage and generous charities of mind and soul;
and Despréaux, gentle, wise, humorous, idealistic, honest, must have
found her so, to speak and write of her as he always did, with ardour
and a kind of boyish awe, even after she had passed away. No note of
discord marred their married years, and when Guimard came to make
her exit from the stage of life, silently, with nothing but ghostly
memories of applause, her comrade, well we may be sure, waited only
with impatience for his cue to follow her.
GUIMARD SPEAKS
(Ætat. 70)
“Yes, ye may laugh at Mère Guimard,
Laugh well, my girls, while laugh ye may!
But none of ye will fare as far
As I, who long have had my day.
Time was when Paris all did pray
Because I broke my arm! And yet
Who now recalls my queen-like sway
O’er those whom Death did not forget?
“Time on my visage many a scar
Hath graven deep. No longer gay
My voice, that once could make or mar
The Minister who failed to pay
Just tribute to my charms. Decay
My once slim, rounded limbs doth fret;
And scarce my feet could tread their way
O’er those whom Death did not forget.
“Yet ere I dance to where they are,
Take heed, my girls, the words I say!
I had a power none might bar,
A court that rivalled the array
Of aught Versailles could best display,
For at my Court Versailles was met!
And still I triumph, old and grey,
O’er those whom Death did not forget.
ENVOI
“‘Squelette des Grâces’ they called me!
Yea, and now? Sans-graces! A mere ‘Squelette!’
But grace I _had_, and have, to-day
O’er those whom Death did not forget.”