A radically sanitized and idealized version of Félix figures in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Tancred (1847). Baroni is the benign and enterprising patriarch of a family of wandering Italian Jewish acrobats. Poor players, they are (like the Disraelis, and unlike the Félixes) Sephardic, more exotic and cultivated than ordinary East European Jews. They belong to a spiritual aristocracy of artists as well. Baroni’s adolescent daughter Josephine is already set apart from the others—they all are gifted—by the solemn foreknowledge that she will be, one day, the “glory of the French stage; without any question the most admirable tragic actress since Clairon.” Destiny has chosen her to awaken “the spirit of French tragedy … from the imperial couch on which it had long slumbered.” Her art is instinctive and innate; her father, acceding to its force, says, “I let her do this to please herself.” The story of the Baronis is a strangely unmotivated pastoral interlude in a novel about a young Englishman’s pilgrimage to Palestine in search of a purer original Christianity. It is told to the hero by the rich, powerful, cosmopolitan Jew Sidonia, partly so as to illustrate his belief that “All is race; there is no other truth.” In Disraeli’s earlier novel, Coningsby (1844), this same philosophical Sidonia argued that musical Jews are the purest example of the unpolluted Caucasian race:
The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations, the imagination fervent with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus, and which we have preserved unpolluted, have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of MUSIC; that science of harmonious sounds, which the ancients recognised as most divine, and deified in the person of their most beautiful creation.… [W]ere I to enter into the history of the lords of melody, you would find it the annals of Hebrew genius. But at this moment even, musical Europe is ours. There is not a company of singers, not an orchestra in a single capital, that is not crowded with our children under the feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and disgust. Almost every great composer, skilled musician, almost every voice that ravishes you with its transporting strains, springs from our tribes. The catalogue is too vast to enumerate: too illustrious to dwell for a moment on secondary names, however eminent. Enough for us that the three great creative minds to whose exquisite inventions all nations at this moment yield, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, are of Hebrew race; and little do your men of fashion, your muscadins of Paris, and your dandies of London, as they thrill into raptures at the notes of a Pasta or a Grisi, little do they suspect that they are offering their homage to “the sweet singers of Israel!”
Sidonia is smug and even spiteful as he contemplates the success of Jewish performers in a Jew-hating society. His Baroni story seems to be motivated by a related impulse: to claim Rachel for the Jews, which also seems to be Disraeli’s motive. Framed as a little history separate from events chronicled by the novel, the portrait of the wandering players is set apart like Brontë’s sketch of Vashti in Villette. The Baronis seem to exist on a different ontological level, in an ideal pastoral world—though they are linked to the wider world through Sidonia, who enjoys mysterious international influence (and transcends Tancred, turning up as he does in another Disraeli novel).
At least one early reader wondered who the Baronis of Tancred were actually based on. “Did you not think the picture of the Baroni family interesting?” Mary Ann Evans wrote to a friend in 1848. “I should like to know who are the originals.” The woman who would become George Eliot judged Tancred the least of Disraeli’s trilogy, “very ‘thin’ and inferior” to Coningsby and Sybil. She added that Sidonia’s philosophy repelled her: “Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade,” she declared. In her last novel, she would counter Disraeli’s picture of Baroni, and utterly revise her view of Jews. Two of the minor characters in Daniel Deronda (1876) are Jewish women performers with significant fathers. Mirah Lapidoth, who marries the hero at the end, is a poor and gentle girl with a sweet voice, the daughter of a rascally hanger-on of fairs and theaters who steals her from his pious wife and schemes, at one point, to sell her to a rich, lascivious gentile. She suggests Rachel less urgently than another character in the novel, the hero’s imperious mother, a successful diva. In her youth, Leonora Charisi rebelled against her good Jewish father, who forbade her to go onstage; as a middle-aged woman, she is tormented by remorse for having done so. In contrast, Mirah manages to escape her bad father, and will thrive (and leave the stage, which she hates). Together, and braided with the story of the English heroine Gwendolen Harleth, these women’s stories evoke the legends about Rachel and her father; they elaborate George Eliot’s complex, conflicted attitudes toward daughterly and womanly duty and guilt, and her fears of the killing possibilities of an artist-woman who acts out her own will, desires, and genius.
