Scholarship emerged after the war, in the 1940s. Gabriel Laplane’s Lettres inédites (1947), like d’Heylli’s earlier volume of letters, took the form of a narrative, with commentaries by the editor splicing Rachel’s own words. But it was more complete, printing new letters—notably, the vivid love letters between her and the playwright François Ponsard—without bowdlerizing them, and attempting to rescue Rachel from arguments about art and morality. In Rachel en Amérique (1957), Sylvie Chevalley painstakingly corrected the impression (cherished by the French) that Rachel’s American tour was an utter financial disaster. Her recent fat biography of the actress, Rachel: j’ai porté mon nom aussi loin que j’ai pu (1989), presents a believable portrait of a gifted and ambitious woman. Chevalley seeks to emphasize the artist and de-mythicize Rachel. Before her, Joanna Richardson, in Rachel (1957), aimed explicitly “to disentangle her life from the legend.” Richardson wrote that she wanted “to record it as completely as I can,” believing that “if, in the process, fact resembles fiction, that is the fault of history.” Richardson regretted that “Rachel was too well aware of the worth of publicity to fell the forest of legend that, fertilized by ignorance, by malice and design, rose about her in her own time.” Unlike her, I am interested, above all, in how Rachel and her life were embedded in legends. I want to map that fantastic forest, to suggest that the interlocking branches of fact and fiction there cannot be disentangled.
“Too Beautiful to Play Rachel,” page from L’Illustration, 15 October 1913 (photo credit 2.1)
For all the efforts of sober scholars, the romantic view of Rachel has hung on, inspiring biographies romancées more and less believable, suggesting as much about the writers as they do about their professed subject. The epiphenomenon attests to the continuing force, in the field, of illusions. On the dust jacket of March Cost’s I, Rachel there is a photograph of the pseudonymous actress turned pseudo-biographer, decked out in the ladylike fashion of the 1950s: little hat with veil, white gloves, and a bunch of violets. Like Rachel, she looks away. Her book—evidently based on the curious series of passionate, agonized, enigmatic letters the young Rachel wrote to Samson in the summer of 1840—spins a tale of unrequited love between a powerful fatherly master and an apt girl pupil. It is the whispered story that the widow Samson tried so hard to squelch, retold with chaste British prurience.
Rachel was clearly a fantasized role for one actress-writer; was it something very different for those other biographers, women and men whose elaborate French names strike the Anglophone reader at least as comically antithetical to hers: A. de Faucigny-Lucinge (née Choiseul-Gouffler); J. Lucas-Dubreton; Martial-Piéchaud; Nicole Toussaint du Wast? In what sense are they closer, am I further, from what one journalist in the mid-nineteenth century called “la verité Rachel”? Did they imagine someone wonderfully like or unlike themselves? What are the consequences of the various distances between biographers and their chosen subjects? A pale shadow of the tensions of the theater, which link the spectator, the actor, and the role, informs the relation of the biographer and her subject. (“I thought her very pretty in London this year but she looked what Lady Ruthven called her ‘a beautiful shadow’ or more correctly to my idea a pale shadow,” Effie Ruskin wrote of Rachel, whom she saw the same year as Charlotte Brontë did; Brontë also chose the image of a shadow—often used, by the Victorians, of a “fallen” woman—to describe her.)
Biography makes strange bedfellows. Rachel, who epitomized contradiction, has inspired lucubrations of very different types and tones. Parallel excerpts from two brief sketches will dramatize my point. At one extreme are the feminine, nineteenth-century accents of the American Sarah Josepha Hale, who thus concluded, in Rachel’s lifetime, a sketch in a dictionary of “Distinguished Women from the Creation to A.D. 1854”:
No doubt calumny has exaggerated the reports of Mademoiselle Rachel’s amours; nor ought she to be judged by the standard of a Siddons, who was born and trained in a land where female chastity is required as the crowning grace of the actress. Still we do regret that a shadow has fallen on the fair fame of one who might have been, like Jenny Lind, a glory to her sex as well as to her profession. But let us record her good deeds. Mademoiselle Rachel is said to be very charitable to the poor. She has provided generously for her own family; educating her sisters and brothers, and never forgetting the humble condition from which she has risen. As a memorial of her street-minstrelsy, she religiously preserves her own guitar.
