What is an actress, asks Balzac, but the stir she makes in the world? Controversy and disputes increase her fame. It was Balzac who called his era an age of paper, and the papers helped Rachel to make her name. The busy feuilletonistes—daily reviewers, literary essayists, gossipy columnists—vigorously praised and damned her various performances, and argued about the sources and the soundness of her gifts. Representing and misrepresenting her was one way of engaging in larger controversies, and those, in turn, aggrandized her.
In Rachel’s day as in ours the force of theatrical entertainments was generated between pairs of poles: elite and popular, traditional and original, literary and spectacular, mainstream and fringe, legitimate and subversive. History and politics, as always, informed the categories. France’s primary theatrical company, the Comédie-Française, was the heir to the nation’s most exalted sense of itself. It had been created in 1680 by an edict of King Louis XIV, which combined two existing repertory companies. The king charged the new national company with the duty of preserving the great dramatic works written during his reign: the comedies of Molière and the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. These tragedies, written in rhyming alexandrines—verses of twelve syllables—faithfully followed the rules of art according to Aristotle and the Roman poet Horace, which had been rephrased and reissued by the seventeenth-century French poet and critic Boileau. Usually based on ancient plays or stories, classical French tragedies were constrained by rigid rules as to time, place, and action. The so-called unities required the plot to take place within twenty-four hours, in a single place, unimpeded by subplots. Courtly bienséances, or rules of seemliness, imposed further constraints, relegating bloody action to the wings and insisting on a limited, periphrastic vocabulary, in which love, for instance, was always a flame and often a fetter. The dramatic force of dilemmas was intensified (or eviscerated, depending on your taste) by the insistent balance and antithesis: as every line had its rhyming mate, and each heroine or hero had a confidant, every personal struggle was waged between opposed abstractions. Torn by conflicting allegiances, arguing like brilliant lawyers, the characters lived intensely in a world of polarizing moral issues.
The members of the company of actors that enjoyed unique rights to those plays tended to be adepts at one or another of the kinds of roles that recurred in the repertoire: brave heroes or heavy fathers, young princesses or scornful queens. Over the years, they developed and codified a set of gestures and inflections based on the early recommendations of the poet-playwrights, which were painstakingly passed on through generations of actors proud to be in the state company’s employ. The Revolution caused the tragic repertoire to pass out of its sole possession, and other theaters to rival its power, but the sociétaires of the Théâtre-Français remained the acknowledged aristocrats of players. Elsewhere, actors were treated like servants by their managers, who could throw them in jail for disobedience; here, they had a share in the decisions and the profits of the company. Their statuesque bearing and incantatory, often bombastic delivery marked their commitment to a high aesthetic ideal and strict rules that were suggestive of, and derivative from, other legitimacies. Playing ancient Greeks and Romans in the cast-off silks of courtiers, they reflected and affirmed the values of the court of the Sun King. While in fact they were at least close cousins of raffish wandering players—the acrobats, ballad-singers, and mimes of the fairgrounds—they seemed to be members of a different, higher class.
Court theater, like street theater, cannot but reflect power politics and engage with them. The radical social and political changes that came at the end of the eighteenth century were signaled and reflected at the theater that had been designed as a showcase for absolutism. The aristocrats who saw Beaumarchais’s Le Manage de Figaro in 1784 were clearly given to understand that their privileged situation was threatened; in the years after 1789, the Comédie-Française was rent by schism, as the country was. Renamed the Théâtre de la Nation, it declined as new rival theaters were licensed, and prolific writers of melodrama—Pixérécourt and his followers—satisfied the taste for thrills that had been whetted by tragedy on a national scale, complete with lurid spectacles in the streets. The blurring of genres under the influence of German and English romanticism, the popularity of opera, the development of theatrical machinery for spectacular visual effects, all helped to lessen the appeal of the old plays in the new century. Though Napoleons taste for tragedy reaffirmed its stature, the state theater’s hold on the popular imagination became ever weaker after his fall. In 1826, the death of the emperor’s favorite actor, the tragedian François-Joseph Talma, was mourned as the death of tragedy.
