Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  The Félixes survived their daughter and ended their lives in respectable dignity on the estate Rachel had bought them, in the village of Montmorency.

  ONLY A RIVAL FATHER can efface the ignoble family central to the legend of miraculous birth, and make the story of Rachel’s achievement realistic and plausible—turn it, that is, into another exemplum of patriarchy, the tale of a goddess not born of woman but made by a man. The story that Lana Turner was discovered as she sat on a stool at Schwab’s soda fountain in Hollywood was anticipated by the various legends about Rachel. In the most familiar version, Victor Hugo notices the starved little girl, too young to understand a dirty word, reciting scabrous verses to a crowd of leering men on the Place Royale; he pauses, sadly shakes his sage’s head, then thrusts some pure poems of his own, with a gold coin, into her thin hand. As he walks away the child stares after him, eyes shining, unable to understand why her less perceptive sister cannot see the halo round his head.

  There is an embarrassment of candidates for the role of Rachel’s true father, the Christian who—like the father of the heroine of La Juive—is revealed at the end to be the legitimate source of her imaginative superiority. In the actress’s case it is no lost “real” father who turns up surprisingly to disclose a secret origin, but the Pygmalion whose efforts transformed her into an object of art. Rachel played up to various would-be Pygmalions, quickly catching on to what men could do for her, saying what was needful to get their help. In January 1839, for instance, the eighteen-year-old actress writes prettily to the literary Marquis de Custine, assuring him she has taken his suggestion about the way to deliver a verse of Roxane’s, and begging him to return her letter after correcting all the errors in it (he evidently did). Men like Custine and Crémieux facilitated the career of Rachel as significantly as the men who assisted her professionally: the music master Etienne Choron, her first teacher; the actor Saint-Aulaire, who ran the little theater where she first studied acting and publicly performed; Delestre-Poirson, who made possible her Paris debut at the Théâtre du Gymnase, and amiably released her from her contract when she decided to return to the Comédie-Française; and the several more self-important others who asserted their claims to her fame more flagrantly.

  The thing to remember about Pygmalion’s story is that it is not Galatea’s. It is a myth about a man whose ideal becomes real in a beautiful woman’s form. As interpreted by nineteenth-century artists, the dream is intensely erotic: a painting by Gérôme catches the charged magic moment when the statue on the pedestal stirs into flesh as the sculptor yearns breathlessly toward her. But when Shaw conceived his barely sexed Henry Higgins, who turns a vulgar little flower-seller into a lady worthy of bouquets, he made another important point about Pygmalion: women are not his main interest. The story of the sculptor whose statue becomes real is an alternative kind of creation myth, in which man, not God or woman, makes life. Pygmalion is an artist—a craftsman—so skillful that the work he produces is in effect natural, like the grapes of the Greek painter who fooled the birds. The story of Pygmalion gained new retaliatory resonances as the age of mechanical reproduction began, and the romantic myth of the creator became problematic. As cheap engravings of paintings, plaster replicas of statues, caricatures and photographs began to change the way people looked at artists and art, the audiences that applauded volcanoes at the Opéra trembled on the cusp of modernity: they were thrilled by the patently fake and stagy and at the same time stirred by the idea that creative genius might make mere matter quicken into life.

  The number of Pygmalions who figured in Rachel’s career suggests the appeal the legend had in her time, proves the fertility of the legend-making faculty, and indicates how much a talent like hers could promise in the 1830s. The financial, social, political, and cultural importance of the theater is suggested by the range of those who are said to have “discovered” her and trained her, and those who sought to influence or use or control her. Individually and as a group, these men reflect the forces that came together in her self-contradictory image. In her story, they become legendary themselves, representations of the opposing forces she figured. On the question of whether the young actress was to be seen as an artist or an artifact, a thinking being or a mere commodity, they fall out somewhat surprisingly.

