Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  Now that both playwright and actress were respectively exiled and dead, it seemed appropriate to mourn them together, as if the man-god of romanticism and the most exalted of the era’s stage goddesses had been a matched pair, types of genius and glory, giants of a great past. Better, almost, than they themselves had done, their twinned ghosts adumbrated what each one had quite differently represented: the grandeur of romantic heroic individualism and the sense that it was gone for good, that it perhaps had never been, or had been only an illusion. At noon the atmosphere, in the gray dampness, was of a twilight of the gods.

  FUNERALS WERE FAVORITE SPECTACLES in nineteenth-century Paris. They functioned sometimes to make public amends for private indignities, always to identify and honor the nation’s heroes and thus, in effect, the nation itself. At the end of the eighteenth century in Paris, a king had been beheaded with a conspicuous lack of ceremony; three regimes later, the bodies of the martyrs of the divisive June Days of 1848, surrounded by a uniformed guard, were solemnly paraded through the streets by a government eager to keep the peace and assert its own permanence. Like a biography, a funeral appropriates a life and celebrates death as an agent of closure; the private is given public expression for public—which is to say political—reasons. The burial of a person identified with the nation provides an occasion to express the continuing vitality, to define and clarify the identity, of the body politic.

  The event that best epitomizes the genre was the so-called Second Funeral of Napoleon, which had made a theater of all Paris in the winter of 1840, early in Rachel’s tenure as reine de théâtre and midway through the reign of Louis-Philippe. The idea for the show came from the minister Adolphe Thiers; that he had been turned out of power by the time the ceremony was held, and that therefore it was underfinanced, augmented its already considerable comic dimension.

  Not only nostalgic about Napoleon’s lost glory but covetous of it, the politicians of the July Monarchy aimed to bring him theatrically back by staging a belated funeral for the ashes that were still stowed on St. Helena. A party of sailors was sent to the island in the spring, in a frigate ridiculously named the Belle-Poule and correctively festooned with imperial eagles. It was commanded by the Citizen King’s third son, the twenty-two-year-old Prince de Joinville, who flaunted princely or youthful disdain for navy regulations in the form of a blond beard. The expedition took six months. During the seafaring stages, at least, it continued to seem adventurous: heady with his mission of stealing the glory of the past, Joinville imagined he sighted pirates on the way home with his precious cargo, and commanded that all movables be scuttled, which only increased discomfort on board. Difficulties multiplied after the ship docked in France, as the men proceeded very slowly by river-boat from Le Havre to Paris: cheering crowds lined the banks to honor the dead emperor, but Joinville had to sleep in a room with twenty others, on top of a table with a common sailor stretched out beneath him on the floor.

  The day on which Napoleon’s ashes were finally to reach the Invalides, 15 November, was wintry, with a few gusts of snow. The young actor Edmond Got, who—probably after the fact—chose to begin his journal with an account of that day, recalled snow six inches deep; Mary Shelley, visiting Paris, had to give up her chance to watch “the immense assemblage of people and military” because of “the intense cold,” although she regretted missing a “sight exceedingly worth witnessing.” Wind whipped the flags that lined the Champs-Elysées, where huge plaster statues of heroes, painted to look like bronze or marble, had been erected. There was a painted Arc de Triomphe over the door of the Hôtel des Invalides, and on top of the real Arc was a huge portrait of the emperor standing in a chariot, surrounded by allegorical statues of Fame, Glory, and Grandeur. From the Neuilly side, Victor Hugo noted, one saw only the struts supporting the canvas. A hundred thousand spectators watched the long cortège: the gendarmerie and grenadiers, with generals and marshals among them; the national guard on horseback in interminable legions, rifles reversed; the crew of the Belle-Poule; finally the emperor’s chariot itself, with eighty-six legionnaires carrying the flags of the eighty-six départements, a forest of flags that looked to Hugo like a marching field of gigantic dahlias. An animal said to be the emperor’s own horse—it would have had to be more than twenty years old—marched with them. Temporary scaffolding erected for the event transformed the Place des Invalides into an amphitheater. Hugo paid for a seat in the stands, and, with the others who could afford such a luxury, stamped his feet on the planking for warmth. Poorer spectators stood along the streets, where one man was crushed beneath a wheel and another was wounded when a celebratory cannon went off. Hugo measured the warmth of Napoleon’s reception as the cortège proceeded: the emperor, he wrote, was received piously by the people in the streets, more coldly by the bourgeoisie on the seats of the esplanade, and insolently by the deputies under the dome of the Invalides.

