The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  I’d had almost no contact with children since the beginning of the year. There were none at the school, and few at the shows I attended. But on the Champs-Élysées, inspired by the girl’s obvious adoration for the poster, I asked her if she’d ever seen a circus. She responded with a detailed description of one she had attended recently, followed by several past experiences, eventually tracing her passion all the way back to her original encounter with a tenting in the Bois de Vincennes. She talked about the circus the way old authors wrote about it: a grand spectacle, a “happy dream” of fantasy made flesh. She had strong feelings about the acts, about those she preferred (the “big parade of lions”) and those she didn’t (the “gentleman who threw the balls in the air”). The details of the experiences seemed seared into her memory, down to the cap the clown wore and the words the tamer shouted to the tiger.

  After a few minutes, her parents summoned her back to the bench. Before departing, though, she turned the question back to me. “Et toi?” She squinted up into the midday sun. “Have you been to the circus?”

  Smiling, I told her that I had, many times. In fact, I said, I was going to visit a circus right then.

  It was actually the ghost of one.

  Before coming to France, I had assumed that all circuses traveled in tents. As should be evident by now, I was wrong. In reality, for the first seventy-five years, circuses took place in buildings, what were known as hard circuses, or cirques en dur. I’ve mentioned several of these buildings already: Astley’s circus near Westminster Bridge; Franconi’s Cirque Olympique on the boulevard. What’s astonishing is their ubiquity. France alone had thirty-three hard circuses at one point. Between 1769, the year Astley built his riding school in Westminster, and 1900, the opening of the Hippodrome, London saw twenty-five circuses come and go. During roughly the same period, New York had twenty—on Canal, Broadway, 42nd, Greenwich.

  To be sure, many of these buildings were shoddy affairs, with tin roofs and wooden walls. But others were quite magnificent, stone structures as luxurious and durable as a city’s finest opera houses, with hand-carved friezes and sculptures ornamenting their exteriors. This was especially the case in the capitals, and each great European city had its version—the Cirque Royal in Brussels; the Tivoli in Copenhagen; in Budapest, the Orpheus. The biggest cities had several, and they dueled for audiences. Circuses were simply part of the urban landscape, as accepted as banks, post offices, and schoolhouses.

  The more I read about hard circuses, the more they captivated me. It was fascinating that the circus, so derided in my youth, had once been considered a part of every urban experience. I was also intrigued by the hard-circus period in the art’s history. For a brief but beautiful time, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth, the circus witnessed a period of artistic perfection and critical appreciation unlike anything before or since. In tuxedos and gowns, aristocrats bantered, cheered, and scoffed as clowns capered and equestriennes in tutus struck refined poses on horseback.

  Today this age of highbrow circus is almost completely forgotten, but I wanted to explore it more fully. Luckily, it was easy to trace it back to its roots. Though highbrow circus had spread around the world from Moscow to Buenos Aires, the form originated and, according to many, reached its apex in Paris, as indicated by the movement’s name: l’élégance française, the period of French elegance. I knew the style had peaked in the second half of the nineteenth century, but I wondered if there was a single circus that stood above the rest, an epitome of the time. During one of our café appointments, I put the question to Pascal.

  “The Champs-Élysées,” he said. “Without question, the Cirque des Champs-Élysées.”

  ON A BITTERLY COLD AFTERNOON in 1840, almost two decades before his discovery of Léotard in Toulouse, Louis Dejean summoned architect Jacques Hittorff to his office for a meeting. Dejean wanted to build a circus. At the time the mogul already had one venue up and running, the Cirque Olympique, purchased from the financially inept Franconis in 1836, but a new opportunity had presented itself. To the west of the city, a long-neglected tangle of bushes and weeds had been under renovation. Informally known as the Elysian Fields, or the Champs-Élysées, the untamed glade was becoming a bastion of aristocratic leisure, a highbrow equivalent to the boulevard across town, complete with planked footpaths, gurgling fountains, and bustling, gaslit cafés.

