Rachel (1887 British Edition)/Chapter 7
POET AND ACTRESS.
In the Revue des Deux Mondes for the 1st December 1838, there appeared, in a defence of Mademoiselle Rachel's representation of the character of Roxane, these words:—
The Théâtre Français is again giving Bajazet, Mademoiselle Rachel is acting the part of Roxane; if I mistake not, it is her sixth appearance in a new rôle. Dramatic criticism, which has been extremely indulgent and (still more rare) extremely just, has shown this time unexpected severity towards the young artist. About eight papers, written on the same day by people of taste and discrimination, are dissatisfied with her acting, and look upon her failure as a decisive condemnation of her talent and Racine's genius. I was present the first night, and returned a second, conscientiously determined to solve the problem. I came away more mystified than ever. Roxane seems to me, after Hermione, to be the rôle in which Mademoiselle Rachel shows to most advantage, and, to judge by appearances, my opinion is shared by the greater portion of the audience. I think it unnecessary, for reasons that must be ovious, to attempt here a dissertation on Racine. I will only touch upon the powers of the actress, who interprets him. We have only to see her and hear her, to know she has studied the part. Does she exhibit less heart or less intelligence? is she feebler, less inspired, or more nervous? or does she look smaller than a month ago, in the magnificent dress of Hermione? I think, perhaps, this last is the most serious fault to be found in Mademoiselle Rachel; she is not tall enough; and this is, alas! an irremediable fault. In the fourth act of Bajazet, during the monologue, I heard someone in the pit exclaim, "What a little devil!" The individual who thus expressed his feelings did not know that he was giving a masterly analysis of what most of us felt, and that his exclamation was worth columns of newspaper criticism.
Criticism has rights that none dare to dispute; if some complain of it, others profit by it. It is a real power, one of the greatest of the day. When a young girl appears for the first time, full of fear rather than hope; when the public, who seldom find out anything for themselves, allow her to play, entirely unsupported, tragedies they have given up going to see, and when the artist, alone, unknown, but faithful to her ideal, reveals her talent courageously, without thinking who is there, nor who is listening to her: then those critics who force the public to come against their prejudices and wishes, play a noble part. Why undo, therefore, now, the good that has been done? Why seek to stifle and discourage the talent you have endeavoured to foster? It is not fair, and we, the public, protest. The young artist belongs no longer to you; it is no longer she personally which is in question, but the art she is reviving—immortal, glorious delight of all humanity. Do not you feel that in reading your criticisms, this child, to whom immeasureable gratitude is due, this child who is not sure of herself, and who, in spite of her precocious genius, is not invulnerable to the shafts aimed against her, this young girl, who plays Hermione, and who understands and interprets Racine as we have seen, her understand and interpret it, may be wounded to tears: for this reason, and for this alone, it seems that, however small one's influence may be, one ought to protest and defend her as much as possible, and, above all, one ought to abstain from destroying the divine spark in the heart of this child, the heavenly seed which must sooner or later bear fruit.
The author of this eloquent remonstrance was Alfred de Musset, the poet, then in the zenith of his talent and fame.
One evening in the following month of May, the susceptible poet met the young actress leaving the Français, where she had been acting Tancrède to a large and enthusiastic audience. She invited him, with some other friends who accompanied her, to come to supper. A curious account of this supper, written to Madame Jaubert, his marraine, is published in de Musset's Posthumous Works:—
After we had arrived at the house, Rachel discovered that she had forgotten her rings and bracelets at the theatre. She sent the only servant of the establishment to fetch them; no one was left, therefore, to cook the supper! Rachel rose and disappeared into the kitchen. A quarter of an hour afterwards she returned in a dressing-gown and night-cap, a foulard handkerchief tied under her chin, looking beautiful; in her hand she held a dish, on which were three pieces of beafsteak that she had cooked herself. She placed the dish in the middle of the table, saying, "Help yourselves." Then she returned to the kitchen, and presently reappeared, a soup-tureen full of smoking soup in one hand, in the other a saucepan containing spinach. That was our supper, no plates or spoons; the servant had taken the keys with her. Rachel opened the buffet, found a salad-bowl full of salad, took the wooden spoon, fished out a fork from somewhere, and began eating. "But," said her mother, who was hungry, "there are tin plates in the kitchen."