At the other end is an entry in a “biographical repertory” appended to an English edition of the Goncourt journals, which reads in part:
Rachel possessed from childhood a particular genius for the declamation of classical French verse, a genius comparable say to that of certain Russian-Jewish boys for the violin. She was not beautiful; she was uniformly unfaithful to her lovers; she was notoriously avaricious; but she seems more than any other person to have been the cause of the revival of public appreciation of classical tragedy in the forties and fifties of the last century, when romanticism was still alive; and she became thus a kind of storm centre and great public figure. Anecdotes concerning her pullulate, but there is none that deals altogether kindly with her.
The actress, the woman, the foreign Jew inspire interlocking prejudices and odd assumptions of familiarity. The angle of vision and the climate of opinion powerfully affect images which in turn have powerful effects.
In a series of lectures he delivered in 1939–40, the actor Louis Jouvet invoked Rachel. Actors may be classified as either pour or contre, for or against, he argued. He offered Talma as the paradigm of the first kind, for whom audiences had an immediate affinity; the other kind, he said, was exemplified by Rachel, who fascinated by repelling. From here it is all too clear that, along with the habit of binary opposition, race (or what was problematically called race, in Europe in the 1930s) and gender figure in this belated professional assessment based only on hearsay: Jouvet spoke less than a decade after the German government ordered the demolition of a statue of the Jewish actress in Potsdam, which had been erected near the spot where she had performed for the King of Prussia in 1852. It should warn us that those complex interlocking factors which colored the experiences of hearing Rachel in the first place must charge any belated project of recalling her.
CHAPTER THREE
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.
GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda
My parents are poor people, but we are of the ancient Jewish race. I am a daughter of the Bible, because I am descended from Israel, and because my father taught me how to read with the books of the prophets and the patriarchs; I understand nothing of what is bourgeois and vulgar; I love summits.
“ESTHER,” in Houssaye’s La Comédienne
THERE ARE TWO KINDS of legends about Rachel. One is the tale of miraculous birth; the other concerns the creation of a woman from mere matter. In both, the creators are male.
The first, most fully elaborated story goes more or less like this:
A pregnant woman, wretchedly poor and homeless, traveling in a strange land, is turned away from inn after inn. Finally she is given shelter, and brought to bed in a room ominously numbered 13 in a roadside hostel prophetically called The Sun, near an obscure Swiss village named—ironically, it will seem—by a mumble: Mumph. The baby’s birth is not registered; her peddler husband packs off mother and girl-child as soon as possible in the wagon that serves as their shop and home. He is anxious to get back to business and/or to be on his way out of hostile territory. The family—it includes another little girl of two—bumps uneventfully across the rutted roads of Europe. One day the infant tumbles off the back of the wagon, and is returned to the parents by a passing peasant, a man of the people saving Rachel for France. (In other versions of the story, the bundled baby is rescued by Mouton, the faithful family dog.)
The children (in short order, there are several more) rattle around among the heterogeneous wares the parents sell. The dark eye
s of the little girl born in the Swiss inn show flashes of what anyone looking on (but of course, there is no one to speak of) would recognize as signs of genius: she can find the right chords to strum on the guitar when her sister sings, and one day she surprises the family by reciting in a sort of chant, with astonishing fervor, the old Ballad of the Wandering Jew. Among themselves, the family speak a hideous bastard German dialect, but the gifted child’s French is miraculously pure. (For French people, this is the most significant of all the portents.)