  Now Dejean wanted to add a circus to the Champs-Élysées, and not just any circus. Hittorff was a royal favorite, responsible for the Place de la Concorde and the resurrection of the Gare du Nord. At their meeting, Dejean indicated that he wanted a circus on the order of the architect’s previous constructions, a circus to attract the denizens of the quartier and rival any theater in town.

  Inspired, Hittorff set to work. He drew up plans and dispatched a crew to undertake construction. Within a year, Dejean found himself gazing up at his dream.

  And it was magnificent. Round like the ring inside, the building looked less like a circus than like a Greek temple. Corinthian columns framed the gilded doorway, each surmounted by an equestrian statue crafted by James Pradier, a noted sculptor.* Higher up, more equestrians charged along a stone frieze that wrapped the building like a ribbon. At the top was a glass cupola that glowed like a lantern when the circus was in session. As an audience member would later comment, “Viewed across the darkened greenery with its interior ablaze, the building’s effect was marvelous.”

  On May 6, 1843, Dejean opened his regal circus to the public. Within a matter of weeks, Paris’s patrician class had flooded the building, lured by the stately horses and secluded location. Within a season, the circus became their regular meeting ground, a place to gather to converse and conduct business, as regular a part of the social calendar as the ballet or the opera. It was, in the words of L’Artiste, a publication of the period, “le rendez-vous de toutes les élégances.”

  Reading about this elegant circus, I found myself longing to have been around during its height, to experience a circus in such an elegant venue. I settled for the next best thing. I went to Pascal.

  “Well, your evening would begin at home obviously,” he said. We were in a cab on a rainy night. Stars of light sparked on the window. I had asked him to talk me through an evening at the Cirque des Champs-Élysées. “It was a soirée mondaine,” he said, “a night of high society. Women wore gowns. Since you’re a man, you would put on your tuxedo, then leave with your wife.”

  In the street, he continued, carriages line the block. If you are rich, you might have your own horse. More likely, the recent rise in stable prices (a product of the migrant flood into the city) has forced you to sell, and so you hire one of the drivers. It’s a warm and cloudless night, as you make your way to the circus. On quiet afternoons, you sometimes come across the building while strolling along the Champs. In such moments, it lingers apart from the action of the main thoroughfare, dim and quiet. But tonight the circus is bustling! Light from the cupola washes the glade in a buttery yellow. Carriages line up against the curb in front of the doorway.

  You assume your place in line. As you wait, you listen to the locusts buzzing in the fields, to the clop of hooves on cobblestones. After a few minutes, the valet arrives. He’s tall and dressed in livery and a powdered wig. Taking your ticket, he helps you from the carriage and guides you under the chandelier hanging above the doorway. Inside, the men sport brushed horsehair top hats, the women pink or blue taffeta dresses. You attend the circus to see and be seen, and tonight all the regulars are there, connoisseurs such as yourself—barons, judges, officers. Drifting through the crowd, you might recall that Henry James attended as a child. So did the Shah of Persia, more recently, before his visit to the Louvre.

  You find your seat. As one critic wrote, the interior of the building looks “less a circus than a boudoir,” and you would agree. The seats are velvet, the railings brass. An enormous, four-thousand-candle chandelier hangs like a piece of dazzling fruit above the ring.<
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  Now the sound of a violin rises from the orchestra pit. The tremelo fills the hall.

  But the lights don’t dim. Unlike in the theater, Pascal explains, the lights never go off at the circus. “That’s why we call it the space of truth,” he says.

  The reign of the Champs-Élysées lasted for more than three decades, through a variety of regimes and name changes (Cirque d’Été, Cirque des Champs-Élysées, Cirque Impératrice). As astonishing as it seems in retrospect, in reality, it was very much in keeping with its time. The Industrial Revolution had given the working class more income and a new status. A new class emerged: the haute bourgeoisie. Eager to assume the cultural place of the retreating aristocrats, the nouveaux riches naturally gravitated to a spectacle that was refined but also spectacular enough for them to comprehend.