According to Rachel’s biographers, the real Jacques Félix was closer to Eliot’s rascally Lapidoth than to either Disraeli’s benign Baroni or her own holy Charisi: sharp-witted, hardheaded, selfish, and vulgar. They write his lines in the accent Balzac gave the rich Jewish Baron de Nucingen; they insist that his greed drove the greatest wage-earner in the family to her early grave. Many nevertheless acknowledge his talent and acumen. In his memoir of Rachel, Védel of the Comédie-Française repeats the well-circulated funny story of the father saying, absurdly, “That was some good ‘Rome’ she gave me today,” after his daughter’s rendition of Camille’s great high-minded tirade. Védel observes that, for all his ridiculous half-German, half-French pronunciation, the man had taste, and a perfect understanding of poetry. Heinrich Heine saw the conjunction of Félix and high tragedy as irremediably ridiculous: “Père Rachel preens himself with the success of his daughter,” he wrote, reporting on the cultural scene in Paris. “There he stands, in the stalls of the Théâtre-Français—an old Jew—and thinks that he is Iphigenia or Andromache, that it is his declamation that has moved all hearts; and when the audience applauds, he blushes and bows.” The figure of Félix lends itself to caricature, exemplifying as it does two related stereotypes: the parasitical stage parent and the Jew showman. As usual, racial prejudices reinforce antitheatrical ones: Clara Schumann’s father, who exploited her as Félix exploited his daughter, was never so generally condemned. Rachel’s biographers take a more sardonic version of the satiric tone Thackeray takes in Pendennis, when he draws the drunken, feckless Irish father of the actress who calls herself, mellifluously, Emily Fotheringay, but is really just plain, lower-class Miss Costigan. Dickens, in an essay, more gently characterized the indigenous London variant on the stage father. He calls him a “gaslight fairy,” a man “principally employed in lurking about a public house, and waylaying the theatrical profession for two-pence wherewith to purchase a glass of ale,” who lives off his daughter’s blind loyalty: “Miss Fairy never relinquishes the belief that that incorrigible old Fairy, the father, is a wonderful man!… She has grown up in this conviction, will never correct it, will die in it.” By her side her father, a failed or would-be actor, proves that fairies, although they seem to be such from seats in the audience, are not in fact real; to focus on him is to begin to debunk his daughter, whose charming, stupid devotion to him begins to suggest her own serious limitations. Together, daughter and father pose the problem the theater sets by being a mixture of art and commerce, “high” and “low.” In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the greasy Jewish manager of otherwise fatherless Sibyl Vane serves similarly as both a foil to her magic and a hint that the theater is a business. The magic of the theater, on the other hand, can make even Jews into something else: in Tancred, the pièce de résistance of the tumbler-patriarch Baroni and his children is a tableau vivant in which the whole family arranges itself, as if turned to stone, to mime familiar Christian religious paintings.
Was Jacques Félix maligned by his enemies? Might he not have been a cultured man in fact, for all his accent? Hard to say; and hard, even, to debate the question without calling on and falling into stereotypes. Here is a
recent letter to a newspaper, objecting to a “needlessly unkind” characterization of a dead movie magnate as a vulgarian: “The first time I saw Sam Spiegel, in 1941 or ’42, he was in a barber chair reading ‘Swann’s Way,’ in the Modern Library Edition, while his hair was being cut.… He was a man of culture, a master of languages, a man of true, broad understanding and sensitivity.”
COMING TO FAME in the Paris of Halévy’s La Juive, at a moment when Shakespeare and Scott were especially admired in France, Rachel and her father might have been generated by literary stereotype—Jessica and Shylock, Rebecca and Isaac of York. A French variation on the couple occurs in Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons (1847), where miserly “Magus the collector” has a daughter, “a beautiful girl, like all Jewesses who incarnate the Asian type in all its purity and nobility.” Magus is a “monomaniac,” one of those “strange figures so devoted to their particular religion” that you see in the city, “a Jew with a three-million treasure around him,” who is “one of the finest spectacles the human race can offer.” With pointed irony, the narrator remarks, “Our great actor, Frédérick Lemaître, superb as he is, cannot rise to poetry like this.” The Jewish father and his lovely daughter, offered as specimens to ponder, are art objects with very different, indeed opposite, provenances, the man being a creature of the crowded, European city of commercial exchange and real actors, and the young woman a representative of a remote idealized East—a Jew of the Bible, not the Bourse. The father at her side sets off her sexuality the way a eunuch in a harem does—also sets her up as a commodity.