The father is by all accounts a rascal. (In Abraham Cahan’s Yiddish biography of Rachel, he is said to have done some time in a small-town jail. The fact, if it is one, is hard to document; most biographers leave it out; is it fairer to suppress such an only possible truth, or to give space to what well might be calumny?) He is shiftless, a tippler, depends on his wife, who mends the old clothes they sell, to do all the work for him. Can it be he who teaches the children to speak and play and sing? Who else is there? Does he also have the sophistication and intellectual wherewithal to teach them to recite alexandrines, and to harbor fantasies of success, assimilation, cultural legitimacy, comfort, and power?
When the family settles eventually in a city, Lyons, he gets a job at a theater as a fireman: such people are very necessary, as the oil lights and the painted scenery and the crowds present a potentially perilous combination. The brute has a taste for drama (the theater has grown more violent and spectacular since the Revolution, over the years). He meets the actress Virginie Déjazet, who possibly (she has a heart of gold) invites him to look her up if he should come to Paris. Such things happen. He doesn’t make much money, and (true to the customs of his kind, careless of their safety and education) he sends his older girls out on the streets to pick up what cash they can to support the mother and younger children at home. They are perhaps eight and ten; one singing and the other at the guitar, they frequent the cafés near the theaters—the brothels, some say—where the buxom blond good looks and flirtatious behavior of the elder attract the attention of idle loungers. Usually the dark, thin younger child strums the guitar as the blond one sings, but sometimes she recites in the strange, harsh, stirring voice that would later be described as a mélopée. A local woman, a good Christian, takes pity on the children, protects them, and often augments their small take at the end of the day, so as to forestall the father’s beatings.
One day a kind stranger rescues the girls from poverty and their father and the cruising Don Juans of the taverns. Some cleaning up and minimal schooling in Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, makes the younger sister’s great destiny clear: Tragedy. At the national theater the best judges recognize a perfect classical actress, only fear that with her extraordinary (romantic) intensity she will too soon burn out. No one has seen her like before.
She is a metonymy, not a metaphor, of Tragedy. The dark eyes blaze with knowledge of terrible truth; suffering has left its mark on the pinched white face, the hollowed-out voice. But the child’s head—not beautiful, with its protuberant forehead, and disproportionately large—is held with grace and majesty by her thin neck. The distinguished actress Mlle Mars admires the way she walks; Samson praises her more elliptically, less translatably: “admirable organisation théâtrale,” admirably well organized for the theater, an admirable theatrical organism. The child from nowhere is recognized as the avatar of a nearly forgotten art in which inheres the lost glory of a once heroic nation.
IN THE MYTH of Rachel’s miraculous birth, reminiscent though it is of older legends, the lineaments of her historical moment are legible. The story confirms both Napoleonic doctrine and Balzacian insight: that careers were open to talent, and that persons are only what they make themselves up, and out, to be. Also it serves to fill a material gap in evidence. Even today, obscure people like the Félixes leave few documentary traces.
For little people as for very great ones, personal history is implicated in world-historical forces. Rachel’s peddler parents were children of peddlers, members of a class of poor Jews looked down upon by their own people as well as by the gentiles—the class from which the rich Gimbels and Guggenheims and Strausses sprang in the nineteenth century. There is a hierarchy even among peddlers, and in its terms the Félixes were not exactly the lowest of the low: only the more prosperous had wagons of their own, as they did. The lowliest walked with packs on their shoulders, leaving their houses at the beginning of the week and returning, when they could, for the Sabbath, sometimes walking the roads all summer, following the fairs. Peddlers with wagons could take their homes with them. In the way of business, such people often met up with actors, itinerants and hawkers like themselves. Secondhand clothes were bought and worn by most of the population of Europe then, but actors, who were required by theater managers to provide their own costumes, were especially good customers.
