MOST BIOGRAPHIES of women are lives of actresses; some are written by actresses. The title of a book by Edwige Feuillère about one of her great predecessors—Moi, La Clairon (1984)—plays on the shared profession of the writer and her subject: the first-person pronoun makes an implicit connection. Under the pen name “March Cost,” an English actress named Margaret Mackie Robinson produced an “autobiography” of Rachel written in the first person, I, Rachel (1957). What doubled distortions result when actresses play in print at being other actresses?
I DELIBERATELY use the word “actress” rather than “actor,” the term that many women players prefer: I like the fact that it marks the importance of gender. The power Rachel exerted on her audiences had a strong erotic component, and the question of whether she matched (various) dominant images of Woman charged the air around her. Her sex was critically important in making her seem “other”—but not, I think, more important than her distinctive “race” and social class. The daughter of homeless, despised wanderers belonged to something more marginal than an underclass; the glamorous star who dined with makers of opinion enjoyed real power in the world as well as onstage. The interplay of gender, race, and class informed Rachel’s life and people’s perception of her. As a “public woman” bare to the gaze of men she was an object of erotic interest, but it is significant that women were important among those who were engaged by her—Charlotte Brontë, for one, and Queen Victoria. Delphine de Girardin wrote Rachel a Cléopâtre in which the queen takes slaves to bed, then has them killed, like the heroine of Dumas’s melodrama La Tour de Nesle. Giggling over the story that Rachel had taken issue with the playwright’s choice of the ordinary name “Antoine” for Cleopatra’s lover, le tout Paris took time also to whisper that the actress was the lover of regal Mme de Girardin.
It is too easy to be too explicit about the erotics of theatrical performance, and the ways luxurious dreams of changing selves and lives, of being glamorously other, are gendered fantasies and fantasies of changing gender. In the theater, as many people have written, gender itself seems to be a role. “Many homosexuals are drawn to actresses,” write Sarah Bernhardt’s most recent biographers, noting that Sarah was “a friend of some of the best-known homosexuals of the day.” (The homosexual Marquis de Custine was Rachel’s close friend.) Gold and Fizdale speculate that male homosexuals envy the power of actresses to attract men, also “their stylish indifference to convention, and their open promiscuity.” But it is more complex than that. Theatrical “self-fashioning,” to borrow Stephen Greenblatt’s influential term, is a central concern of contemporary “queer theory.” Experiencing the art of great performers, thinking of what it must be like to be them, is a kind of imaginary dressing-up that makes one dream of more wonderful radical changes. “I am jealous of the life of great artists: the enjoyment of money, of art, of opulence—it is all theirs,” wrote the young Flaubert. “If I could have been simply a beautiful woman dancer—or a violinist; how I should have wept, sighed, loved, sobbed.”
A FEW MONTHS AFTER Rachel’s death, her family held a public auction of her effects. In the last months of her life, Rachel had anticipated them: in a contract signed on 1 September 1857, she had agreed to send her secretary and business agent, M. Bellevaut, to star-struck, dollar-rich America, to sell by public lottery—one hundred thousand tickets at a dollar apiece—“the diamonds, the silver, and the costumes belonging to Mlle Rachel,” including a “river” of thirty-two diamonds, a pearl collar with a diamond and emerald clasp, a vermeil Russian goblet, an embroidered Turkish belt, and a knife, fork, and spoon also in vermeil. But there were laws against such sales in America, and poor Bellevaut was obliged to return home dollarless to Paris after Rachel was dead. Her survivors held their sale in April 1858: of dresses and costumes and silk underskirts; lengths of fabric and lace; one hundred pairs of new gloves; a coffer in malachite and gilded bronze presented by the empress of Russia; four Etruscan vases; more than thirteen hundred bottles of wine; tables, chairs, coffee urns, bracelets and rings and earrings both real and for the stage; an Abyssinian mandolin; the famous battered guitar. There were portraits of Mlle Clairon and Adrienne Lecouvreur; a statuette of Melpomene; copies of the Bible and the Koran, Homer and Byron, the works of Molière and Corneille and Racine and Eugène Sue and Charles Nodier, de Staël’s Corinne and eleven volumes of George Sand, and—listed in the advertisement under the category armes—a revolver and a variety of knives, daggers, and sabers. The things were on view in the Place Royale apartment for several days, and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, boulevardiers and lovers of the theater and of gossip, queued up to gape along with the masses. They set down what they saw in their journal:
All the dead woman’s old rags—old rags of a woman, of a queen: evening gowns in white satin, Athalie’s robes, all the relics of her body, all the costumes of her glory, hung now in heaps as if on the walls of the morgue, looking like ghostly envelopes, clothes from a dream stilled and deadened by the first light of day.
