Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  With the exemplary exception of Chevalley, however, most of Rachel’s biographers call them by their Hebrew names, Jacob and Esther Chaya, in effect refusing to recognize them as French. (Mme de B. calls him Abraham, with what James Agate wittily characterized as “Christian inaccuracy.”) The question of the actress’s nationality confused a public already confused about Jews in general: “Mlle Rachel was born in Munf, in the canton of Aarau (Switzerland), on March 24, 1820,” one journalist wrote inaccurately in 1843. “Her mother, Esther Haya, is a Jewess; but, God be praised! Rachel is French by her father M. Félix of Metz. Like most Israelites, M. Félix was a common peddler who traveled from fair to fair with his large family.” (Other journalists reported that the mother was from Bohemia, hinting at Gypsy ancestry.) Jews were in fact citizens of France, having been declared such—along with Protestants and actors—by a Revolutionary decree of 1791. And the Félixes’ decision to take the road from Alsace suggests they were French by choice as well as by birth, French rather than Alsatian or German, or Jewish first of all. Jacques later said he had studied to be a rabbi, but probably only as a way of claiming (indefinite, untraceable) intellectual distinction; as her Jewish critics pointed out later, there was no protest from home when, on the solemn holiday of Yom Kippur, the young Rachel performed the role of Pauline in Polyeucte, who converts to Christianity. (When he was put on the spot about this, Jacques countered that his daughter belonged to the Comédie-Française and not to him, skirting the private matter of the family’s religious observance to get to his favorite subject of debate.) In his memoir of Rachel, Védel, who was the director of the Théâtre-Français when Rachel was first hired there, recalls that forbidden meat was often on the family table.

  The Félixes were swept westward on a huge wave of internal immigration. They went from Alsace to Besançon, Saint-Etienne, and then, for a few years before they settled in Paris, to Lyons, where the cloth industry was attracting many Jews from the east. They were pushed by the Jews who poured into France in flight from pogroms in Poland and Russia, and pulled by the promise of life in the capital, where people were beginning to practice what Guizot would soon be preaching, “Enrichissez-vous!” The wave they caught was one of several that were mixing populations and weakening the boundaries between classes. If their westward movement seems to signify their hopefulness, it was a sign of their concomitant helplessness that the family grew and stayed poor as they traveled. After Sophie-Sarah and Elisa-Rachel, who was born in February, 1821, came the only son, Raphaël, in 1826; in 1829, in Lyons, Rébecca was born. Adélaïde was born in 1830 at Saumur, on the very last, long-delayed leg of their journey to the capital, and Mélanie, the last child, in Paris in 1836.

  The family arrived in the city in August of 1831, the year after the July Revolution had installed Louis-Philippe as King of the French. Paris was hot and unstable. They took up temporary, or tentative, residence in the crowded, noisome district of the Marais, where they knew people; they were lucky to live there, untouched by disease, through the great cholera epidemic of 1832. Early biographers of Rachel insisted on the somber and romantic circumstance that the Félixes settled in an apartment opposite the Morgue (where the dead bodies were a favorite attraction, in those days, for bored Parisians and visiting tourists); some of Rachel’s more class-conscious biographers have found it telling that for a time the family lived in a little street that had been named Passage Vérot-Dodat by two pretentious merchants of those plain names. Jacques chose or was obliged to go off traveling from time to time, leaving his wife to keep the old-clothes business going: the actress Mlle Judith, in her memoirs, suggests it was a woman’s business, recalling that her mother and Rachel’s were in the same line of work. One imagines these immigrants—strangers in the capital of their country—improvising their lives and future in a city full of elusive possibilities and unknown people, many of whom were also newcomers to the city, with a sense like theirs of excited dislocation.