De Musset then goes on to detail the conversation that takes place between Rachel, her mother, and sister; Rachel making fun of Sarah because she considered herself too fine to eat off tin.
"Figure to yourself," says Rachel, addressing the poet, "when I was acting at the Théâtre Molière, I had only two pairs of stockings, and every morning." Here Sarah began to chatter German, so as to interrupt her sister. Rachel, however, went on: "No German here! Why should she be ashamed? I had only two pairs of stockings, as I told you, and I was obliged to wash one pair every morning—it hung in my room on a string while I wore the other!"
"And you did the housekeeping?" I asked.
Rachel.—"I rose at six o'clock every day, and by eight o'clock all the beds were made. Then I went to the market to buy the dinner."
I.—"Were you extravagant?"
Rachel.—"No, I was a very honest cook. Was I not, Mamma?"
The Mother (her mouth full).—"Yes."
Rachel.—"Only once I robbed for a month; when I had bought four sous worth of goods, I put down five, and when I had paid ten sous I put down twelve. At the end of the month I found myself the happy possessor of three francs."
I (severely).—"And what did you do with those three francs. Mademoiselle?"
The Mother (seeing that Rachel was silent).—"Monsieur, she bought Molière's works."
I.—"Really!"
Rachel.—"Yes. I already had a Corneille and a Racine; I wanted Molière. I bought it with my three francs and then confessed my sins."
Meantime, the other guests began to drop off. The servant returned with the jewels, four or five thousand franc's worth: bracelets, rings, crowns. She laid them on the table among the salad, spinach, and tin plates. I, thinking of the house-keeping, bed-making, and all the duties of straitened circumstances, took the opportunity of looking at Rachel's hands, fearing to find them ugly and coarse; they were, on the contrary, white, soft, and slender—the hands of a princess.
Some punch was made, and after some more laughing and talking, the character of the scene suddenly changed. A word was sufficient to call out the poetry and artistic instinct hidden for the time being under her childish playful manner.
I.—"How you read the letter this evening! You were very much moved."
Rachel.—"Yes. I felt as if something within me were going to break; but still I do not care for the piece (Tancrède). It is artificial."
I.—"You prefer Corneille and Racine?"
Rachel.—"Ah! I adore Racine; everything he writes is so true, so fine, so noble."
I.—"Do you remember, some time ago, receiving an anonymous letter on the subject of the last scene of Racine's Mithridate?"
Rachel.—" Certainly. I followed the advice given, and since then am always applauded in this scene. Do you know who it was who wrote to me?"
I.—"Yes, very well; it was the woman who has the largest mind and smallest foot in Paris.[1] What part are you studying now?"
Rachel.—"We are to play Mary Stuart this summer, and then Polyeucte, and perhaps"
I."Well?"
Rachel (putting down her little fist emphatically on the table).—"I will play Phèdre; they tell me I am too young, I am too thin, and a hundred other stupidities; I answer, it is Racine's finest conception. I am determined to play it. If they say I am too young and the rôle is not suitable, was it not the same with Roxane? If they think I am too thin, I maintain it is nonsense. A woman nourishing an unholy passion, but who would rather face death than give herself up to it—a woman devoured by grief and love—would not have a chest like Madame Paradol. It would be utterly inconsistent to expect it. I have read the rôle ten times in the last eight days. I do not know how I will act it, but I can tell you how I feel it. The critics, the newspapers, the public, no one shall make me give it up. Instead of encouraging me and helping me, they invent things to injure and annoy me. Yes, I have read sincere and conscientious articles; there is nothing better for the artist, but there are others who kill one's soul with pin-pricks. I should like to poison them."