  Dejean understood this and deliberately aspired to create a circus for this clientele. There was the luxurious building, of course, an advertisement unto itself. More instrumental was his choice of acts, which were among the finest in Europe. He hired Richard Risley, the foot juggler, and George and Sam Lockhart, Europe’s most celebrated elephant trainers. During the 1840s, he featured the Hanlon Brothers, creators of macabre acrobat pantomimes. (In his treatise Le naturalisme au théâtre, Émile Zola noted that the brothers “laid bare, with a gesture, a wink, the entire human beast.”)

  Dejean’s most critical decision had to do with the circus’s central element: horses. In the seventy years since Astley’s first canter around his London ring, equestrian exhibitions, and trick riding in particular, had remained the sturdy backbone of the circus program. Directors fought to hire the most spectacular riding acts. In the 1820s, acrobats à cheval emerged. Unlike voltige performers, who mostly remained fixed to the horse, these acrobats used the horse’s back as a sort of moving floor. Performers struggled to top one another. Didier Gautier became the first man to throw a somersault on the back of a horse.

  At the Champs-Élysées, Dejean also featured trick riding acts; Paul Cuzent, one of his stars, taught himself to ride four horses without a saddle, an act known as the “Roman games.” But he also leaned on a more refined form of horse training known as haute école. Like trick riding, haute école, or classical dressage, dates from martial practices of the Middle Ages, when military trainers taught their “war moves” for the battlefield, such as how to turn (volte), kick (capriole), and rise up on their hind legs (levade). During the Renaissance, the moves were codified, first as training exercises to build a horse’s strength, later as displays for military ceremonies and jousting tournaments. In the seventeenth century, the displays made their way into the palaces of Europe. Companies including the famous (and misleadingly named) “Spanish Riding School” of Vienna developed routines to showcase an equestrian’s mastery of his horse and his grace of movement. Performers were judged not on their spectacularity but on their refinement, on the appearance of “total unity” with their mount. Often riders would perform at the same time, in a practice sometimes known as “horse ballet.” “They turn and turn again,” wrote L’Éstoile of a Spanish horse exhibit in 1581, “to the sound and cadence of trumpets, oboes, and bugles.”

  After the French Revolution, haute école had fallen from favor, but there remained a fondness among the aristocrats, passed down from their ancestors who had fled the châteaux for the city. Recognizing this latent love, Dejean resurrected the practice and built his shows around it. He hired François Baucher, France’s most famous trainer and a “Galileo of the hippic sciences,” to be his equestrian director. He recruited Antonio Franconi’s son, who a writer of the period called one of “the most complete circus equestrians of all time.”

  Dejean’s female riders, the équestriennes, were especially renowned. They cames in two forms. The équestriennes du panier were ballerinas on horseback. In tutus and bodices, they worked atop a large pad strapped to the horse (the eponymous panier, or basket), striking poses and daintily hopping over colorful ribbons held taut by clowns. The second type of female rider—queens to the panier princesses—worked in pure classical dressage. Known as Dejean’s “divas of the whip” (divas de la cravache), they worked from the saddle or in “liberty,” directing the horses from the ground. The women were revered for their inventiveness and strength. Caroline Loyo, a student of Baucher’s, trained her own horses, a rarity at the time. She was relentlessly exacting. As she once told Dejean, “I will wear out any horse that defies me.”

  By emphasizing haute école, Dejean gave the upper classes a circus that fit their world. As French circus scholar Roland Auguet has noted, the practice was a “visual projection” of the values of refined French culture—a love of forms, of grace through work, of ease in unnatural movement. In return, aristocrats celebrated Dejean’s performers as serious artists. The Count of Daru courted Loyo. Empress Elizabeth of Austria proclaimed Émilie Loisset, another Dejean rider, “the most ladylike person” in Paris. “For me,” Balzac wrote, “the équestrienne in the fullness of her powers is superior to all the glories of song, of dance, and of dramatic art.”