  IN La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836), Alfred de Musset described the “mal du siècle” of upper-class youths of his generation as an identity crisis that expressed and tried to forget itself in theatricality. The sons of fathers who had fought in the imperial wars felt themselves useless, he wrote—wanting in purpose, distinctiveness, conviction. Malaise and anomie found expression in masquerade. Without a style of their own, with and without a sense of humor or what would later be called bad faith, they borrowed the forms and fashions of other periods, betraying both their alienation from history and their preoccupation with it. He describes a kind of postmodernity avant la lettre:

  Our age has no impress of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything whatever. On the street you can see men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henri III, others who are clean-shaven, others who have their hair arranged to resemble the self-portrait of Raphael, others who look as if they lived in the time of Christ. The homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the gothic, the Renaissance style, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own—a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this thing for beauty, that for utility, another for its antiquity, still another for its very ugliness, so that we live surrounded by debris, as if the end of the world were near.

  If the sense that glory had been lost forever with the empire caused Musset’s generation to feel that the end was near, it also seemed to prove that anything was possible, and nothing reliably real. The extravagant young men of the generation of 1830—Théophile Gautier, Petrus Borel, Gérard de Nerval—protested theatrically against a world that seemed to them no more substantive or serious than a stage.

  Meanwhile the theaters of Paris flourished, attracting people of all classes. Technology and cash were deployed to keep up with popular hunger and taste: huge sums were spent at the Opéra on increasingly spectacular special effects, including a lifelike volcano. The ballet La Sylphide, with the first tutus and decorations by Ciceri, was danced there in 1832. Dance and opera were the rage; the ballerinas Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler were passionately followed, compared, and contrasted by rival parties of fans, as were the divas Malibran and Pasta. Arguing that one stood for Art, the other for Nature, the fans worried and elaborated and further polarized the terms of the old debate, reinforcing, no matter what their position, the view of women performers as personified abstractions.

  Napoleon’s had been a hard act to follow, and—especially in retrospect—it had also been clearly an act. “Bonaparte, c’est l’homme,” Alfred de Vigny wrote; “Napoléon, c’est le rôle.” Crowning himself in Notre Dame, later having himself painted in the act, and also portrayed in the regalia of a Sun King, the emperor aped the ancien régime he had begun by rejecting. Musset went so far as to see him as a self-parodist: “the last flicker of the lamp of despotism, he both destroyed and parodied kings.” Among the parodic ambiguities of the revolution of 1830, which replaced one king with another, was a resurgence of Bonapartist feeling, which as if to memorialize the dead emperor’s favorite art took a theatrical form. Napoleon plays were popular during the first years of the reign of Louis-Philippe; the nation that had just rejected the Restoration was eager to idealize the fallen hero. Martin Meisel, describing how history merged with spectacle in the period, cites Alexandre Dumas’s recollection that the new regime had barely settled into place when several directors of theaters approached him for a Napoleon play. Dumas waited for the new king’s permission to write one, and by the time he began to write without it, he recalled, “six theaters were putting on their Napoleon plays, and I, I was still waiting.” Jules Janin commented mischievously on the vogue for plays about Napoleon, writing that “one wondered who in fact reigned, Bonaparte or Louis-Philippe.” But the effect of so many Bonapartes was not altogether to praise the lost leader: Virginie Déjazet, playing Napoleon en travesti, tested the line between
mimicry and mockery. As well as nostalgia for lost glory, the rage for Napoleon plays reflected the sense that there was a problem in imagining the place of the heroic in history: Musset suggests as much with his chaotic, Shakespearean, romantic tragedy Lorenzaccio (1834), which did not get produced until 1896, when Sarah Bernhardt triumphed in the title role.

  The mix of nostalgia for a lost heroic ideal and enthusiasm for ambiguous mock heroics helped inspire the unprecedented vogue for stars. Dancers and singers and actors peopled a dense demimonde in Paris, and fascinated the great world. The great stars of the time were original performers who made egregiously theatrical, semifictional projections of themselves: the mime Deburau, who transformed the white-faced Harlequin of commedia dell’arte into his own unique persona, a gracefully expressive mute; Frédérick Lemaître, who on the basis of a rudimentary role in a mediocre play created the memorable figure of the raffish Frenchman-in-the-street, Robert Macaire. Lemaître and Deburau were admired as romantic geniuses able to express with a look or a gesture what words could not say. The success of these innovative performers, and of Marie Dorval, suggests how extraordinary Rachel had to have been to make old-fashioned rhymed tragedy riveting. On the other hand, the other stars of the time did whet the appetite that she would help to satisfy. As cartoonists appropriated the figures of Macaire and Deburau, and images of the actors embarked on lives independent of the men who created them, they delighted a public that wanted a hero and suspected there was no such thing—suspected that the age, as Byron put it in his mock epic, Don Juan, could not produce a true one. A female hero would neatly pose the problem.

