by Will Durant
Despite amateur competition, the stars of the Comédie-Française shone brightly over France. We have seen how the people of Geneva and Ferney came out to see Lekain when he played for Voltaire at Châtelaine. His real name was Henri-Louis Cain, but this was a cursed cognomen which he for-givably changed. Neither was his face his fortune; Mlle. Clairon took some time to warm to him even in a play. Voltaire had discovered his ability in an amateur performance, had coached him, and had found a place for him at the Théâtre-Français. On September 14, 1750, Lekain made his debut as Titus in Voltaire’s Brutus; and for a generation thereafter he took the male lead in Voltaire’s plays. The irascible patriarch loved him to the end.
But Voltaire’s stage favorite (now that Adrienne Lecouvreur had passed away) was Mlle. Clairon. Legally she was Claire-Josèphe Hippolyte Léris de La Tude. Born without benefit of marriage in 1723, and not expected to survive, she lived to be eighty—which is not always a blessing for the heroines of the stage. It was not thought worth while to educate her, but she stole her way into the Théâtre-Français, was entranced by the scenery-plus-orations, and never quite overcame a tendency to make speeches even in the ecstasy of love. She announced that she would be an actress; her mother threatened to break her arms and legs if she persisted in so sinful a resolve;26 she persisted and joined a traveling troupe. She soon acquired the morals that were customary in her new profession. “Thanks to my talent, my good looks, and the ease with which I could be approached, I saw so many men at my feet that it would have been impossible for me, being endowed with a naturally tender heart,♥ to be inaccessible to love.”27
Back in Paris, she charmed M. de La Popelinière; he enjoyed her, and then used his influence to get her a place at the Opéra; four months later the Duchesse de Châteauroux, current mistress to the King, secured her admission to the Comédie-Française. The company asked her to choose her first role, expecting her to follow custom and select a minor part; she proposed to play Phèdre; the company protested, but let her have her way; she carried off the adventure triumphantly. Henceforth she starred in tragic roles, in which her only rival was Mlle. Dumesnil. She gained a reputation for acquisitive promiscuity. She entertained a roster of nobles, made them pay well, hoarded her gains, and then yielded much of them to her favorite lover, the Chevalier de Jaucourt, who wrote articles on economics for the Encyclopédie. She paid a price, too, for the attentions of Marmontel, whom we shall soon meet as the author of Moral Tales. Consider the woman’s side of it in her letter to him: “Is it possible that you did not know what troubles you caused me (unintentionally, but I had them all the same), and that those troubles have kept me in bed for six weeks, in critical danger? I cannot believe that you were aware of this, else you would not have gone out in society while everybody knew what condition I was in.”28 Nevertheless she and Marmontel remained fast friends for thirty years.
It was he whose criticisms and suggestions led her to make an important change in acting. Till 1748 she had followed the method usual at the Théâtre-Français—forceful and emotional speech, grand gestures, trembling passion. Marmontel found this unnatural and distasteful. Amid her liaisons Clairon had done much reading, and had become one of the best-educated women of her day; her fame and esprit had won her admission to cultivated society; she perceived that the emptiest vessels were the most resonant. In 1752 an attack of syphilis compelled her to withdraw for a time from the stage. Recovering, she accepted an engagement to give thirty-five performances in Bordeaux. On her first night there, she tells us, she played Phèdre in the traditional manner, “with all the noise, fury, and unreason which then were so applauded in Paris.” She was applauded. But on the next night she played Agrippine in Racine’s Britannicus in quiet voice and restrained gestures, leaving emotions pent up until the final scene. She received an ovation. Returning to Paris, she won the old audience to her new style. Diderot warmly approved; he had her in mind when he wrote The Paradox of the Actor— that a good actor is inwardly calm and self-possessed even in the most passionate moments of his roles; and he asked, “What acting was ever more perfect than Clairon’s?”29 She liked to shock her admirers by telling them that she mentally reviewed her monthly bills while conveying to an audience a pathos that moved it to tears.30 Voltaire did not welcome the new method, but he effectively supported her, and she him, in reforming costume and furniture on the stage. Heretofore all actresses had played their roles—of any nation or age—in the dress of eighteenth-century Paris, with hoopskirts and powdered hair; Clairon startled her audience by dressing her body and hair in the style of the time in the play; and when she played Idamé in Voltaire’s Orphan of China the costume and furniture were Chinese.
