RACHEL’S FOUR PALLBEARERS had been chosen carefully: representing the theatrical world were Baron Taylor, president of the Association of Dramatic Artists, who as royal commissioner had led the funeral of the great Talma; and Geffroy, a sociétaire of the Comédie-Française and also a painter, whose 1840 group portrait of the company set a fashion for distinguishing Rachel from other actors by portraying her costumed as an immortal, or an abstraction, in toga and laurel wreath. Literature was represented by Auguste Maquet, president of the Commission of Dramatic Authors, and the imposing portly figure of Alexandre Dumas père. Maquet had extended and elaborated not only the legend of sexy, imperious Rachel but the idea of her doubleness and duplicity, by writing Valéria et Lycisca (1851) with Jules Lacroix, a play in which she created the double role of a Roman empress like Messalina—here exonerated—and her criminal doppelgänger, a prostitute. The connection between Rachel and Dumas was more problematic. Once, when she was living in faithful domesticity with Walewski, Dumas had written to propose becoming her lover—if not then, later on; when she rejected him on the same sheet of paper, disdainfully returning the offending lines which, she wrote, had doubtless flowed accidentally from his prolific pen, he became her enemy. He was only temporarily and mildly mollified by her choice of his Mlle de Belle-Isle for her first foray into romantic drama, in 1850. Dumas had led the chorus of Paris journalists who attacked Rachel as greedy and vulgar and virtually treasonous for going on tour to America—Hermione deserting Orestes to follow Barnum, as one caricaturist styled her, a woman contemptibly willing, for love of the dollar, to betray the dignity of France and render Racine’s immortal lines in Iroquois! Under the circumstances, the choice of Dumas as pallbearer was so odd that even he was moved to comment on it. “Why was I chosen?” he asked rhetorically, after the funeral, in his paper Le Monte-Cristo, and answered himself smugly, “Because I’m me!” He meant he stood for France: proudly, he described how workers in blue blouses had pushed through the crowd to shake his hand. (Rachel’s good friend and former lover, the playwright François Ponsard, once described Dumas in a letter to her as “a tedious charlatan.”)
WHILE THEY PROBABLY did choose Dumas as a sign that the nation had forgiven its errant queen, the Félix family itself was not in a forgiving mood. Rachel had died unreconciled with her teacher, Samson of the Comédie-Française. He was understood to be the benefactor of her youth, the actor who had urged the national company to accept her. He had handed down to her the legacy of Talma and of Mlle Chiron; he had painstakingly rehearsed and advised her; he was popularly understood to be a vital part of her life. His absence was noted, and he was missed. Everyone knew the story of the furious encounter between Samson and Jacques Félix early in Rachel’s career, when the actor had thrown the peddler down a flight of stairs after smashing a plaster statuette of his daughter that stood on his desk and threatening to break her just as he had made her. Félix had been demanding more money for Rachel (that is, for himself) on the ground that she had made an astounding two hundred thousand francs in six months for the Théâtre-Français; Samson, representing the company, had insisted on keeping to the terms of the contract she and her father had signed. The less dramatic but more decisive second round of the battle had been won in court by Félix and his lawyer Adolphe Crémieux, who had argued successfully that because Rachel had signed as a minor the contract was invalid. (It was this debate that eventually provoked the Comédie-Française to fix the uncertain date of Rachel’s birth with a legal certificate.)
This was the first of a long series of arguments about Rachel’s artistic and financial independence—the extent to which she was a free agent. The Comédie-Française—constituted by Louis XIV, subvened by the state, recognized as the epitome of dramatic art—was the source of her repertoire, her style, and her authority: only its traditions and its status and its style of tragedy could have made her la grande Rachel. On the other hand, having restored its fortunes, was she not entitled to go on and make a fortune for herself beyond its walls? To what extent was she bound to be a company woman? Maneuvering to put in power men who would comply with her demands, insisting on long vacations in which she could tour the provinces and abroad, bargaining by threatening to resign or retire, Rachel wrangled with the Théâtre-Français for years, largely without her father’s help. But biographers have preferred to focus on the early part of her history, the story of a passive, dependent girl torn by divided loyalties to her biological father and to Samson, her father in art, both of whom believed they legitimately owned her. The drama of fathers and daughters is every bit as compelling as that of fathers and sons; and Rachel had unforgettably acted a daughter’s role, as Camille in Corneille’s Horace and also—before she ever appeared at the Théâtre-Français—in La Vendéenne, the melodrama written for her, in which she had made her Paris debut. The daughter role stuck, and offstage her father stuck to her, haunting the wings. “She’s my daughter; it’s only right that she make money for me,” Félix supposedly insisted, with the logic of the poor. Samson rejoined—and many agreed with him—that the high art of the Comédie-Française, which he had taught her to embody, was vulgarized and ruined when she sought to supplement her income by performing outside Paris with incompetent actors, before ignorant audiences.