  The Entry of Napoleon’s Ashes into Paris, from a contemporary lithograph (photo credit 1.1)

  The playwright mocked the cheap pomp of plaster and decorative tissu-de-verre, swatches of which were sold as souvenirs the next day. But even he felt a solemn thrill as Joinville intoned, “Sire, je vous présente le corps de l’empéreur Napoléon.” The handsome young man had high style (preserved in his likeness on one of the bas-reliefs around Napoleon’s tomb). In an account of the spectacle written for the English public, William Makepeace Thackeray described Joinville: “a tall, broad-chested, dark-eyed young prince, with a great beard (and other martial qualities no doubt) beyond his years. As he strode into the Chapel of the Invalides on Tuesday at the head of his men, he made no small impression, I can tell you, upon the ladies assembled to witness the ceremony.” Hugo noted that the mother of the matinee idol also behaved well, receiving her son for the first time in six months in public, without gushing, in the manner of a queen rather than a mother. To his theater-man’s eye it seemed that the royal family, though inadequately backed by the government, performed quite creditably.

  Only a few months after his great performance the dashing young prince de Joinville became the lover of Rachel, the first in a series of Napoleonic amorous connections. A second was Napoleon’s own illegitimate son by the Polish countess Walewska; another, Arthur Bertrand, marched behind Joinville at the Second Funeral, alongside his father, General Bertrand, who had been Napoleon’s steward at St. Helena. (Arthur had been born on the island, and was presented to the emperor by his mother as the first Frenchman to arrive there without British permission.) Yet another of Rachel’s Napoleonic conquests was the republican Prince Napoleon-Joseph-Charles-Paul Bonaparte, nicknamed Plon-Plon and Nap, the son of the emperor’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte, once King of Westphalia; and hardly the least of the lot was Charles-Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who became Napoleon III. Imperial splendor accrued to her through her lovers—obliquely, ironically. Stories were told about her imperiousness and exigence as a mistress, and the power plays she enjoyed. It was said that the Jewess was a “mad Messalina” who required her lovers to cry out blasphemies at the crucial moment. Rachel’s reputation for taking and dismissing men at her pleasure made her a formidable image of sexual voracity: people said the carriage in which she toured the provinces was fitted out with a bed where she entertained a new man each night. She was notorious for demanding—and giving away—valuable gifts from her admirers. But it was also clear that she made her real money on her feet, not her back, by her own awesome gifts as an actress of high tragedy. Rachel was a vivid variation on the theme of the courtesan; she revised and corrected the sentimental stereotype, of which one example is Balzac’s slavish little (Jewish) actress Coralie, who assures Lucien de Rubempré that her body will be a stepping-stone to his success. In Rachel’s case, her success was the point. “Chère grande,” her friends sometimes began their letters. (“Rachon,” she liked to sign herself, or “Votre tragedienne ordinaire.”)