“He is the Wandering Jew, and I am his four sous,” Rachel supposedly said of her brother Raphaël, who eventually became her (rapacious) manager. But some of her critics insisted from the first on her own, independent, active greed. As early as March 1841, the Courrier des théâtres reported that poor old Félix had only accepted the role of heavy to save his daughter’s image: “He’s only a puppet, it’s the child who’s pulling the strings.” Biographers like to tell how she sweated out the dull aftermath of a triumphant tour in Lyons because the gold crown she had been promised was not ready (she collected crowns, and gold as well, and had been assured that this gift from the city of her youth would be gratifyingly heavy). “Moi, je suis juive,” Mlle Judith was supposed to have remarked complacently; “Rachel, c’est un juif.” The epigram, useful for characterizing Rachel as unfeminine and unnatural, was much quoted. Insisting on Rachel’s avariciousness, Hector Fleischmann pontificates, “Greed is only natural, in Père Félix; in Rachel, it’s a vice.” The star’s partisans told different stories, about a childish love of beautiful objects that made her want whatever she saw, and give it away almost immediately. They said she held onto a new toy or jewel no more than four days. Without the good financial management of her father, Arsène Houssaye writes, she would have left nothing at all behind for her children and parents.
The benefit performances for other actors that Rachel appeared or refused to appear in, the ones she arranged for members of her immediate family, are cited by her admirers and her detractors to make opposite points. Sums she contributed to victims of floods and epidemics (too little? too showy?) are adduced as evidence that she was and was not both typical and perverse; the house she furnished for her sister Rébecca proves both her generosity and her Jewish allegiance to her own. People prefer their entertainers (the women especially) to be impulsive, even demonic, rather than calculating. Admirers of Mrs. Siddons were horrified to hear she cared about box-office receipts. Men flatter themselves to think an actress gives herself involuntarily, or at least generously, and pay to entertain the illusion that the other side of the coin isn’t there. Jonas Barish, observing that the Roman actor Roscius did not “play” for money, asks, “Why should it have been so much more unacceptable for actors to receive pay than for members of other callings? Why should the celebrated Roscius have felt it necessary to decline all reward for his performances? Would he have done so if society had not made it seem ignoble for actors to be remunerated for their work?” In Rome, he notes, love of actors and contempt for them became allied: “The gradually eroding link between religion and theater was to turn the theater, a source of pleasure, adrift from its moorings in morality, and thereby inspire a guilt such that the Romans, recoiling from their own pleasures, came to persecute the purveyors of them even as their addiction to them intensified.”
LIKE HER FATHER, Rachel’s energetic older sister Sarah is often invoked as the tellingly vulgar counterpart of Rachel. “My crazy sister,” Rachel called her, and paid her debts. Sarah won renown as a compliant amoureuse rather than an exigent one, a soupeuse vaillante or party girl who moved merrily from lover to lover. The tragedienne was often embarrassed by her elder, whom she roundly rebuked by mail for bad behavior (during the years with Walewski, she wrote at least one note to herself vowing to be nicer to Sarah). A particularly severe but poignant lecture was provoked by a letter from Rébecca that described a terrible scene at home. “My dear Sarah, it is time to change your character,” Rachel writes, declaring she can no longer tolerate her family’s behavior. “I am humiliated to see my family go on this way, so much that I ask if God was not wrong in taking us out of the filth in which we were all living before my entry upon a dramatic career.… You are none of you worthy of the happiness which God has poured out among us these past ten years.… Is there any family where there is less heart than among us?” She ends by observing there’s nothing filthier than Sarah’s filthy mouth, adding “the advice of a sincere friend,” evidently apropos of Sarah’s treatment of Rébecca: to bend in the world, where one does have need of others, or at least not to repay them with injuries.