A few women, vendors of these gorgeous, rusty second-hand stuffs, move along, fingering Camille’s tunic, seeking out the rent made by her brother’s sword.
“Move along, ladies and gentlemen,” barks the seller as he prods the shoulders of the dazed crowd milling about.… Here is a bedroom, a bed made of black wood with blue silk curtains, and strewn about the room bits of lace, flounces from England, linens from Belgium, handkerchiefs from Valenciennes, all that careful work of a spider’s servitude. An old woman sits at the bedside, yellow-faced, bright-eyed, greedy and Jewish, brooding over the lacework. “Move along,” says the voice.
E tutto, all that Rachel left behind: a few old rags, diamonds, jewelry, books half-bound in calfskin, and bits of lace; a courtesan’s legacy.
The sad clutter of real objects laid out in April light exposed the pathos that underlay the glamour, characterized La Grande as just another cheap item, a commodity exhibited to a gaping crowd. Her effects defined the reine de théâtre as a courtesan, to be used even after her death for someone else’s pleasure and profit. Her family’s hustling of even her intimate clothing was an insult to taste, art, privacy, reflection, feeling; it made her pathetic, reduced everything about her to a show, proved that her substance had been only an illusion. When Edmond de Goncourt transcribed the passage word for word from his journal into his 1882 novel about an actress, La Faustin, he blurred a line between history and fiction that had never been clear. Goncourt’s literal “realism” served to anchor the myth of the femme artiste in history: but in the novel, the pathetic, dismissive “facts” about the dead actress prove she had only been illusory.
The femme artiste is a Jewess in an earlier novel Goncourt wrote together with his brother, Manette Salomon (1867). Manette is not an actress but a beautiful artists’ model, whose greedy impoverished mother began putting her out for hire when she was just a child (as many poor Jewish and Italian immigrants were doing in Paris). The young painter who falls desperately in love with her sees her as the embodiment of art; he claims her as his own and forbids her to model for his friends. Deprived of her métier, Manette grows melancholy; pathetically, she poses for herself before a mirror at home. She is an artist in her way, and in her way authentically in love with art. But loving herself is a lamentable perversion. Women, who embody the artist’s ideal, cannot themselves be artists, the Goncourts show; and Manette is not only not an artist, but not much of a human being. Beneath her beauty (it runs to fat) she is unregenerately the vulgar Jew, who combines petit-bourgeois values with Asiatic squalor. At the end of the novel, her large Jewish family—muttering men and conspiratorial women—move into the lovers’ ménage. The hapless painter, thoroughly trapped, is finished, and his friends shake their heads over his squandered gifts.
In the later Goncourt novel, the protagonist is the femme artiste herself. Her stage name, La Faustin (her real name is Juliette), makes it clear that her soul is the one at stake. (The tragedy Musset began to write for Rachel was called
Faustine.) La, Faustin is first seen passionately studying and rehearsing the role of Phèdre, carefully following direction, working so seriously that she goes to consult an old Greek scholar about Euripides. Her aim—Bernhardt’s—is to equal the great Rachel. Possessed by the role of Phèdre, she becomes possessed, against her will, by lust, as Phèdre was. Of course the novel has a sexual plot, provided by the actress’s grand passion for Lord Annandale, whose unexpected return to Paris causes her to jilt a man who thereupon kills himself—causing her no guilt at all. This lord is a gloomy and father-fixated Englishman unmistakably descended from Lord Nelvil, the dour beloved of de Staël’s Corinne, but Annandale’s devotion to an old homosexual friend, who comes to live with him and La Faustin, gives his character a new decadent fillip. For love of the rich dull lord, the actress proposes to leave the stage and live in retirement with him in the country, away from the theater and her friends. To show him that she is resolved to repudiate her career for love of him, she takes him with her to see the display of a dead tragedienne’s pathetic effects.