  History merged in a timely way with theatricality: the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, called the “Boulevard du Crime” because of the bloody melodramas performed in the many theaters there, was chosen for an 1835 attack on Louis-Philippe’s life. The bomb that went off there was spectacular, if ineffective, and it provoked another street show. Even more than his enemies, the king required an audience: Michel Foucault, in his analysis of how power and spectacle interact, recalls the staging of the punishment of the assassin Fieschi, who was sentenced to be taken, in November, “to the place of execution wearing a shirt, barefoot, his head covered with a black veil;… exhibited upon a scaffold while an usher [read] the sentence to the people, and … immediately executed.”

  The streets of Paris produced, along with more and less solemn spectacles, the casual walker in the city, or flâneur, who mused on life as masquerade while poor saltimbanques—acrobats, jugglers, street singers, fire-eaters, clowns—competed for their attention with modish young people extravagantly costumed, and peddlers with pushcarts hawking their wares. (In a powerful series of watercolors and paintings made rather later, Daumier presented the saltimbanques as tragic clowns who epitomized the misery of the urban poor; in 1849 they were driven from the streets, when the government decided they were agents of subversion.) Contemporary caricatures of theater audiences suggest the prevailing sense that spectatorship verged on performance: Marcel Carné evokes the scene in his 1945 film, Les Enfants du paradis. Salesmen hovered near the queues outside the theaters, where the crowds were eager to be distracted as they waited, and to buy opera glasses and umbrellas, and the scripts of the new plays. It was by collecting the rights to sell those plays that Michel Lévy augmented his father’s pushcart business into Calmann-Lévy, the publishing house that would become a monument of the cultural establishment, publishers of Dumas, Flaubert, and George Sand. The Lévy family had come from the same part of the world and the same social class as the Félixes; young Michel went to school with Raphaël Félix, auditioned and was accepted at the Conservatoire, and was probably instrumental in bringing Rachel to the attention of the management of the Théâtre-Français.

  IN 1840, there were approximately nine thousand Jews in Paris, three times as many as there had been in 1808; their number would quadruple by 1880. It was a small but tightly organized and visible population. Napoleon’s appointment, in 1809, of the Jewish Consistory, a state-sanctioned center of self-government, had done much to legitimize and to encourage a Jewish presence in France. In January 1831, an act of the July Monarchy had “put Judaism on the state payroll,” in one historian’s phrase, stipulating that rabbis, like priests, were to be paid by France. Phyllis Cohen Albert writes that “when the consistory system was established … the total French Jewish population was approximately 47,000. During the next twenty-five years, under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration, it increased rapidly to a total of about 70,000 in 1831.… By 1861 it reached 96,000.” The general aim of the Jewish community of Paris was to retain religious identity while attaining social assimilation. In the school the consistory established for the likes of Raphaël Félix and Michel Lévy, to which new immigrants to Paris were enjoined to send their boys, pupils were not allowed to speak Yiddish. Frenchness, integration, was the aim. It may seem somewhat paradoxical now that racial pride was harnessed toward this end.