The Mother.—"My dear, you have done nothing but talk all day. You were up at six, and you played this evening. You will be ill."
Rachel (quickly).—"No: leave me alone. I tell you it gives me new life. (Turning towards me)—Shall I go and fetch the book? We will read the piece together."
I.—"Certainly, nothing could be more delightful."
She rose and went, shortly returning with the volume of Racine in her hand. There was something solemn and religious in her walk—like a priestess carrying the sacred vessels to the altar. She sat down beside me and snuffed the candle. The mother went to sleep smiling. Rachel opened the book almost with awe, and bending over it said, "How I delight in this man! When once I put my nose into this book, I could willingly remain without food or drink for days." We began to read Phèdre, the book lying on the table between us. At first she recited in a monotonous tone like a litany. By degrees she became more animated. We exchanged remarks, ideas, on every passage. At last we reached the great scene. She stretched out her right arm on the table, her head resting on her left hand, and gave herself up to her emotion. Still she only spoke in an undertone. Fatigue, excitement, the lateness of the hour, an almost feverish agitation that coloured the little cheeks, surrounded by the night-cap, red and white by turns, some charm that emanated from her, those brilliant eyes challenging my criticism, a childish smile that irradiated her features, the table covered with dishes, the flickering flame of the candle, the mother asleep close to us—all made a picture worthy of Rembrandt, a chapter of romance worthy of Wilhelm Meister, and a memory of my artistic life which I shall never forget.
At last half-past twelve struck. Her father came in from the opera where he had gone to see Mademoiselle Nathan make her first appearance in La Juive. He addressed one or two irritable sentences to his daughter, telling her to stop reading. Rachel shut the book, saying, under her breath, "It is disgusting. I will buy a candle and read alone in my bed." I looked at her, great tears stood in her eyes. It was indeed disgusting to see such a creature treated in so coarse a manner. I rose and took my leave, full of admiration, respect, and tenderness.
I sit down and send you, with the exactitude of a short-hand writer, all the details of this wonderful evening, thinking that perhaps you will keep them, and that posterity one day will read them.
After this supper a friendship sprang up between the poet and the actress. He undertook to write a tragedy in five acts for her, and determined to take his subject from the early history of France. "For days," as his brother tells us in his biography, "Alfred's table was covered with volumes of Thierry's and Sismondi's, and he at last fixed on the story of Frédégonde and Chilperic, calling it La Servante du Roi."
The details of this piece were never completed; the outline, as told by the old chroniclers, is this:—
Frédégonde insinuates herself into the confidence of Andovère, Chilperic's first wife, and by her coquetry and pretended modesty becomes possessed of the good graces and heart of the King. So great is her influence, that she induces him to repudiate the Queen, hoping to succeed to the crown herself. Deceived in her expectations by Chilperic's second marriage with Galsuinde, she yields to the King's love, becomes his mistress, and heaps every possible humiliation and insult on the new Queen. At the beginning of the fourth act, Galsuinde has resolved to secretly leave the court and to return to her father. Frédégonde, informed of her intention, deliberates if she should assassinate her or let her flee.
This monologue and the succeeding scene with the King are the only portions ever written.
We can see here and there, in the account Frédégonde gives of her youth and girlhood, a certain reflex of Rachel's earliest years, and the impression that the contempt with which her nationality was treated had made on her.
Dans ce sombre palais j'ai reçu la naissance,
J'en suis sortie un jour, le cœur plain d'espérance;
J'ai voulu voir de près ce que j'osai rêver.
J'ai vu; ma mere attend, je vais la retrouver.
Tel sera mon asile. *****
We can imagine the tone of voice with which Rachel uttered the words "J'ai vu."
Mes sœurs, mes pauvre sœurs, ô comble de misère,
Vont au seuil des chateaux mendier pour leur mère
Et chanter au hasard, les larmes dans les yeux,
Ces vieux refrains gaulois si chers a vos äieux!" ***** Ces barbares Seigneur, sont plus fiers qu'on se pense.