Bold Sarah rushed out to meet the world head-on, playing the fool in early life, even going to jail at one point when a lover left her behind to pay the hotel bill. Her more clever younger sister, subtler and more gifted, out-shone her. But in the end Sarah proved to be more sensible than not: in middle age, prefiguring the career move of many shrewd actresses today, she put her name on a product called “Eaux des Fées” or “Eau Sarah Félix”—“souveraine pour la régénération de la chevelure,” according to the advertisement—and managed to make some money. (Evidently she lost it, but she continued enterprising: later, she opened an oyster farm in Normandy.) The two girls had started out together, first on the streets of Lyons and later in Paris: Sarah was acting in the little Théâtre du Panthéon where Rachel sold brochures and flowers (pursuing her studies, she primly told the men who asked what a girl like her was doing there). The sisters always remained close. Sarah accompanied Rachel to Egypt, where someone did a drawing of them in their barge on the Nile, nervous Rachel hard at work on her embroidery, buxom Sarah relaxed among the pillows. Sarah was as healthy as the day was long, Rachel reported home to their mother. “She glows, and she would make the sun pale if she looked back at it.”
Talma’s father had been a valet de chambre, but the fact hardly figures in his legend. In contrast, Rachel’s emergence from the bosom of her unlikely, awful family was always crucial. Her gender and religion made the difference. Women are defined by their connections as men are not; also Rachel flaunted her family. The early experience of poverty, the sense of being outside French society, kept her close to her parents and brother and sisters. Since she never married, and they were gifted and ambitious, too, all the Félixes surrounded her in the public eye: the Théâtre-Français turned into a synagogue, wits complained, when their powerful sister arranged for Raphaël and Rébecca Félix, Sarah and Lia and even the child Mélanie, to join her onstage. (All became variously successful, independently.) While some were astonished by the family talent, most commentators could look no further than the marvellous fact that Rachel, with such parents and such a crowd of relatives, became or seemed to become the rare creature she was.
There are very few anecdotes about Rachel’s mother, as there are only a few about her motherhood: patriarchal legend must have it that she was produced either by a miracle or by
a man. Clothes figure in all the stories about the old-clothes woman, who supposedly made Rachel a hat fashioned from ill-assorted scraps of fabric—her only hat, made to serve in all seasons—when she was admitted to the Conservatoire and given a pass to the Théâtre-Français. Mme Félix is said to have piled extra petticoats on the child when she went to her first interview with Samson, then unabashedly pulled them off when he complained she was too fat. After her first triumphant tour of England, the star supposedly came home and draped a rich paisley shawl, the gift of a duchess, on her mother’s humble shoulders. While they retain a remnant of Thérèse Félix’s historical reality, the stories about her also imply she was immaterial: a sloppy housekeeper who relegated the cooking and marketing and the younger children to the care of Rachel, while Sarah cavorted with boyfriends. A vulgarian peasant mother is easily summoned up by the structure of legends like Rachel’s; in fact, Rachel found Thérèse sufficiently sortable to take her along as a chaperone in her first years of fame.
A jolly early letter from Rachel to her mother, planning a picnic, and another written on tour from Poland, about the East European food that reminds her of her mother’s cooking, suggest a certain coziness between mother and daughter. But Rachel’s letters to her father are more frank and fluent: it is to him that she confides details about her health (including her monthly periods), always urging him to assure the mother that all is well. Mme Félix was overly anxious about her daughter’s health, possibly because she depended on her daughter’s earnings. Papa is lovable, writes Rachel to Sarah in the 1850s, and she is not at all surprised their younger sisters prefer his company to that of Mama, whose character is so grasping and self-interested. When Rachel was away on tour Mme Félix went to pick up her salary at the Théâtre-Français, and Rachel sought to please her from afar with gifts and flattery, insisting, in a letter from America, that she hire (at her daughter’s expense) a carriage for the four winter months, in order to travel in a style befitting the mother of a grande tragédienne—and visit her grandchildren when she pleased. Charming with little jokes and intimacies was the tragedienne’s style: letters written around the same time to her business agent suggest Rachel preferred to keep her boys from leaving school to visit the Félixes—possibly to keep them at their work (they were not great students), but perhaps also (she was ambitious for them, socially, and had had both of them baptized) in order to protect them from the ancestral “filth” she herself always managed to navigate and even to exploit so brilliantly. There may be some truth to the story Victor Hugo tells of how Mme Félix deliberately degraded the three-year-old grandson of Napoleon, dressing him in rags and training him to make sassy remarks about his father and his mother’s rivals.
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