Gossip, chroniques scandaleuses, representations of the private life of an actress are responses to her erotic appeal. In Rachel’s case, they were also a way of putting her in her place—insisting on her woman’s nature, making the point that her “male talent” was not natural. Jenny Lind was called the Swedish Nightingale because her singing seemed effortless and instinctive; Heinrich Heine satirically imagined Pauline Viardot as natural to the point of exoticism, “especially when she opens wide her large mouth with its dazzling white teeth, and smiles with such savage sweetness and delightful ferocity, you feel as though the monstrous plants and animals of India or Africa were about to appear before your eyes, as though giant palms festooned with thousands of blossoming lianas were shooting up—and you would not be surprised if a leopard or a giraffe, or even a herd of young elephants were to stampede across the stage.” When George Sand describes watching Marie Dorval, she extols the performer’s art as basic and immediate and physical; the spectator-writer, in contrast, is a (male) Sisyphus torn by “a relentless struggle between desire and impotence,” dry and cold and blocked. In contrast to Sand’s “poor poet” in agonies of self-doubt and self-consciousness, the actress is graceful, spontaneous; her body, her instrument, reveals her soul transparently—and captivates, reflects, reveals the onlooker’s. Here is Sand:
If, when I take my seat here, when I throw myself on these theater benches, all oppressed by the violence of my pain, burning with fever, my brain aching and heavy, my marble-cold lips smarting with bitterness, tears refusing to flow in my arid eyes, if this woman with her wasp waist, her carefree step, her sad, penetrating look, appears on the stage… [it] seems to me that I am watching my own soul, that my soul has dressed up in this pale and sad and beautiful shape to show itself to me, to reveal itself to me and to humanity.
Marie Dorval, the real actress Sand describes here, was the epitome of art-lessness, naturalness, femininity: Gautier wrote that when she performed, “It was no longer art, it was nature itself, it was the essence of maternity distilled in one single woman.” In sharp contrast, Rachel was imagined as an avatar of austere, literary art. Hers was the kind of glamour which suggests that word’s historical connections with “grammar”—the spells of witches, the magic power of saying certain words. Spotting her one day when she was sitting at her mother’s side in a carriage crossing the Seine, engrossed in a book and oblivious to the world, Alfred de Musset marveled at the fact that audiences who cheered Pauline Viardot should also applaud the pale and otherworldly Rachel.
Romantic women performers like Taglioni, Dorval, and Viardot were praised for expressing with their bodies something beyond and more basic than words. Rachel, in contrast, spoke Racine’s rhymed lines as if they were her own thoughts; she was his voice, some writers said. Representing Roxane, Aménaïde, Camille, and the rest, she also stood more generally for literariness, was identified as woman rarely are with language. One biographer has called her the only actor responsible for a literary revolution. The Comédie-Française had given the poet-playwrights of the seventeenth century a strategic place in French culture, by making them central to the living repertoire of the national theater; in the mid-nineteenth century, when Paris seemed to be the center of Western civilization, Rachel reaffirmed the aesthetic value of Corneille’s and Racine’s works. Reviving them at a time when neither classical Greek tragedy nor the French courtier-playwrights’ versions of it spoke directly to what was on living people’s minds, she reinforced the “classic” status of the plays, established their place in a canon of European high culture rather as her contemporary (and coreligionist) Felix Mendelssohn helped establish the music of Bach.
TRAGEDY, according to Aristotle the highest literary form, lent her its dignity and authority; representing Tragedy, Rachel identified herself, an actress and a woman and a Jew, with High Art and Genius, creating a disquieting, threatening persona. Misogyny and anti-Semitism fueled hostile criticism of both her play and her character. The two were seen as one by journalists who dug what pay dirt they could from the subject of the celebrity. As early as 1839, Parisian audiences were advised, “Do you know what you have to do to assure that Mlle Rachel will be grateful for your admiration? Go to the theater with your pockets full. Toss flowers to the other actresses, but throw Rachel your wallet. If you lay at her feet coins up to her ankles, if you make the gold shine in those eyes that are too hard to weep, you will give her the emotion and the tenderness she lacks.” Rachel’s greed and vulgarity were insisted on. The reading public savored stories that she planned to set up her sister in her own bed one night, in order to trick an unwitting lover who had annoyed her; about the showy pineapple she bought from Fauchon’s gourmet shop, used as a centerpiece for a dinner party, and returned uncut the next day, demanding her money back; about the host who said she could have the silver epergne she admired, and offered his carriage and servants when she moved to take it right away, cautioning only that those must be brought back. As gossip proliferated, so did people who were eager to make a profit by writing it down.