In February 1830, the Théâtre-Français was the scene of a historic fight as followers of Victor Hugo, the leading enemy of old-fashioned tragedy, cheered his drama, Hernani, loudly enough to drown the jeers of traditionalists. The “Battle of Hernani” was viewed at the time as a sign of the triumph of the new romantic drama; in fact the vogue would last only a few years, until the failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves in 1843. But the rejection of neoclassical tragedy and traditional declamatory acting was emphatic and decisive. In the late 1830s, as melodramas drew crowds to the so-called boulevard theaters and the increasingly lavish productions at the Paris Opéra, the best actors of the state company were aging; the theater on the rue de Richelieu, which was partly subvened by the state, was losing money.
It was saved, to everyone’s astonishment, in the fall of 1838, by a new young actress’s electrifying renditions of familiar roles—Corneille’s Camille and Emilie, Racine’s Hermione and Roxane. Die-hard conservatives hailed Rachel for bringing the dead back to life—not only Racine and Corneille, but Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides right behind them. (Although in fact she never played and probably never read the ancient Greeks, some of her fans saw in her a pure classical ideal that had eluded even Racine.) Some writers called her a daughter of the dead to deprecate her, but others used the same phrase with the opposite intention: one of the plays written (but never produced) for her, years later, was entitled La Fille d’Eschyle. She was criticized as a mere banner for the political right to band behind: “Mademoiselle Rachel est un principe!” one critic wrote, attacking Rachel’s fans. More loudly, she was praised as an uplifting avatar of the patrimoine, or cultural legacy of the nation, as a priestess of Art, as the precious embodiment of a lost ideal. Alfred de Musset described her as the crucible in which Racinian gold was purified. Rachel seemed persuasively to embody both the glory of France and eternal beauty—and to make them newly thrilling.
But the symbol of classical standards came quickly into vogue for very romantic reasons: Rachel was a striking anomaly, an original, a phenomenon. Novelty and genius were the reigning modern values: though her diction and bearing were awesomely perfect and traditional, Rachel seemed inspired. She was visibly wracked by her great roles; she seemed to embody the fever of the mind in creation, to suffer the burden of Racine’s genius and her own, to be—though only an actress—the very image of an artiste maudite, an outcast from ordinary society who is maddened by a vision of truth and tormented by the need to speak it. Among the strongest singers of her praises, from the first, had been Musset, who called on his fellow poets to write new modern tragedies for Rachel, and Théophile Gautier, the poet and critic who, in long hair and a red plush waistcoat, had led the forces of romantic rebellion who packed the house for the Battle of Hernani, coming to the theater hours before performance time, eating garlicky supper sausages in the dark stalls, and crowding out, then drowning out, the conservative opposition. Gautier disputed the view of Rachel as classical: for her most acute critic, her glittering nervous brilliance was quintessentially modern. He reflected that
Rachel, who triumphed so magnificently in the old tragedies, was marked by distinctively modern qualities, in talent as in beauty.—This slender young girl, so thin she could make a belt of her diadem, this supple-bodied child, with her thin and delicate hands, tiny feet, prominent brow, dark-fl
ashing eyes, lip arched in a scornful sneer, in no way resembles those women of ancient times, with narrow hips and thick waists, broad shoulders and low foreheads, which we find in Greek and Roman statues; all of the unhealthy passion of our own time agitates her fragile, anxious limbs, which draw their strength from nervous energy, as the ancients drew theirs from a physical source.—This modern fever of hers which always perceptibly boils beneath the cold surface of old tragedy is one of the unrecognized and unacknowledged reasons for the young tragedienne’s success.
Stendhal, who had argued in a celebrated essay that Shakespeare was better than the colder, more formal Racine, found Rachel’s Racinian heroines marvellous: there had been nothing like it in France for two hundred years, he wrote of the actress. She put Shakespeare in Racine, people said.