  TUBERCULOSIS CONSUMES SLOWLY and painfully. Rachel first coughed blood as early as 18
41, when she was only twenty, but for years she hotly denied that she had the fearful disease. In 1848, after a visit to a victim of tuberculosis, she wrote that any other death was preferable. Her favorite younger sister died of it in 1854. Pallor and feverish intensity like hers were conventionally read in her time as signs of the malady; long before she fell ill in earnest, she embodied its metaphorical dimensions. Tuberculosis in the nineteenth century was elaborately overread. “Like all really successful metaphors,” Susan Sontag observes, “the metaphor of TB was rich enough to provide for two contradictory applications.” It was imagined as a “disease of the will,” also interpreted as a sign of “a failure of will or an overintensity.” As cancer does today, tuberculosis then seemed to pose the mind-body question in its most painful form, and with it questions about design and accident, personal integrity and control, guilt and punishment. For that reason tuberculosis was moralized and gendered: in a man (like Keats) it was read as a sign of genius, while in a woman (like Violetta in La Traviata) it seemed to signify both “consumption” by sexual desire, and punishment for desiring. In either case it nightmarishly literalized metaphor. As Rachel sickened and suffered and died, tuberculosis seemed to attest to her noble consuming spirit and “male talent,” and also her corrupt female body; to signify both her unwomanly ambition and willfulness and her having gracefully given up; to mime and therefore simultaneously validate and undo the actress, whose art was to misrepresent her real self, to make the feverish and fearful real.

  Death sanctioned Rachel as its own image, and also enrolled her in the glamorous, amorous company of tubercular romantic women: fictional heroines like Violetta and Marguérite Gautier, and their sisters from real life whose stories a Dr. Cabanès authoritatively retold in a 1925 book he shamelessly entitled Poitrinaires et grandes amoureuses. (Citing the physician who attended Rachel in her last illness, he asserted that she had caused lesions to develop in her lungs by stopping her breath and heartbeats to play death scenes.) Her final decline was slow but steady after 1855, when she caught cold on an unheated train between Boston and New York. On the advice of doctors, she exhausted herself in pursuit of promised health, going to Cuba to seek the sun, returning across the Atlantic to France, visiting a spa at Ems, then sailing to Egypt for a milder climate, and coming home again. During hot days and nights on a barge on the Nile, she coughed constantly and, with the nineteenth-century industriousness that seems so implausible now, she—largely unschooled and notoriously ungrammatical—kept up her extensive, lively correspondence, doing business, reporting on the sights and the people she met, and tirelessly dramatizing herself. To her young son in France, the pretty mother playfully describes the airy light clothes she wears all day in the heat, sketching an engaging self-portrait; signing off to a theatrical colleague, she who had played Cleopatra notes bitterly that she blots her letter with the dust of queens. In the end, in a villa in Le Cannet, in the south of France, where she finally waited to die, she took time to write a will circumventing French law by leaving more money to her children than she was allowed to do, through her sister Sarah (who failed, however, to follow through); she had time to go through her old love letters, which she tied together with ribbons in packets, tucked into baskets of fruit, and sent back to the writers, with greetings for the new year she did not expect to see. Toward the very end she sent her parents away so as not to suffer the pain of seeing their pain: she was always exquisitely aware of her audiences’ responses. Only her longtime servant Rose Halff, and Sarah Félix, the sister, older by two years, who had embarrassed and annoyed her and had been her closest friend since childhood, were with her at the very end.

  SARAH SUPERVISED the funeral arrangements; presumably she was responsible for assembling the minyan of local Jews who had chanted Hebrew prayers beside the deathbed. (The neighbors said they saw sudden gusts of wind whip flames above the building at the very moment Rachel died.) From Le Cannet, the body was taken to Nice, where it was embalmed and placed in a double coffin, a lead box inside a walnut one, before being shipped by train, in a special car, to Paris. The stations along the way became makeshift theaters or temples: in Marseilles the grand rabbi presided over a funeral service in the station; the actors of the Grand Theater of Lyons came to the station there to render homage. At 6 o’clock on Saturday morning, the remains arrived in Paris and were taken to the apartment on the Place Royale. Delayed at first by the Jewish sabbath, the funeral was again put off till Monday, when groups began to gather in the morning, at first huddling against the weather under the arcades, then growing, spreading, and filling the square.

