The English stage has not been wanting in an illustrious line of right royal queens of tragedy. Mrs. Barry is the noble founder, and perhaps the noblest queen of that brilliant line. Then came Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Spranger Barry (Mrs. Crawford), Mrs. Siddons (who hated Mrs. Crawford for not abdicating), and Miss O’Neill, whom Mrs. Siddons equally disliked for coming after her.
With all these the lovers of dramatic literature are well acquainted. Of the contemporary line of French tragedy queens very little is known in this country; nevertheless the dynasty is one of great brilliancy, and the details are not without much dramatic interest.
In the year 1644, in the city of Rouen, there lived a family named Desmares, which family was increased in that year by the birth of a little girl who was christened Marie. Corneille, born in the same city, was then eight-and-thirty years of age. Rouen is now proud of both of them—poet and actress. The actress is only known to fame by her married name. The clever Marie Desmares became the wife of the player, Champmeslé. Monsieur was to Madame very much what poor Mr. Siddons was to his illustrious consort. Madame, or Mademoiselle, or La Champmeslé, as she was called indifferently, associated with Corneille by their common birth-place, was more intimately connected with Racine, who was her senior by five years. La Champmeslé was in her twenty-fifth year when she made her début in Paris as Hermione, in Racine’s masterpiece, ‘Andromaque.’ For a long time Paris could talk of nothing but the new tragedy and the new actress. The part from which the piece takes its name was acted by Mdlle. Duparc, whom Racine had carried off from Molière’s company. The author was very much interested in this lady, the wife of a M. Duparc. Madame was, when a widow, the mother of a very posthumous child indeed. The mother died. She was followed to the grave by a troop of the weeping adorers of her former charms, ‘and,’ says Racine, alluding to himself, ‘the most interested of them was half dead as he wept.’
The poet was aroused from his grief by a summons from the king, who, in presence of the sensitive Racine’s bitterest enemy, Louvois, accused him of having robbed and poisoned his late mistress. The accusation was founded on information given by the infamous woman, Voisin, who was a poisoner by passion and profession, and was executed for her devilish practices. The information was found to be utterly false, and Racine, absolved, soon found consolation and compensation.
He became the master of La Champmeslé, and taught her how to play the heroines of the dramas which he wrote expressly for her. She, in her turn, became the mistress of her tutor. Of his teaching indeed she stood in little need, except to learn from him his ideas and object, as author of the play. She was not only sublime, but La Champmeslé was the first sublime actress that had hitherto appeared on the French stage. Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter:—
La Champmeslé is something so extraordinary that you have never 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.’
Between these two queens of tragedy the company of the Théâtre Français 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.