The first full-scale biography published after Rachel’s death, by one Madame de Barréra, was anti-romantic, anti-republican, casually anti-Semitic, and moralistic and envious above all. The biographer begins by gratefully marvelling that the high art of tragedy had been revived by “the hand of a child,” and harps throughout on the congenital rapacity and lack of patriotism of the actress and her family. Rounding up the usual phrases, she insists of Rachel that “her idol was gold,” and observes that she turned down the offer of a salary equal to “the amount paid to Monsieur Guizot to govern the most ungovernable nation on earth!” Rachel was “a thorough cosmopolitan,” she writes with distaste; she by the way describes her as deformed by a protuberant breastbone like a chicken’s. In performance, writes Mme de B., Rachel resembled “a viper standing erect on its tail” (in Thomas Corneille’s Ariane). It was this biography, which he read the summer after Rachel’s death, that inspired the three reverent sonnets in which Matthew Arnold apotheosizes the actress as at once a tragic victim and a transcendent symbol of Art.
Mme de B. was concerned to reduce Rachel to ordinariness or worse. The actress’s intimates had more complicated goals and motives. The squabbles of those who had known and sought to own her motivated many of the early books about her, notably Jules Janin’s Rachel et la tragédie (1858), which recycled his reviews and insisted on their importance in her career, and Samson’s rejoinder, Lettre à M. Jules Janin (1859). The marvellous child had indeed been gifted, Samson wrote, but she would have got nowhere, been no one, without him. In an effort to offset the inevitable gossip that was invited by this claim, Samson’s widow wrote her version of the relationship, which was not published until 1898, reiterating her husband’s claim of his importance to Rachel, insisting on the purity of his connection with his pupil, and suggesting that she herself had a hand in some important things—that Rachel’s stage name, for instance, had been her idea. As many women writers about Rachel would do to blame or praise her, Mme Samson underscored her subject’s unwomanly will to fame. Recalling a conversation with Rachel and another of her husband’s students, she—who had herself given up a stage career for marriage—remembers Rachel protesting, “Renouncing the theater would be renouncing life itself!” Shocked Mme Samson could never forget what the young woman said: “Say what you will of love and marriage, nothing takes the place of glory.”
In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, while Sarah Bernhardt dominated the theatrical scene, nostalgia moved garrulous old men to recall the wonderful earlier actress who seemed to incarnate their own lost youth; meanwhile new authorities purveyed their versions of the facts. The prominent drama critic Francisque Sarcey, for instance, spoke in London in 1879 about the lean years of the Comédie-Française, during the July Monarchy.
Rachel alone could draw receipts in those days. It was the great Rachel. But Rachel cost the theater more than she ever drew, and she did more harm to art th
an she rendered it service.… The nights on which she played the receipts amounted to ten thousand francs, the whole of which went into her pocket. The next night the theater was empty. Rachel, moreover, must be blamed for having imparted a factitious life to tragedy and for encouraging her admirers to struggle against the advent of a new art. She obstinately confined herself to a dozen parts, in which she displayed incomparable power, and left imperishable memories. She did not lend the assistance of her genius to any of the contemporary poets, or, if she did so, it was with regret, and without decisive success.
Partisans of the state theater had long invoked variants of those complaints: her lack of team spirit, an offense against the communal life of actors; in general, the evidence (her loyalty to her family only made it more compelling) that she was out for herself, a loner. The fact that she had allied herself with the magisterial dead, rather than contemporary artists, had always rankled even while her narrowness had intensified the sense that she was “incomparable” in a high art France considered distinctively its own.