Ils ne se montrent pas pour un morceau de pain;
Leur visage est voilé lorsqu'ils tendent la main.
And the King answers—
Qu'ils gardent donc en paix cet orgueil solitaire,
Qui les fait exiler du reste de la terre!
Alfred de Musset took the fragment to her in the summer of 1839. She was apparently delighted with it, and recited it several times to small circles of intimate friends. She did not urge the poet, however, to complete his work, but seemed bent rather on the production of Polyeucte and Phèdre. Time passed. Alfred was pressed by the Revue des Deux Mondes for more work, and, being in want of money, he put away the MS. of La Servante du Roi and directed his energies to the completion of some short tales, to meet his most immediate debts. Enthusiasm on both sides cooled. The story told in Paris at the time was that Alfred de Musset, being invited to supper by Rachel to discuss some of the details of the piece, went to the Café de la Régence beforehand to play a game of chess, and there, as was, alas! often the case, forgot the engagement and his better self. "Il s'absintha—lisez s'absenta." Such was the joke made at his expense next day.
Alfred addressed some stanzas to her on this occasion; they were never, however, sent, and were found among his papers long afterwards:—
Si ta bouche ne doit rien dire
De ces vers désormais sans prix;
Si je n'ai pour être compris,
Ni tes larmes ni ton sourire;
Si dans ta voix, si dans tes traits,
Ne vit plus le feu qui m'anime;
Si le noble cœur de Monime
Ne doit plus savoir mes secrets;
Si ta triste lettre est signée;
Si les gardiens d'un vieux tombeau
Laissent leur prêtresse indignée
Sortir, emportant son flambeau;
Cette langue de ma pensée,
Que tu connais, que tu soutiens,
Ne sera jamais prononcée
Par d'autres accents que les tiens.
Périsse plutôt ma mémoire
Et mon beau rêve ambitieux!
Men génie était dans ta gloire;
Mon courage était dans tes yeux.
When they met again it was at a supper given by Buloz, editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes. Alfred wrote to his brother, then in Italy:—
February 1843.
I add a few lines to my mother's letter in answer to your question. I dined at Buloz on Shrove Thursday. All the Review was there, with Rachel as outsider. It was as stiff as a diplomatic dinner. Henri Heine found the bean, but pretended not to know what was expected of him, so that the cake which was to have been the great point of the evening turned out as heavy as lead.[2] Mercifully. Chaudes-Aigués got drunk, which broke the ice a little. Rachel asked me with so conciliating or coquettish an expression, if "we were still fighting," that I replied, "Why did you not ask me that three years ago. You know that I am not rancorous, and our quarrel would have blown over at once." She looked at me still more coquettishly, exclaiming, "How much time lost!" and we shook hands as good friends. Rachel has invited me to come and see her; I go every Thursday. That is the whole story.
The sequel is thus told by Paul de Musset in the Biography he wrote of his brother:—
One day, in the April of 1846, Rachel had invited him (Alfred) to dinner. The other guests were all men of position and rank. During dinner, the person seated on the left of the mistress of the house remarked a beautiful ring that she wore. The ring was immediately passed round, all expressing their admiration. "Messieurs," said Rachel, "since this trifle pleases you, I will put it up to auction. How much will you give for it?" One of the guests offered five hundred francs, another a thousand, a third fifteen hundred. At one moment the bidding went as high as three thousand francs. "And you, my poet," said Rachel, "why don't you make an offer? Come, what will you give me?" "I give you my heart," answered Alfred. "The ring is yours." With childish impetuosity Rachel threw the ring, as she spoke, into the poet's plate. After dinner Alfred wished to give it back to her. "Dear poet," she said, "you have given me your heart, and I would not return it to you for a hundred thousand crowns. Keep this ring as a pledge. If ever, by my fault or yours, you renounce the idea of writing the rôle for which I have expressed a wish so often, bring me the ring, and I will take it back." He accepted it subject to these conditions.