Quickly embraced as the darling of reactionary Catholics and aristocrats and the carefully cultured bourgeoisie of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Rachel also appealed to ordinary people in Paris and the provinces and eventually abroad, in spite of her old-fashioned repertoire and her want of conventional healthy female good looks—or perhaps, as Gautier implies, because of that. She was a waif with burning eyes, not sexually appetizing as an actress is supposed to be. She lacked the stature expected of a tragedienne: her waist, Musset wrote ungallantly, was the size of an arm of Mlle George, the (still living) grande tragédienne of Napoleon’s day. On the other hand, she seemed made for tragedy—and by it. She had been born in poverty, and on her face and body the marks of deprivation were legible; as she threw herself into her roles she seemed to consume herself in performance, to act out her own doom. The spectacle of her suffering thrilled sensation-seekers. Tuberculosis haunted her for years, and toward the end newspapers across the world were publishing bulletins about the progress of her mortal illness. Biographies were ready for the press when the news of her death came: readers were avid for the least details of the tragedienne in extremis, especially the most morbid ones. Her dying was lamented and also celebrated—by moralists as her just deserts, by aesthetes as her appropriate end, by the muddled legions of her fans as the ultimate accolade and a perverse vindication, proof that she was tragic, was Tragedy.
The mourners who drifted into the Place Royale early that January morning in 1858 were not, on the whole, the ones who had rejoiced at the rebirth of mandarin art. This was the popular audience that the guardians of taste deplored—the people who, they said, had coarsened Rachel’s play as she worked for their applause, the poor Jews who proudly packed the galleries to support her, and other elements of the new masses of an increasingly crime-ridden city, who were aroused by her violent stage passions as they also were by vulgar melodrama. The impudent poor girl clever enough to pass in high society appealed to the popular imagination. Her frank acknowledgment of her lowly origin was attractive. She relished her enormous successes, and the idea that she was worthy of them. Enjoying the royal “we,” she wrote merrily home from one tour abroad, “What can I tell you about our triumphs? They continue to be as great as our gifts are.” Her arrogance was fabulous, and her vulgarity. People loved the story that, after dining in London with the flower of the English aristocracy, she declared she longed to “disenduke” herself; they laughed about the battered guitar she passed off as the one she had strummed as a child street performer, which she hung on the wall of her luxurious salon, then sold at an exorbitant price to a besotted admirer. Having thrilled audiences as Racine’s murderous Roxane, and inspired a contemporary playwright to write her the role of Judith, the biblical heroine who kills Holofernes, she burnished her criminal image by laying out a display of ornamental daggers on a table in her home. And everyone knew these details of her furnishings: le tout Paris flocked to the salon she ran on Thursdays, and gossiped about the outrageous lavishness of her house. Rachel was a creature of publicity, a star more than half-created by strategically deployed rumors and the new machinery of the penny press, by columnists and caricaturists.
Later, some would claim that the grand state funeral was a flop. They pointed out that Rachel had been in retirement, dying, for two and one-half years and that her star had been in decline for some time earlier. “They wanted to orchestrate a final triumph for the great tragedienne,” Michaud’s 1880 Biographie universelle declared, “but only a crowd of curiosity-seekers came.” But who can characterize such a crowd? People came to the funeral as they had come to the theater to see her, to put their own persons close to a celebrity’s; to mourn and savor the death of a glamorous, still-young woman; to invite the mixed pleasures of pity and terror; to relish the fact that they themselves were still alive; to enjoy the evidence that the high and mighty also fall. Above all they came to bear witness to—to be reassured of—the idea that reason and order, the massed forces of civilization, can make something intelligible of death.