When Marguérite Gautier, in La Dame aux camélias, proposes to her lover that they leave the gay life of Paris for a simpler world, circumstances prevent her from living out her hopeful dream of a purified, pastoralized self. In the case of La Faustin, her own bad dreams undo her: in the most hideous one, she sees her brains as a salad being tossed by a disembodied plaster hand. One night in the country she gets up and in her sleep recites a speech of Hermione’s from Racine’s Andromaque; when her lover awakens her, she collapses into his arms, sobbing out her desire to forget the tragedienne in the loving woman. But she cannot love, which is her doom, and his. The climax of the novel and the ultimate revelation of the character of La Faustin come when Annandale is mysteriously seized by an illness that permanently twists his face into a sardonic rictus. Grieving at his bedside, poor Juliette feels a terrible compulsion to mimic his ghastly expression, and store it for later use.
Her impulse is an artist’s, an actor’s. Talma had confessed (a bit shame-facedly) that his detachment extended beyond the stage: “I scarcely dare admit,” the actor wrote, “that even in a circumstance in my life when I felt a deep sadness, the passion for the theater was so strong in me that, while wracked by acute grief, weeping real tears, I in spite of myself made a quick and fleeting assessment of the change in my voice, which underwent a certain spasmodic intonation as it was constricted by sobs; and, I say this with some shame, I automatically thought of using this when I needed it; and in fact such lessons derived from my own life experiences have often proved quite useful to me.” But such detached observations of oneself are of a different order than battening on the pain of another person; and different things are expected of men and women, in the realms of demonstrativeness and sympathy. Rachel was notorious for having studied—so as to copy—the collapse of a man in pain. Goncourt’s La Faustin embodies the fiercest of misogynist fears. Not only does she copy the expression of the dying man, but she goes to the mirror to measure how well she has done so! At that revealing moment Lord Annandale opens his dying eyes. “Turn out that woman!” he says, twice, in a terrible voice, in English, and expires.
The femme artiste as Goncourt describes her is incapable of love. She is a monster, a temptress whose sexual allure is partly a function of class—and of crossing classes. A daughter of the people, she is more natural than bourgeois women: “La Faustin had about her the pungent distinctive flavor of a girl of the people, to whom she still belonged, whose coarse crude spicy foods she still preferred.” On the other hand, she recalls women of the upper classes: “the duchess alternates with the grisette.” In fact she is neither natural nor in any way social, being a creature of the stage and a theatrical city, “the great Parisian courtesan, who gives the most perfect amorous pleasures on earth.” The thoroughly artificial La Faustin is a representation of Sarah Bernhardt, of Rachel, of Woman; her evocative half-feminized name insists she is no one in particular, deflecting the charge that Goncourt’s is a chronique scandaleuse. A novelist, Goncourt disingenuously writes, is “a historian of people who have no history”: the distinction reminds the reader of the difference between public and secret history, and the different truths told by books that make revelations soberer historians conceal, or avoid. A similar claim introduces a novel that responds in kind to Goncourt’s, the 1884 roman à clef by Arsène Houssaye that looks back through Sarah Bernhardt, and the chroniques scandaleuses she had inspired, to Rachel. Coyly, it is entitled La Comédienne.
Houssaye had been the director of the Théâtre-Français in Rachel’s last years: the actress’s influence with Louis-Napoleon got him the job, he claimed. In his youth he figured in a popular caricature of the young Rachel, which shows her standing sullen in her toga between two hatted, black-suited nineteenth-century men. In addition to her costume, the girl’s identifying features are the large egg-shaped head balanced on a tiny body, dark lowering brows, and the anxious, slightly cross-eyed look that shows up even in flattering pictures of Rachel. She is worried but detached from her associates, engaged with neither the man who hustles her off nor the one bemusedly watching—both easily recognizable, in their time, as the rich impresario and publisher Dr. Louis Véron and Houssaye. The scene is a variant on, or parody of, the traditional Judgment of Paris, in which a man deliberates before choosing between allegorical female figures. Here the picture of a mind divided is paradoxically inverted. Although the sole woman between rival men is still the prize, and she does not so much choose as allow herself to be chosen, the male figures in their modern dress are the pointedly allegorical ones. Fat ugly Véron buttoned into his dark suit, tightly lidded by his stovepipe hat, clearly stands for Commerce; he hustles Rachel away while dapper Houssaye looks on, curious but negligent, leaning on a walking stick entwined by flowering vines, grazed upon by butterflies—a proleptic Whistlerian or Wildean aesthete representing Art.