  By the third decade of the century, Jews had gained distinction in law, medicine, the army, science, literature, the embassies, and the new railroads. Some of them were members of Sephardic families that had fled Spain during the Inquisition, and had been long resident in France. Adolphe Crémieux, whose great-niece was to be the mother of Marcel Proust, was one of that elite group. Descended from a family of republican merchants, Crémieux became a lawyer and gained national recognition during the Restoration by his skill at political trials, especially an effective defense of two youths accused of singing the revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise. He settled in Paris in 1830 and was soon elected to the consistory, of which he became president from 1843 to 1845. He was twice a minister of the state, and a member of the French senate until his death in 1880. The lawyer whom Jacques Félix hired to defend his daughter’s interests against the Théâtre-Français was her “Papa Crémieux,” who wrote rough drafts of Rachel’s letters, at her request, to people she wanted to impress—she hoped people would think she was another Madame de Sevigné, she astonishingly said. Of greater general historical importance were Crémieux’s successful efforts to defend his people in France and abroad. In 1839 ne argued against a law that required Jews to take a special oath in court; it was repealed in 1846. In 1840, he journeyed to Damascus along with Moses Montefiore, to defend a Jew accused of ritual murder. The mid-nineteenth-century career of Crémieux illustrates both the successful integration of Jews in France and the nascent sense of a Jewish identity that transcended national borders. For his achievement as a Jew and a Frenchman, he is remembered as having “rehabilitated the Jew in Europe.”

  A cultured man and a zealous patron of the arts, Crémieux was the cordial host of writers and artists. Delighted by the idea of a Jewish queen of tragedy, he invited the young Rachel to become an intimate of his family, among whom she picked up shreds of education and some notion of respectable life: people enjoyed the story that the lawyer had defined the word “firmament” for the ignorant child, and the other one that—amazed that she knew only her own lines—he had explained the various plots of the classical plays to her, including, with quite unnecessary delicacy, that of Phèdre. Perhaps sloppy habits of expression she had caught on the street account for Rachel’s signing some of her letters to Crémieux “Yours, body and soul”; she maintained that he was the only man who had never made her a proposition.

  Emile Péreire, like Crémieux a member of an old Sephardic family, opened the Paris-Saint-Germain railroad in 1835; newer Jewish arrivals were also thriving in the Paris of the 1830s. The Rothschilds and the Foulds gained importance in finance; Halévy and Meyerbeer were conspicuous in the arts. These representatives of their people delighted ordinary Jews as proof of the witlessness of their enemies, and promise of their own ultimate success. The impoverished juiverie that filled the cheap seats—the paradis—to applaud Rachel wanted France to have a Jewish reine de théâtre, and wanted to have a hand in her fame; so did her wealthy and prominent coreligionists, who loaned her their je
wels when she appeared in the role of the avenging Jewish heroine Judith.

  Jews were turning up, increasingly, on both sides of the footlights in the theaters. Eager to get on, enterprising and adaptable, socially marginal and used to improvising, they had, both their friends and enemies argued, a special affinity for the stage. Like Jews, actors were not respectable: in France they were denied Christian marriage and burial. Implicitly, the theater invited Jews. Their importance there has been variously interpreted and reinterpreted: one historian of French Jewry protests, for example, that “the remark in Proust’s great novel about a dramatic producer who changed his name to Samuel so that he might be more successful was not an antisemitic gibe, but a bow to the prominence of the Jews in the theaters.” Jewish actresses and models were in fashion in the 1830s and 1840s; Jewish parents who see their daughters as salable commodities are a staple of nineteenth-century fiction.

  The stereotype of the Jew who confuses his ducats and his daughter easily embraced Jacques Félix, who aimed unapologetically to get what he could from Rachel. He was perhaps distinctive in desiring cultural legitimacy as well as money. As careful of her image as a Hollywood agent, he indignantly refused, for example, to allow her to play the role of “une mulâtresse,” in a play about the Haitian revolution by Lamartine. He had more imagination than most men, according to Julie Bernat, Mlle Judith of the Comédie-Française, who recalled in her memoir that when she was a child living in the same Paris neighborhood as the Félixes, Jacques enlisted her into the performing group he hoped to make of his young children, having been inspired after some visiting Italian child actors, the Castelli Troupe, were acclaimed at the Salle Ventadour. He fed the children mostly on potatoes, she remembered, and worked them very hard; she also claimed that he tried to molest her sexually—hardly the only negative thing that was said about him, but the only one of this kind. Dictating her memoirs in advanced old age, after a career of rivalry with Rachel, she remembered her colleague’s father as an immoral man who made his wife work for him, and an exigent, excellent teacher.