Legend casts Rachel’s “father in art”—more respectable and dignified, more bourgeois and French—as a more plausible author of her being than the vulgar peddler. More and less explicitly, more and less anti-Semitically, Rachel’s admirers resisted the inexplicable fact that the compelling exponent of the most refined and most French of poets had no education and, as one historian put it, “not a drop of French blood.” The figures of Samson and Félix lend themselves to allegory: Samson the representative of nurture and art versus Félix the brute, whose claim to Rachel was merely natural. The conflict is between the state and the tribe, civilized Frenchman and Wandering Jew—with the actress of course cast as the passive product of one or another. Samson disputed the romantic pictures of Rachel as a magically inspired genius, insisting it was her hardworking teacher who effectively made her an actress and also civilized her into social life. It was said that Samson preferred Rachel to his own daughters; the actress and her teacher quarreled with a violence they did not impose on their biological families. The personal struggle was between generations and sexes; between a lesser artist and a greater one; between a functionary of an institution and a creative, independent egotist; between the advocate of a cultural establishment and all that such an establishment must define as wild and alien in order to assert its own authority. It was a clash of personalities, writes one biographer, explaining that Samson had “the temperament of a bureaucrat … respectful of authority,” while Rachel “belonged to a race without roots [racines].” But on another level, the issue was precisely roots—and what was in question was whether Rachel’s were legitimate. Loyalty to Samson was in effect allegiance to a distinctive art, institution, culture, and nation—all of which depended on assuming that the Félixes were different, other and inferior. By refusing to relinquish her loyalty to her family, Rachel challenged and undermined the French national ideal which she had come, with Samson’s connivance and help, to represent.
At her death, she had not healed a breach made in 1853 and confirmed in 1854, when Samson had refused Michel Lévy’s request that he speak at the funeral of her best-loved sister, the gifted twenty-five-year-old actress Rébecca Félix, “ma gentille et parfaite petite Rébec,” as she called her. Although Samson, overcome by emotion, had broken down and praised the young actress at the graveside, and her brother Raphaël Félix had thanked him for his words, Rachel herself did not forgive him for his initial refusal. Directly after the ceremony, the mourning star fled with Lévy to the country; she never saw Samson again. But when he heard the news of Rachel’s death, her teacher—who had published verses praising and also admonishing her from the start of her career—went so far as to prepare a eulogy of his greatest student, which he pla
nned to deliver in spite of a bad cold (his wife recorded pettishly) and the weather. A clear note from Jacques Félix kept him at his fireside. It was inappropriate, Rachel’s father wrote, that Samson should appear on this occasion.
THERE WAS, therefore, no official speech in the cemetery on behalf of the Comédie-Française, whose glory Rachel had restored and made her own. All accounts of the funeral stress the lack of such a eulogy, the absence of Samson, the “triumph” of the former peddler with the funny foreign accent over the man who had been a colleague of Talma. Had nature, in the form of the paternal Jew, vengefully come in the end to claim its own and challenge the pretensions of high art? Félix had written severely to the administrator of the Comédie-Française in the letter warning Samson away: “You may take me at my word, sir, since I have found the strength and courage to write to you at this moment.” Rachel’s biographers have mocked the possibility that he had grammar enough to phrase the letter himself, and the absurdity of a man of his class and kind professing “a pained sense of what is absolutely proper.” It is entirely possible that Félix did have editorial help, as his daughter sometimes seems to have had with her official correspondence; but those who refuse to grant him a sense of what was appropriate seem to me to show their culturally determined hand.