Rachel with Dr. Louis Véron and Arsène Houssaye, from a contemporary caricature
Houssaye would live well into Wilde’s time. Of all Rachel’s imaginary and soi-disant fathers—playwrights and publicists, teachers and managers, critics and lovers—he is the most engaging. As a very old man, recalling—in his six-volume Confessions (1885–91)—the literary-theatrical fashionable Paris he had known, he apologized for his garrulousness, and likened himself, in a charming preface, to a guest who stays too late at a party in the hope of getting off a last really good story. The hint is helpful: fidelity to historical fact is not his chief concern. It obviously was not when he wrote his roman à clef about the celebrated actress “Esther Bonheur.” The tone of semi-fiction and innuendo is set from the title, La Comédienne being both an inclusive term for “actress” and the opposite of tragédienne.
Houssaye’s plot skips from one bit of familiar anecdote in the Rachel legend to another. He tells the story of Esther, triumphant, coming off the stage with her arms full of bouquets, and meeting the man who had once advised her to go back to selling flowers: she announces airily that she is about to take his advice. (Rachel herself had retailed a version of this story as early as 1845, to a journalist in Lyons, in a letter.) He repeats the tale that when her grammar was corrected, Rachel retorted that women like her made and unmade grammar. He also dishes out the (true) story of her generous love for her younger sister, for whom she bought and furnished a house she presented on the occasion of Rébecca’s successful stage debut. Obeying but underplaying the convention that requires a heroine to have a single overwhelming true passion for a man, Houssaye also manages to indicate that Esther/Rachel had abundant other lovers, not neglecting the gossip that one or more of them were women. The novel is laced with famous names (Hugo, Véron, Janin, Samson), and broadly hints at others (Prince Napoléowski). The principals are more and less identifiable beneath their half-masks; a few of the main characters are teasing composites of several people the reader is meant to recognize. There are quotations from letters Rachel sent Houssaye (some included in a
chapter entitled “Les Légendes”), and well-known remarks of other named celebrities (like George Sand) who knew her. “Esther” is quoted as having said to the writer, “Should the writers of scandalous tales one day wish to distort my life story, you tell it in all its simplicity; you know all too well that I wasn’t raised at the Sacré-Coeur, and that the girls who were are no better than I am, as I have wronged only myself, while many of those young ladies marry a man only to betray him.” She is as good as or better than good women: her heart is better than her upbringing was. For this is a scandalous tale written for Rachel. In a footnote Houssaye quotes Théodore de Banville, who wrote that Rachel’s “most remarkable incarnation was neither Hermione, Phèdre, nor Tisbe, it was that masterpiece worthy of Gavarni or Balzac: Rachel the Parisienne.” The novelist adds, “Rachel, at her whim, could cover herself in jewels or dress in a two-bit wrap: she was always highly distinguished, regally in command and gracious, superior to all God’s creatures, that is to say, a Parisian lady!” The snow-balling illogic of sexual enthusiasm, civic pride, male arrogance, and romantic excess recalls Goncourt and escapes analysis. But there is a point here, about the distinction with which Rachel fit into, carried off, whatever garments and ornaments were available—the sense she gave of making them part of herself.
STARS ATTRACT BIOGRAPHERS for obvious reasons: “made” by playwrights and critics, they fall as if naturally into other writers’ hands. (“I owe Ken a lot,” Laurence Olivier is said to have protested when Tynan sought to write his life story, “but not my life.”) Is it simply that the player who struts and frets her hour upon the stage is a compelling image of mortality? Or do we flatter ourselves when we see a great star’s meteoric rise and fall as anything like our own? Are our problems in knowing who we are reflected in the performer’s demand to be admired, her dependence on the recognition of other people and their applause? What is the connection between the charged exchange of emotion and identity that links actors and spectators and the felt mystery of being a separate person? Adam Smith wrote long ago that we have to pay actors well for doing what we ourselves wouldn’t do for any amount of money: are they aspects of ourselves we admire or abjure, or both?
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