WHEN SHE FIRST MOVED into the apartment at 9 Place Royale, already mortally ill, Rachel had remarked with bitter irony that the rooms would just do to accommodate her mourners. In another mood, she might have observed that the large square could serve as a lobby and anteroom, a liminal space where people could come together as they do in Racinian tragedy. But the former street performer would have been amused by the sight of so many chilled spectators content to stay outdoors on her account on a wintry day when long stretches of the Seine were icebound. (Some six years before, on a very hot evening, she had had to be cajoled into acting en plein air before the Czar of Russia and the King of Prussia, on the beautiful Island of Peacocks in the great lake of the park in Potsdam.) By noon on the day of the funeral people were jostling for good vantage points on the wet gravel; a few men and boys climbed into the leafless trees. This was not the first time Rachel had kept them waiting, some joked, alluding to performances canceled without explanation, also to the fact that announcements that the funeral would be on Friday had been posted on the walls of the Théâtre-Français before the train from the south had arrived, late, with the body. (A rumor circulated that, in a characteristic effort to avoid expense, her family had had the corpse put into a common deal packing case, sent to the railway to be forwarded to Paris as merchandise, and stowed in the luggage van, whereupon it had been stolen by a lover, who sought, as one early biographer wrote, “to inter the precious remains in his own grounds, and erect there a monument over which he might mourn unseen by profane eyes.”) Rachel had often been criticized for womanly caprice—in other words, for withholding herself. The sense that she was ungenerous was perhaps retaliatory, a response to her coercive power onstage. In 1847, the Russian writer Alexander Herzen had described the complex knot of pleasure and pain and compulsion that bound together the audience, the role, and Rachel:
Her acting is fascinating; while she is onstage, no matter what happens, you cannot take your eyes off her; this weak and fragile being dominates you; I cannot imagine that anyone would not abandon himself to her power during the performance. I imagine I can still see that proud pout, that sharp, whip-like glance.
Her body seemed an image of her self-disciplining will, the pleasurable pain she inflicted on audiences. Herzen read in “those finely chiseled, expressive features, molded by the passions” evidence that suffering had empowered her to inflict suffering; her extreme thinness was seen as a sign of her wasting away, burning up. Ambivalence was the common response to her. In Villette, Charlotte Brontë’s narrator-heroine, overwhelmed by the intensity of the actress she calls Vashti, describes the conflict she imagines to be going on within the other woman, and feels within herself, as she watches her. Her prose imitates the structure of her experience, strophe contradicting antistrophe:
It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.
It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.
For Brontë, Rachel’s power was wrenchingly ambiguous: was she wonderful or terrible, a victim of hell or its tyrant queen? Countess Marie d’Agoult (who wrote fiction as Daniel Stern) heard with disdain the accents of a much-reviled race in the tragedienne’s harsh, scornful t
ones. Perceived with mixed feelings—not to say mutually contradictory ones—Rachel was imagined as a person divided against herself. But on the day she was buried the more hostile responses were muted: the crowd was oppressed by the chilly, wet weather and the nearness of the dead body, the solemn sense of doom satisfactorily fulfilled.
Straining to identify the black-hatted, bearded men passing in and out of Number 9, onlookers gaped as well at another house on the square: Number 6, the home of Victor Hugo, the poet, playwright, novelist, statesman, and popular hero. Hugo was now in exile from the country he had served and stood for, stranded like Prometheus, like Napoleon, living on the isolated rocky island of Guernsey, victim of an emperor he had derided as Napoléon le petit. In their time the dead actress and the banished writer had been associated, first as antagonists, then briefly as collaborators. Hugolians were conspicuous among the early critics who dared Rachel to venture outside the classic repertoire. When after much taunting and urging she finally agreed to play Tisbe in Hugo’s Angelo, she not only managed the feat of memorizing her unrhymed lines, but thoroughly and brilliantly identified herself with the self-immolating romantic heroine. Gautier, who always saw Rachel as some stirring variant on a marble statue, praised her perfect delivery of “those lines in which ideas resound like bronze armor on a warrior’s shoulders … that style so firm, so precise, so masterful, in which meaning emerges as in a bas-relief, from under a chisel.” With her characteristic wry emphasis on money and class and her own legend, Rachel herself wrote that the role of the Venetian courtesan could be played only by a woman who, like Tisbe, had risen from miserable poverty to sleep on satin sheets. Hugo dressed her for the part (also undressed her, the gossips tattled); the tangle of prejudices—misogynist, antitheatrical, anti-Semitic—tightened as it always did around Rachel, as scandalmongers repeated the angry imprecations that the playwright’s jealous mistress, Juliette Drouet, had scribbled against the Jewess.
Tragic Muse Page 2