“And so the history of Rachel begins and ends with Papa Félix”: James Agate concluded his 1928 biography with this little flourish of contemptuous irony. In the biographical act of foregrounding the struggle between Samson and Félix for center stage at the graveside, we accept the conventional terms that deny Rachel agency and define her as a man-made thing. Rejecting it, or critically examining it, we cannot help seeing how misogyny is linked with other prejudices. The story of the conflict between the gross Jew and the gentleman-actor is hardly on the same level of anti-Semitism as the anecdote about the grand rabbi’s turning to the Rothschild standing beside him at Rachel’s funeral to get information about the stock market between two psalms (a story, by the way, that only got “recalled” at the time of the Dreyfus affair). Félix and Samson did in fact figure in Rachel’s life as opponents and probably, in one another’s minds, as opposites. But to polarize them—peddler and representative of the state theater, outsider and insider, (low) blood and (high) culture—is to enter a minefield of binary oppositions, where Rachel is blown out of the picture. It is better to focus directly on her figure, which provocatively invites such thinking while it also challenges and ultimately upsets it.
THE FUNERAL WAS a forum for interpretations. There were three eulogies, all political, two with the contentious flavor and form of arguments in a debate. First, Grand Rabbi Isidore, having pronounced the Hebrew prayers over the dead, contradicted, in French, the talk that Rachel had converted or ever planned to convert. Rumors that she was about to do so had circulated for years, since she had first been taken up by Mme Récamier’s Catholic circle. She herself had denied them, at one point, in a letter to a newspaper (“I had always believed that an artist’s private life was not in the domain of publicity, which evidently is not your view.… But nothing can authorize crossing certain boundaries—of the truth. Please inform your readers that the piquant story of my conversion is altogether without foundation”). But she had also, more privately, encouraged hopes of converting her. There was, for example, the bishop she had met on the ship back to France from Egypt, who had had a Mass for her recovery said at Malta. She thanked him, she reported, but made it clear he should abstain thereafter from talking to her of religion. (“We talked food all the way to Marseilles: he was an eating prelate,” she reported.) More seriously, she flirted with the pious, star-struck young Gabriel Aubaret, whom she met in Egypt, and with his hopes of her conversion. After her return to France, she became quite close with his Catholic family, and he believed he was on the verge of bringing her into the church when, weak though she was, she suddenly fled to Paris, fabricating a story that one of her children was seriously ill.
The plain fact was that she had never repudiated her Jewishness. The rabbi at the funeral declared she had found ample satisfaction for the needs of her heart, and the demands of her beautiful intellect, in the old and good faith of her fathers. (“All that we can say of Mlle Rachel is, that to her other immoralities she has not added that of apostasy,” was one Jewish newspaper’s different, bitter comment.) Then Bataille, vice-president of the Society of Dramatic Artists, kept up the argument against the enemies of Judaism. At some length, he said that in spite of what people said Rachel had been very generous.
The final denial was the most ambitious—of death itself, by Jules Janin. The powerful critic of the Journal des débats had made Rachel a star with his reviews, which effectively defined the terms through which she would be seen evermore. He would continue to further her fame, and feed on it, by refashioning those reviews into a book. Janin was a man full of words and of himself, always ready to seize the day: once, in a week when there were no new plays, he had devoted a column to “Le Mariage du critique,” a review of his own (second) wedding. The funeral of the greatest star he had ever discovered, whom he had so influentially described, moved the man of a thousand pens (as he styled himself) to an orgy of self-reflexiveness. At Rachel’s graveside, he praised the silenced actress’s audience, now his, and the death that had brought the assembly before him. He mourned the loss of all the brilliant artists of the generation of 1830, in whose number he implausibly included not only Rachel but her sister Rébecca Félix, who had been a small child in those great days. His periods swelled. He lamented the absence of the only man capable of mourning all the immense griefs and losses, without naming Hugo, the modern Prometheus who had been banished to a rock in the ocean. Praising glory in spite of the pains it entailed, he ended by applauding the people present, as lovers of beautiful things, faithful to the good, hopeful of immortality in this world and the next. For all his auditors, he wished the sole and supreme recompense, to be followed to the grave by pity, and sympathy, and respect, and—returning the focus, predictably, to himself—such a funeral as this one. Rachel was effectively reduced to an occasion for rhetoric.