As Bernhardt and other artists continued to recall her image, Rachel was now idealized, then reduced to one or another of the things she stood for. Guy de Maupassant invoked her obliquely in a story, “Mademoiselle Fifi” (1882), about a prostitute called Rachel who murders a German officer, proving herself a French patriot in spite of being a Jew: in a final paragraph, the narrator makes the familiar claim that she was really a better woman than the bourgeoisie who scorned her. In 1883, Oscar Wilde, visiting Paris, sent his card to Edmond, the surviving Goncourt brother, expressing his esteem for the author of La Faustin, which would influence his portrayal of Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Texts produce other texts, get translated, re-presented. The murder in “Mademoiselle Fifi” was the subject of a painting by Ernest-Jean Delahaye that was exhibited in the Salon of 1898. Four years later, Adriana Lecouvreur, the opera by Cilea and Colautti, had its premiere in Milan: if the program notes did not recall, as they tend to do now, that Rachel had played Adrienne, and wept for herself while rehearsing Adrienne’s death scene, that was because there still were people alive who could tell that story.
Biographies of the dead depend on documents, usually letters. From the handsome volume of Rachel’s correspondence that was published in 1882, the editor, Edmond Poinsot (who signed himself Georges d’Heylli), took pains to banish all hints of scandal—for the greater glory of Tragedy and the Comédie-Française (and out of regard for Lia and Dinah Félix, who were still alive). He arranged choice bits of Rachel’s voluminous correspondence to portray an energetic worker and a sometimes caustic wit; he emphasized the pathetic, tragic sufferer. In 1910 the “discovery” of new love letters produced a spate of biographies, the most sympathetic being La Vie sentimentale de Rachel d’après des lettres inédites by Valentine Thomson, the great-granddaughter of the lawyer Adolphe Crémieux. Thomson’s Rachel, largely derived from letters the actress wrote to a lover with whom she planned a simple life in the country, is a loving, suffering, sympathetic woman. “Cold impartiality is not absolutely necessary,” the biographer wrote in defense of her own sympathetic method. “On the contrary, isn’t indulgence required, in making judgments of an already distant past? And shouldn’t we allow the charm that seduced all the tragedienne’s contemporaries to act on us, so we may know her better?” The same year Thomson’s book was published, Rachel et son temps, by A. de Faucigny-Lucinge, also appeared. It emphasized Rachel the avatar of classicism and the awesome star—one of those “comets which have their own laws; the place they come from, the place they go to, everything, is strange, in their bizarre, tremendous, tormented destiny.” As if to correct the feminine emphasis, Hector Fleischmann, the author of a biography of Mlle George entitled Maîtresse de Napoléon, produced his scandalmongering Rachel intime (1910), which reprinted many of the scurrilous caricatures that attacked Rachel in her time, and resurrected the most salacious lost gossip. Fleischmann claimed to reveal the base facts behind the noble appearance: among his juicy “revelations” was the Napoleonic menu of the dinner Rachel gave for Alexandre Walewski, shamelessly borrowed from Houssaye’s novel, in which “Esther” serves “Comte Napoléowski” “Saucisson à l’ail de Toulon, Omelette au Jambon de Mayence, Andouilles à la Bonaparte, Poulet à la Marengo, Bombe Glacée à la Moscowa.” The brandy-and-cigars tone is like Goncourt’s and Houssaye’s, the guiding premise that the life of the actress—excessive, theatrical, and implausible—by its nature invites and deserves embroidery.
In England, Francis Gribble put together a moralizing spin-off of Fleischmann, the disapproving Rachel: Her Stage Life and Her Real Life (1911), which deplores the great actress’s offstage behavior; it is notable mostly for Virginia Woolf’s rejection, in a book review, of its title and point of view. Woolf’s claim that Rachel lived fully and truly and well in her imagination is a vigorous feminist variant on Wilde’s epigram that “the only real people are the people who never existed.” As Woolf understood, the sexual emphasis of Rachel’s biographers calls out for a corrective insistence on her work: Henry James began to make it in The Tragic Muse, in which the old actress Mme Carré speaks of Rachel as “a drudge” who labored tirelessly at her art. But biographers continued to stress her sexual life. The American Nina (Mrs. Arthur) Kennard had managed loftily, in an 1886 book for a series called “Representative Women,” to shift the emphasis slightly—from the erotic to the maternal. She gave pride of place, in her conclusion, to a letter the actress wrote to her son: “Come into my heart, dear little one, and find there all the tenderness of which there is an unlimited supply for my sons. It is riches without end that God gives mothers who love their children.”