In 1763 Clairon went to Geneva to consult Dr. Tronchin. Voltaire asked her to stay with him at Les Délices. “Madame Denis is ill; so am I. Monsieur Tronchin will come to our hospital to see the three of us.”31 She came, and the old sage liked her so much that he lured her to Ferney for a longer visit, and persuaded her to join him in several performances in his theater. An old drawing shows him, in his seventieth year, kneeling before her in a passionate avowal.
She retired from the stage in 1766, having already at forty-three lost her health, and even the precision of her speech. Like Lecouvreur, she fell in love with a dashing young noble; she sold nearly all her possessions to rescue him from his creditors; he repaid her by giving his love, and her livres, to other women. Then, aged forty-nine, she received from the thirty-six-years-old Christian Friedrich Karl Alexander, Margrave of Ansbach and Bayreuth, an invitation to live with him at Ansbach as his mentor and mistress. She went (1773), and for thirteen years she kept her hold on him. He had imbibed in France some ideals of the Enlightenment; with her encouragement he effected several reforms in his principality—abolishing torture and establishing religious liberty. Her final accomplishment was to persuade him to sleep every night with his wife. In time Clairon grew bored, and longed for Paris. The Margrave took her there occasionally; on one of those trips he adopted a new mistress, and left Clairon in Paris, handsomely endowed. She was now sixty-three.
She was welcomed in the salons, even by the virtuous Mme. Necker; she gave lessons in elocution to the future Mme. de Staël. She took on new lovers, including later the husband of Mme. de Staël herself, who was glad to get rid of him. He set up the aging actress in comfort, but the Revolution deflated her livres, and she lived in poverty until Napoleon reinflated her pension in 1801. In that year a Citizen Dupoirier offered her a last liaison. She discouraged him in a pitiful note that summarizes the tragedy of many an old actress: “It is likely that your memory still recalls me as brilliant, young, and surrounded with all my prestige. You must revise your ideas. I can scarcely see; I am hard of hearing; I have no more teeth; my face is all wrinkled; my dried-up skin barely covers my weak frame.”32 He came nevertheless, and they comforted each other by recalling their youth. She died in 1803 by falling out of bed.
She had long outlived the classic tragic drama whose greatest eighteenth-century exponent, Voltaire, had acclaimed her as its supreme interpreter. The Paris audience, predominantly middle-class, was surfeited with the rhyming speeches of princes, princesses, priests, and kings; those majestic alexandrines of Corneille and Racine, marching pompously on six feet, seemed now to be a symbol of aristocratic life; but were there none but nobles in history? Yes, of course, a Molière had shown those others; but that was in comedy; were there not tragedies, profound trials and noble feelings, in the homes and hearts of people without pedigree? Diderot thought the time had come for dramas of the bourgeoisie. And whereas the nobility had shunned sentimentality, and required emotion to wear a stately mask, the new drama, said Diderot, should liberate feeling, and should not be ashamed to move audiences to handkerchiefs and tears. So he, and some others after him, wrote drames larmoyants— weeping plays. Moreover, several of the new playwrights not only portrayed and exalted middle-class life, they attacked the nobility, the clergy, at last even the government—
its corruption, taxes, luxury, and waste; they did not merely denounce despotism and bigotry (Voltaire had done this well), they praised republics and democracy; and those passages were applauded with special warmth.33 The French stage joined a hundred other forces in preparing revolution.
IV. MARMONTEL
“Authors are everywhere,” wrote Horace Walpole from Paris in 1765, and they “are worse than their own writings, which I don’t mean as a compliment to either.”34 Certainly the age could not compare, in literature, with the age of Molière and Racine, nor with that of Hugo, Flaubert, and Balzac; in this brief period between 1757 and 1774 we have, as memorable authors, only Rousseau and Marmontel, and the living embers of Voltaire’s fire, and the secret, unpublished ebullience of Diderot. Men and women gave themselves so intensely to conversation that their wits were spent before they took to ink. Aristocratic polish was out of print; philosophy, economics, and politics held the stage; content now dominated form. Even poetry tended to propaganda; Saint-Lambert’s Les Saisons (1769) imitated James Thomson, but denounced fanaticism and luxury unseasonably, and, like Lear, thought of winter in terms of icy blasts whistling about the hovels of the poor.