SHE HAD REHEARSED her end throughout her public life as if attempting to anticipate, mock, or master it: she expired on stage memorably as Phèdre and also as Adrienne Lecouvreur, the great eighteenth-century actress, who, like Phèdre, was a victim of her own ill-judging love. When Rachel actually did die on 3 January 1858, she could not but do so theatrically. The setting was a villa in the south of France borrowed for the event from the uncle of the playwright Victorien Sardou. He was a man of bizarre tastes who had decorated the house in a fantastic medley of styles—Moorish, neoclassical, Renaissance—as a sort of museum or monument to the sciences and the arts. In one room, there was an immense leafless stucco tree, representing the tree of knowledge, whereon the names of celebrated scientists were engraved. The bedroom was lugubriously decked out as if for a dying tragedienne. One visitor described its salient features:
In the half-light of an alcove resembling a chapel is a strangely constructed alabaster bed, designed to resemble an organ, with its pipes topped by ancient masks. At the foot, facing the head, is a statue of Polymnia, which evokes the memory of classical beauty by the folds of her tunic—a kind of beauty misplaced here in this masterpiece of bad taste. It is in this bed, which forewarns of the coldness of the tomb, that Phèdre went to sleep, never again to awaken.
One shudders to think what she must have made of the masks and the statue in her final fevers. Stories circulated about how she bore her dying: with a fine romantic defiance of the effects of high fever on the extremities, it was said that she begged her father to bring her the coffers of jewels she had collected from lovers and potentates, so that she could cool her fingers in them. After she died, her body was draped in white and crowned with laurel, and sketched by Mme Frédérique O’Connell; one version of the portrait later became the treasured property of Sarah Bernhardt. Ernest Legouvé, one of the authors of Adrienne Lecouvreur, had go
ne to Le Cannet to see her on her deathbed, and although he was turned away from the door he elaborately described her dying, still unregenerately the actress, self-consciously assuming statuesque postures even at the very end, mimicking the marble muse at the foot of her bed. As late as 1908 the maison mortuaire de Rachel was an obligatory stop for tourists in Le Cannet, who—the English especially, it was said—continued to pillage what detachable souvenirs remained.
IS IT POSSIBLE to locate Rachel’s specificity, individuality, uniqueness—the person herself rather than what she represented or seemed to stand for—beneath or beyond the layers of spectacle and symbol and stereotype? Alfred de Musset, who addressed the actress as “chère muse” in at least one letter, defined her image by enthusiastically declaring, in 1838, that Rachel was Tragedy; soon after she died, the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme would spell this out in an idealizing memorial portrait of her entitled La Tragédie that was exhibited at the Salon of 1861. Against its own best interests, this repellent but unforgettable work demands contrast with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s much more famous portrait, Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784), which portrays the distinguished English tragic actress undergoing apotheosis with roseate aplomb. In Gérôme’s painting, a highly finished academic work, a boneless figure is slouched against a stagy background architectural. The tremulous face of stricken Phèdre, which Gérôme copied from a photograph by Nadar, is too small and stylized here to have much force. Swathed in a scarlet tragedy toga, wreathed with glaucous laurel, Tragedy is surrounded by a suffocating clutter of symbolic artifacts: a Grecian pillar hung with a plaque inscribed with names of tragic heroines; a sort of group tombstone that bears the names in Greek letters of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and beneath them Corneille’s and Racine’s names; a grimacing greenish tragedy mask. On top of the Ionic column at her side stands a fierce little statue, seemingly of an archaic priest or priestess, mouth open as if in a howl. Its extended hands hold out what appear to be snakes. The many names in the picture are painted to look chiseled into the various stone surfaces; the stone on which the figure stands, the plinth at the painting’s base, bears the name, in large letters, “J.-L. Gérôme.” Reynolds gracefully said, apropos of his own scrawled signature, that he hoped to go to eternity on the hem of Mrs. Siddons’s garment; Gérôme’s makes us notice that Rachel’s name is absent. The label fixed to the frame reads La Tragédie. The female figure dwarfed by Tragedy’s regalia seems to be its sick, apprehensive victim, a woman who dreads becoming her own monument. This sad, frail creature’s burden is the dead weight of allegory; she cowers at the approach of an unseen power that can only be limned by symbols—like herself. Is she a sign among other signs, or a woman destroyed by representation—by being taken, by taking herself, for a sign? Where Reynolds depicted the living Mrs. Siddons in the conventional but splendid role of Muse, Gérôme seems to brood uneasily, about the problems of separating Rachel from what she stood for. Rather than Tragedy embodied, the figure in his painting seems to be a trapped creature struggling against dissolution.
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