In a 1928 biography written for a series with a similar title, the English critic James Agate predictably sank the doting mother. Agate pronounced Rachel “first a great Jewess, second a great actress, and third a great lover,” whose “great career may be used to point whichever of two morals one prefers: either that abnormality in one direction must be balanced by abnormality in another, or that men and women are not made in one piece.” The tongue is somewhere near the cheek; the tone is arch and fey and pointedly insouciant—and, like every biographer’s, proprietary. Agate, born in 1877, reached back through Bernhardt (whom his actress sister May had known) to Rachel: he could “remember my father taking me to see Sarah Bernhardt, in, I think, Frou-Frou. I remember, that while the tears were still running down his face, he told me that Rachel was a greater actress.” In filial pride, he extends Diderot’s paradox—that the actor who feels least performs most effectively—across the proscenium arch, writing that his father’s “detachment proved him to have been a dramatic critic without portfolio.” The son took up the critic’s portfolio in earnest, and by the way the cult of Rachel, and pursued his obsession with the kind of fervent detachment he attributed to his father—and to her. He went so far as to amuse himself by reconstructing Rachel’s London debut in honor of its centennial.
The salient, politically charged issue among her French biographers in the years after the Dreyfus affair was, How French was Rachel? It was debated in sober academic tones. André Bellessort’s meditation on Rachel and tragedy (1929) insists on the paradox of the ignorant, vulgar, but supremely gifted Jewess who revived the noble plays; Louis Barthou’s respectful Rachel (1926) is tactful about the relation of legend and history. It begins, “Il y avait une fois une petite juive,” and concludes by echoing and correcting itself: “Il y avait une fois une grande tragédienne.” Is this to be read as a claim that legend can become history, or a confession of the writer’s complicity in the transformation? Or is it guileless rhetoric? In the mid-1930s, new threats and fears in Europe created a new kind of partisan interest in the actress. Bernard Falk’s Rachel the Immortal (1936) put the emphasis on the woman of the people (and the adorable playful child); Abraham Cahan’s Rachel (1938), a compilation of columns from his New York Yiddish newspaper, The Jewish Daily Forward, claimed her as a heroine of t
he Jews.
The “discoveries” of letters and the publication of books about Rachel inspired various stagings of her legend. In 1913, when a play about Rachel (by Gustave Grillet) opened in Paris, it provoked a debate in the newspapers about whether its star was sufficiently ugly to play Rachel—illustrated with hideous portraits of the dead star and charming ones of the actresses who had been considered for the role. A four-act romantic drama very like Grillet’s, Rachel by Carina Jordan, opened at the Knickerbocker Theatre on Broadway at Thirty-eighth Street in New York in December 1913. It ran for two weeks; both the star (Bertha Kalich of the Yiddish stage) and the subject were a little too foreign to please. “There has always been a tendency toward the historical play abroad,” wrote the reviewer for The Theatre, The Magazine for Playgoers. “Those people live more in the past than we do.” Nevertheless, over a decade later, the Belmont Theater in Los Angeles briefly housed a play about Rachel. The program concludes a brief synopsis of the “comedy-drama” thus: “Everything is taken away from her—even her jewels, and the one she loves.” At least three other Rachel plays were planned or written in England and America: the playwright and critic William Archer considered producing “a story round that great name” for the American actress Elizabeth Robins. La Guitare de Rachel, a play by Maurice M. L. Savin, was published in Paris in 1964. Dead as alive, Rachel has remained intriguing as a character poised at a place where the commercial and vulgar and sordid aspects of the theater converge with emotional truths accessible only through a serious performer’s art—“those more solid realities,” as Proust called them, “Phèdre and the way in which Berma spoke her lines.”
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