Rachel left for England shortly afterwards. She had promised to write to "her poet," but did not keep her word, and Alfred, knowing by experience the capriciousness of the great tragedian, drew unfavourable conclusions from her silence. When he saw her in the autumn, she said nothing of a piece. Rose Chéri was at that time acting with great success in Clarissa Harlowe. Alfred expressed the high opinion he had of the young girl before Rachel. The latter immediately showed signs of displeasure, and treated the poet with such scant courtesy that a day or two after he returned the ring, which she seemed to have forgotten.
Four years later, in the spring of 1851, Rachel gave a dinner in the house she had had built in the Rue Trudon. Alfred de Musset was invited. When dinner was announced the mistress of the house took his arm. On the way to the dining-room they had to pass along a narrow staircase. Alfred stepped on Rachel's dress. She said, with one of her queenly airs, "When you give your arm to a lady you ought to take care where you walk."
"When people have become princesses," answered the poet, "and build a mansion, they ought to command their architect to build a wider staircase."
The beginning of the evening was unpropitious. After dinner, however, peace was made. Alfred recalled regretfully the time when he had partaken of supper with Roxane off tin plates. Rachel was amused at the recollection.
"You think, perhaps, seeing my present luxury and riches, that I am not so good-hearted as I was then. I will prove the contrary."
"How?" asked Alfred.
"By going to see you and begging you to write something for me."
True to her word, she arrived next day, and remained for an hour talking about theatrical affairs.
She came, indeed, on several succeeding days, and ended by extorting the promise of a rôle. Still Alfred had no faith in the genuineness of her intentions, and, as she soon after left for another tour in England, the matter remained in abeyance. Meantime, Madeleine Brohan won all hearts in Les Caprices de Marianne. Rachel, piqued by this success, wrote from London, begging Alfred to remember his promise. Encouraged by her persistence, he began a drama in five acts, the scene of which he laid in Venice in the fifteenth century. The fragment—for it never was finished—is published among his posthumous papers under the name of Faustine. Another misunderstanding arose, which was destined definitely to end the friendship between the great tragédienne and the great poet, a friendship which ought to have been prolific in results for the dramatic art of the day. They seemed formed to stimulate each other's powers, but unfortunately, something antagonistic in the two natures negatived the possibilities of their genius.
"Please persuade Léon Gozlan to compose a short piece for me, Musset being dead—to literature," she writes to a friend a little later. We find him about the same time shutting up in his desk the piece he was writing for her, with these words, "Adieu, Rachel; c'est toi que j’ensevelis pour jamais."
Alfred de Musset threw away his birthright in this instance, as in so many others. She may have been capricious and changeable; but there is little doubt, if he had completed a drama and brought it to her for acceptance, she, who accepted so much that was worthless, would willingly have interpreted and done justice to his work.
"Many others forced their tragedies upon her," Paul de Musset says; "but they were not poets; il faut prendre les poètes comme ils sont."
Perhaps so; but does not the brother's pen refuse to write what he as well as all the world must have known by then, that the author of Rolla was no longer the poet but the "poét deçhu," as Alfred himself described him.
- ↑ George Sand was always said to have the largest mind and smallest foot of any woman in Paris. Five years before the scene described here, Alfred de Musset made his famous journey to Venice with the authoress of Lelia.
- ↑ It is noteworthy that Heine is one of the few great artists who saw Rachel and refused her the tribute of his admiration. "I find in the matter of talent," he says, "a great similarity between Herr Felix Mendelssohn and Mademoiselle Rachel Félix, the tragic artist. Peculiar to both is a severe, a very serious severeness—a decided, nearly unfortunate, attachment to classic models, the purest, most talented power of calculation, sharpness of understanding, and, in fine, a total want of näiveté." Is there, however, in art such a thing as original genius without näiveté? Up till now there has been no occurrence of an example of it.