Jean-François Marmontel owed his rise to his shrewdness, to women, and to Voltaire. Born in 1723, he wrote in his old age amiable Mémoires d’unpère (1804), which offer us a tender picture of his childhood and youth. Though he became a skeptic, and almost an idolator of Voltaire, he had nothing but good to say of the pious people who had brought him up, and of the kindly and devoted Jesuits who had educated him. He loved these so much that he took the tonsure, aspired to join their order, and taught in their colleges at Clermont and Toulouse. But like many another fledgling of the Jesuits, he flew off on the winds of enlightenment, and lost at least his intellectual virginity. In 1743 he submitted verses to Voltaire, who so relished them that he sent Marmontel a set of his works corrected in his own hand. The young poet kept these as a sacred heirloom, and gave up all notions of a priestly career. Two years later Voltaire secured a place for him in Paris, and free admission to the Théâtre-Français; indeed, in the hidden goodness of his parental-childless heart, Voltaire sold Marmontel’s poems, and sent him the proceeds. In 1747 Marmontel’s play Denys le Tyran (Dionysius)— dedicated to Voltaire—was accepted and produced; it succeeded beyond his hopes; “in one day I became famous and rich.”35 Soon he was a minor lion in the salons; he feasted on dinners and paid with wit, and found a route to Clairon’s bed.
His second play, Aristomène, brought him more money, friends, and mistresses. At Mme. de Tencin’s gatherings he met Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Helvétius, Marivaux; at the table of Baron d’Holbach he heard Diderot, Rousseau, and Grimm. Guided by women, he made his way up in the world. Having praised Louis XV in clever verses, he was admitted to the court. Pompadour was charmed by his handsome face and blooming youth; she persuaded her brother to employ him as secretary, and in 1758 she made him editor of the official journal, Mercure de France. He wrote a libretto for Rameau, and articles for the Encyclopédie. Mme. Geoffrin liked him so well that she offered him a cozy apartment in her home, where he remained for ten years as a paying guest.
To the Mercure he contributed (1753-60) a series of Contes moraux (Moral Tales), which lifted that periodical into literature. Ex uno judice omnes. Soliman II, tiring of Turkish delights, asks for three European beauties. The first one resists for a month, yields for a week, and is then put aside. Another sings beautifully, but her conversation is soporific. Roxalana does not merely resist, she berates the Sultan as a lecher and a criminal. “Do you forget who I am and who you are?” he cries. Roxalana: “You are powerful, I am beautiful; so we are even.” She is not surpassingly beautiful, but she has a retroussé nose, and this overwhelms Soliman. He tries every device to break down her resistance, but fails. He threatens to kill her; she proposes to spare him the trouble by killing herself. He insults her; she insults him more cuttingly. But also she tells him that he is handsome, and that he needs only her guidance to be as fine as a Frenchman. He is offended and pleased. Finally he marries her and makes her his queen. During the ceremony he asks himself, “Is it possible that a little turned-up nose should overthrow the laws of an empire?”36 Marmontel’s moral: It is little things that cause great events, and if we knew those secret trivia we should completely revise history.
Nearly everything prospered with Marmontel until he published (1767) a novel, Bélisaire. It was excellent, but it advocated religious toleration, and questioned “the right of the sword to exterminate heresy, irreligion, and impiety, and to bring the whole world under the yoke of the true faith.”37 The Sorbonne condemned the book as containing reprehensible doctrine. Marmontel appeared before the Syndic of the Sorbonne and protested, “Come, sir, is it not the spirit of the age, not mine, that you are condemning?”38 The spirit of the age showed in his boldness, and in the mildness of his punishment. Ten years earlier he would have been sent to the Bastille, and his book would have been suppressed; actually the sale of his novel proceeded famously, still bearing the “permission and privilege of the King”; and the government contented itself with recommending that he should keep silence on the matter.39 However, Mme. Geoffrin was much disturbed when the Sorbonne’s decree banning Bélisaire was not only read in the churches but posted on her door. She gently suggested that Marmontel should find other lodgings.