  THE CIRQUE DES CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES was torn down in 1902, eventually replaced by a quiet glade of flowers and winding paths, which I found after a bit of searching. Tucked behind high, thick bushes, the spot retained vestiges of romance. Sprinkled across the grass were an old theater and a mansion with a high veranda and vines spilling down the sides. A narrow street curved around the knoll, blocked that day for a small market. A dozen or so merchants had laid out their wares on collapsible tables under white awnings. It was a pleasant legacy, on the whole.

  I poked around. After taking some pictures of the daffodils in bloom, I investigated the market, where I found a few pictures of hard circuses from Amiens and Elbeuf, though none of the circus on the Champs-Élysées. One of the vendors, a cheery old Normand in a faded blue cardigan, reminded me of a curious fact. At the destruction of the circus, the city bureaucrats, showing a surprising (and unprecedented) sympathy for circus-lovers, had renamed the street in honor of the lost building. And sure enough, bolted to a corner was a sign: “Rue du Cirque.” I had retreated to the sidewalk and was snapping pictures when I heard a chirpy voice behind me:

  “Looks like we have a circus fan!”

  I turned. Two elderly women stood eyeing me. They looked like a pair of cartoon birds, a stork and a barn owl. In addition to a pair of oversized Gucci sunglasses, the stork wore a conspicuously white pantsuit, the sort of outfit I had only ever seen in catalogues and movies featuring polo matches. The owl, who came up to the stork’s shoulder, was dressed in equal luxury, with a blue pastel jacket over a pink blouse spun of what appeared to be cotton candy.

  Addressing the owl, I confirmed her suspicions: yes, I was indeed a circus fan, come to pay homage. To my surprise, this quickly led to a conversation about the site and the great circus. Both women had lived in the neighborhood their whole lives and had grown up hearing stories about the magical old building. Neither could remember any specifics, but the stork recalled her grandmother saying she had attended a show there.

  “I mean, it really is a beautiful building,” the owl added wistfully. “One rather hopes they’ll make it a circus again one day.”

  I felt myself straighten in curiosity. I asked her what she meant. “Well, the building,” she said flatly, as if I was being silly. “The circus.” She raised a bony finger and indicated the theater in the lawn.

  This was one of the more startling moments in my year. Every source I read indicated that the circus had been destroyed. But the women made me wonder. And so did the theater building, once I examined it more closely. Like the famous circus, the theater was round. What’s more, though I didn’t know enough about architecture to identify the specifics, the building seemed vaguely of France’s neoclassical era. Was it possible this was the circus building?

  Eagerly, I pressed the women for details. What else did they know about the building?

  The stork answered first. “Well, I believe i
t was constructed by Napoleon. He built it for sa favorite.” She turned to face the owl, the sunlight glinting off her glasses. “Isn’t that right?” Now I knew it could not have been my circus, but I listened just the same.

  The smaller woman nodded. “Mmm-hmm. Josephine it must have been.” Now they were both nodding.

  “That’s right, Josephine,” the stork repeated. “She lived in that building over there.” She pointed to the nearby mansion. “Josephine wanted a circus next door, so Napoleon built her a circus. She must have walked over at night.” Then she added, in a softer voice, “Can you imagine?”

  Trying not to sound presumptuous, I asked the stork where she had heard all this. From her grandmother?

  She shrugged. “Oui, j’imagine.” Her tone said the question wasn’t important. “Mostly, they’re stories you hear growing up in the neighborhood, des histoires de quartier. People talk about the buildings, you know. I’ve always known the stories. They’re part of the collective memory.”

  Later that week, I stopped by the circus library to verify truth about the circus’s destruction. Sure enough, in 1880s, after the Parisian elite had flitted on to new pleasures, Dejean was forced to sell. The circus became a skating rink, with ice spread over the ring. In 1899, Charles Franconi, great-grandson to Antonio, abandoned the building completely, claiming irreparable damage to the walls. The new owners dispatched a wrecking crew to destroy it, but the company went bankrupt, and for several years the building rotted ignominiously in a state of half-destruction. Finally, in 1902, the city took pity on the ruins and razed them. According to one report, the stables beneath the building survive; street cleaners use them to store their brushes.