  The invitation specified that the funeral would begin at eleven in the morning. At 1 o’clock the coffin, draped in a white cloth embroidered with silver stars, was finally carried outside and laid on the hearse. Three crowns—of laurel, cypress, and gold—were placed on it; by some accounts, there was also another made up of the flowers called immortelles. Drawn by six horses caparisoned in black, the hearse began its slow progress through the narrow streets toward the Place de la Bastille, then on across the avenues to the cemetery at Père Lachaise, where Balzac’s Père Goriot had been buried and Eugène Rastignac, another arriviste, had looked down and vowed to revenge himself on Paris by conquering it. At the head of the procession rode eleven municipal guardsmen on horseback, followed by thirty on foot, brass-helmeted and splendid in close-fitting blue uniforms trimmed with red, white, and gold. Behind the hearse walked Grand Rabbi Isidore of Paris, followed by Jacques and Raphaël Félix, the dead woman’s father and brother, and after them her younger son, ten-year-old Gabriel Félix, holding the hand of Michel Lévy, the founder of the publishing house of Calmann-Lévy, a family friend, a relative of the rabbi, and one of Rachel’s most faithfully devoted lovers. (Six months later, he would marry a twenty-year-old named Amélie Rachel Raba.) The dead woman’s older son, the grandson of Napoleon I, had remained at his school in Switzerland. Other family members and friends followed, and then the actors of the Comédie-Française and the personnel of the theater, and representatives of the government, of the Académie Française, of the Association of Dramatic Artists. Some of the notables’ names still mean something to us: Théophile Gautier and Paul de Saint-Victor, both of whom wrote memorably about Rachel; the acerb Prosper Mérimée, who had thought her vulgar; Henry Murger, who immortalized the Parisian vie de bohème; the pioneer journalist Emile de Girardin, another sometime lover and longtime friend; the waspish critic Sainte-Beuve; Augier, Ponsard, Legouvé, and Scribe, who had written plays for her; her rivals Mlles Judith and Plessy of the Comédie-Française; Mlle George, who had spitefully but wrongly predicted that someday Rachel would end up old and fat and poor like her. The actress Virginie Déjazet, who had also sadly outlived her glamour, was there as well; she wept while throwing violets into the grave, mingling her lamentations for poor Rachel and for herself, enviously and, as it turned out, wrongly prophesying that at her own death there would not be so fine a turnout.

  Some six hundred carriages and thirty to forty thousand people on foot followed the hearse. According to one newspaper account, several detachments of cavalry were on hand to keep order. By the time the procession reached the cemetery, over one hundred thousand mourners surged forward dangerously toward the open grave, and the wrought-iron gates had to be closed to control the crowd.

  Nearly twenty years later, in his “Letter from Paris” to the New York Tribune, Henry James reported the death of Mlle Déjazet. “She has had the funeral of a crowned head,” he observed, noting that one hundred fifty thousand people followed her to the grave. With a typical Anglo-Saxon mix of envy and disdain he reflected that “there could not be a better example of the ingrained Parisian passion for all things theatrical than this enormous manifestation of homage to the memory of a little old lady who was solely remarkable for the assurance with which she wore trousers and sang free and easy songs.” Edith Piaf’s death would bring Parisians out to mourn in the streets; so would Yves Montand’s. But actor
s had not always been rendered such homage in Paris. The great actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, who died in mysterious circumstances in the middle of the eighteenth century, had had no funeral at all: her body was dissolved on a bed of lime beside the river at night. Voltaire, in a poem eulogizing her, had deplored the way France treated actors, and pointed out that England, in contrast, honored them. On a January day some forty years before Rachel’s funeral, indignant crowds of enthusiastic mourners had burst open church doors to accommodate the coffin of Mlle Raucourt, late of the Comédie-Française, protesting the Church’s refusal to grant her Christian burial. For until the hard Catholic line against the theater was softened in 1849 by the Council of Soissons, actors were urged to repudiate the stage before dying (or marrying, or having their children baptized). As late as the funeral of Mlle Mars, in 1847, the priests had taken refuge in their carriages so as to avoid having to hear a eulogy for an actress. But by 1858 burying an actor respectably in state presented less of a problem—especially when she happened to be a Jew.