He landed on his feet as usual. In 1771 he was appointed royal historiographer, with a good salary; in 1783 he became “perpetual secretary” of the French Academy; in 1786 he was professor of history at the Lycée. In 1792, aged sixty-nine and sickened by the excesses of the Revolution, he retired to Évreux, then to Abloville; there he composed his Mémoires, in which even the Sorbonne was forgiven. He spent his final years in uncomplaining poverty, grateful for having lived a full and zestful life. He died on the last day of 1799.
V. THE LIFE OF ART
1. Sculpture
The King had a fine taste in art; so did the lords and ladies of his court, and the millionaires who were now itching to control the state. It was an event in French history when the Sèvres factories, which Mme. de Pompadour had established, began in 1769 to produce hard-paste porcelain; and though the Germans at Dresden and Meissen had done this sixty years earlier, the Sèvres products soon gained a European market. Great artists like Boucher, Caffieri, Pajou, Pigalle, Falconet, and Clodion were not above making designs for Sèvres porcelain. Meanwhile faïence and soft-paste porcelain of exquisite design continued to come from the potters of Sèvres, St.-Cloud, Chantilly, Vincennes . . .
Potters, metalworkers, cabinetmakers, and tapestry weavers combined their resources to adorn the rooms of royalty, nobility, and financiers. Clocks, like that which Boizot designed and Gouthière cast in bronze,40 were a characteristic ornament of this age. Pierre Gouthière and Jacques Caffieri excelled in “ormolu”—literally, “ground gold,” actually an alloy composed chiefly of copper and zinc, carved and chased and inlaid into furniture. The master cabinetmakers formed a proud and powerful guild, whose members were required to stamp their work with their names as an emblem of responsibility. The best of them in France came from Germany: Jean-François Oeben and his pupil Jean-Henri Riesener; these two joined their skills in making for Louis XV (1769) a magnificent “Bureau du Roi,” a rococo orgy of design, carving, inlay, and gilt, for which the King paid 63,000 livres. It was enjoyed by Napoleons I and III, and was surrendered to the Louvre in 1870. It is now valued at £ 50,00ο.41
In this age, which set such store by tactile values, sculpture was esteemed at almost its classic estimate, for its essence was form, and France was learning that form, not color, is the soul of art. Here again women outshone the gods; not in the natural imperfections of reality, but in the ideal shapes and drapery that sensitive sculptors could assemble and conceive. Sculpture embellished not only palaces and churches but gardens and public parks; so the statues in the Jardins des Tuileries were among the most popular figures in Paris; and Bor
deaux, Nancy, Rennes, and Reims emulated Paris in terra cotta, marble, and bronze.
Guillaume Coustou II (only one year younger than the reign) now produced his finest work. In 1764 Frederick the Great commissioned him to make statues of Venus and Mars; in 1769 Coustou sent them to Potsdam for the Palace of Sanssouci. Also in 1769 he began the stately tomb of the Dauphin and the Dauphine (parents of Louis XVI) for the cathedral of Sens; on this he labored till his death (1777). In his last decades he saw the rise of as brilliant a quartet of sculptors as France has ever known: Pigalle, Falconet, Caffieri, and Pajou.
Failing to win the grand prix that paid for an art education in Rome, Pigalle went there at his own expense, helped by Coustou. Returning to Paris, he won admission to the Académie des Beaux-Arts with his first chef-d’oeuvre, Mercure Attachânt Ses Talonnières {Mercury Attaching His Heelpieces). Seeing it, the old sculptor Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne cried out, “Je voudrais l’avoir fait!” (I wish I had done that!) Louis XV liked it, too, and sent it to his ally, Frederick II, in 1749. Somehow it found its way back to the Louvre, where we may contemplate the remarkable skill with which the young artist suggested the impatience of the Olympian herald to be up and off. Mme. de Pompadour found Pigalle’s work congenial, and gave him many commissions. He made a bust of her, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and when her amour with the King subsided into friendship he carved her likeness as Déesse de l’Amitié (1753).42 He made a statue of Louis as plain Citoyen for the Place Royale at Reims, and finished Bouchardon’s Louis XV for what is now the Place de la Concorde. He portrayed Diderot in bronze, as a man torn by conflicting philosophies. But he let himself go histrionic in the tomb that he carved for the remains of the Maréchal de Saxe in the Church of St. Thomas at Strasbourg—the amorous warrior striding to death as to a victory.