It is not clear how long the young Félixes had owned the vehicle—it was probably drawn by a mule—in which they were living and working in early 1821, when Rachel was born. Possibly they had bought it when they had made their not uncommon but still radical decision to move toward the cities of the west: it provided a convenient and economical means of travel. At the time their second daughter was born, they were doing business on the busy road between Basel and Zurich, in the canton of Aargau (in French, Argovie), near Aarau, in Switzerland, where they were welcomed by the isolated peasants of the region and feared by the local merchants who, jealous of their customers, had succeeded in having laws passed to prohibit giving Jews shelter. (In spite of such laws, Thérèse or Esther Félix managed to get the help of a midwife, as well as a room at the inn.) Their wagon was crammed with what humbler peddlers carried in their packs: old clothes and what used to be called “notions,” needles and threads and fasteners for clothing, bolts of fabric, tanned animal skins, magnifying glasses, spectacles, scissors, umbrellas. Also stacks of pamphlets and chapbooks, the popular literature, or bibliothèque bleue, that never got into libraries or bookshops. Among such peddlers’ books (livres de colportage) there well might have been a version—several, even—of the tale of the Wandering Jew. First written down in 1710, this medieval story is about a Jew (sometimes given the name Ahasvérus) who, for the crime of refusing comfort to Christ on the road to Calvary, is condemned to wander the earth eternally, like Cain. The tale appealed to the romantic imagination of a time when widespread immigration was changing the demographic face of Europe: like Cain, the Jew was an image of the poète maudit, an outcast from society, banished to solitariness for refusing brotherly love. (Later in the century, the painter Courbet, exploring social inequities, would draw on popular images of the Wandering Jew in his non-demonic form.) Dramatic versions of the story had been put on the boards in Paris in 1812 and appeared again in the 1830s. In the play Ahasvérus by Edgar Quinet, fragments of which were published in the Revue des deux mondes of 1 October 1833, Ahasvérus is comforted by the ange Rachel, who is doomed to share his wanderings. When in 1844 Eugène Sue’s novel, Le Juif errant, was published, Paris gossips said the figure had been partly inspired by the real-life Jacques Félix: this intersection of fiction and history is only as factitious and ironic as the stranger-than-fiction fact that literally wandering Jews carried and sold to gentiles cheap printed versions of a story directed against the Jews. The often-told tale that Rachel first showed her talent by declaiming the ballad to her family has an anti-Semitic subtext: it is as if, by reciting, the Jewish actress authenticated it. Also it suggests that in some way the chapbooks bundled in the peddler’s wagon along with the baby had generated the tragedienne, or begun to endow the biological accident of her birth with the signifying shape that literary language has.
SOME HISTORIANS of Jewish peddlers unblinkingly trace their origins to the nomadic life of the Middle East. A materialist view is more plausible. By the nineteenth century, peddling was a traditional way of life for European Jews, who in some countries were still forbidden to own land. The way of life was not only an affliction:
the flexible hours and independence that peddling offered attracted people who wanted to remain on the margins of society and preserve, among other things, their religious freedom. Peddlers could carry their own kosher pots, and keep to the weekly rhythms of prayer and rest that Judaism mandated, as other workers among the gentiles could not. And peddlers had a quasi-religious function, too, as objects of charity. The arrival of a footsore peddler in a shtetl, of a Sabbath, was welcomed as a chance for the community to exercise the religious obligation of hospitality—as well as an opportunity to hear the latest news. On the other hand, a rebel Jew who balked at the rules and sequestration of the Jewish community might well look to the road for liberation (or temporary freedom) from the family creed. Peddlers were cosmopolitans. Though poor and marginal, they were not like those religious village Jews who were secluded from the Christian world and from secular knowledge, and afraid of the people they lived among. They were not unworldly, not naive. Since Shakespeare’s gossipy Autolycus of A Winter’s Tale, peddlers have been known as ragbags of information, and valued for their expertise about, for instance, currencies. Though he was not perhaps reliably grammatical, it is neither comical nor unlikely—although some biographers think it is—that Jacques Félix would have known enough of what might now be called business German to have people pay him to teach it in Lyons. The Félixes, then, must be imagined not as bearded and bewigged and Orthodox, but as an enterprising modern young couple attuned to their times, or eager to embrace modernity, when they left their parents behind and moved toward the Enlightenment and the cities of the west.
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