  Obscure talents, like remote countries, are “discovered” by those who seek to exploit them. It was not of course true that no one had seen her before Rachel was found playing the guitar as her sister sang on the streets of Lyons (not the Place Royale in Paris) by a musician. But Etienne Choron had in mind a use for her. He was a kindly Parisian with an interest in education: his system for teaching reading and writing at the same time, which presumably made the nine-year-old Rachel literate (supposing her parents had not done so), continued in use, in France, for decades after his death. He was passionately committed to early music written for church choirs. It was not a fashionable art in the years after the Restoration, and the school in which he trained promising boys and girls to sing together lost its government support as a result of anti-Catholic feeling attendant on the revolution of 1830. Choron continued to run the school at his own expense, continuing also to scout for young talent. The little girls on the Lyons street appealed to his ear—the two girls probably sang together, the dark one harmonizing with the blonde’s sweeter and higher voice—and he went home with them to meet their father, who agreed to enroll them in Choron’s school. The commitment might have encouraged the family’s move to the capital: at the time the men met, Félix was sick in bed, out of work, and discouraged.

  In Paris, in September 1831, a month after the family arrived, the girls were signed up at school, unaccountably as “Mesdemoiselles de Saint-Félix.” The institution was residential. The parents traveled at least part of the time while the girls were studying there: in a postscript to a letter that Rachel wrote to her parents, Choron asked the Félixes to look around for a young tenor for him (indicating his commitment to his enterprise and his faith in the Félixes’ taste). His faith in their child soon proved to have been misplaced: Rachel was a good student, he told them, but her gifts were not for singing. This chorus-master, unlike the music teacher Porpora in George Sand’s Consuelo, was not to be gratified by transforming a waif of the streets into a brilliant solo singer like Pauline Viardot. Still, Rachel’s vocal training, what she learned from Choron about rhythm and ensemble work, and reverence for a traditional, solemn, spiritually uplifting art, prepared her for the great career that was to come. She would always speak with respect of her first teacher. There is a story that destiny or instinct impelled Choron’s student to seize a tablecloth one day, and wrap it around her as if it were a toga to signal the direction she could not but take. Something like that must have helped the music master discover that her gift was for acting. And since he was not unworldly, he was in a position to recommend a girl who could not sing—it would be wrong to describe her as having no voice—to a friend of his in Paris named Saint-Aulaire, an actor of the Comédie-Française who like him had an interest in forming youthful talent.

  The very existence of Saint-Aulaire’s Théâtre Molière begins to suggest the demand for new performers in Paris in the 1830s. The Opéra and the Boulevard houses were voracious for young theatrical flesh; the number of theaters and the volume of business they had, the possibilities for fame and fortune that were available only there, attracted ambitious and talented people who wanted to escape from the growing ranks of the wretched urban poor. Girls ran away from hopeless homes to become rats of the corps de ballet, prepared to suffer at the whim of tyrannical directors and possibly to be noticed by the manager or by one of the black-hatted pleasure-seekers, depicted (later) by Degas and Manet, who prowled the corridors backstage. Poor parents sometimes exploited and colluded with dependent, ambitious children. The theater was a hard and risky business, in which few made real money and fewer enjoyed dignity. Actors and actresses were expected to submit utterly to their employers: historically, the managers
of the theaters of the fairs had been entitled to fine and even jail misbehaving performers. But students who were accepted at the Conservatoire might hope to have a chance to become, eventually, comédiens français, who enjoyed some measure of the national company’s dignity and (should they become sociétaires) voting rights and a stipulated percentage of the profits. A new government order, motivated by concern over the state theater’s decline, directed the Comédie-Française to hold auditions in the fall of 1836.

  The actors at Saint-Aulaire’s Théâtre Molière would have been among the first to hear about these auditions. The shabby outpost of the Théâtre-Française had two social functions: for a pittance, it entertained working-class audiences, educating them in the French literary and dramatic tradition by the way, and meanwhile it trained children of the poor who hoped to be actors, and served them as a showcase. Rachel’s brother’s schoolmate Michel Lévy was a member of Saint-Aulaire’s company: like Rachel, he lived at home and helped out his peddler parents, getting away to the theater only when work permitted. At the Théâtre Molière, Rachel was introduced to the classical repertoire, and trained in the traditional high declamatory style. She learned to speak her words and bear her body with the elegance and grace perfected by late-Renaissance courtiers, who understood—as we still do—that the surest markers of social class and personal taste are pronunciation and posture. At an academy for aristocratic young ladies, another girl might have been schooled quite similarly. In addition, Rachel acquired a skill: she memorized the specific gestures and inflections that had been developed by the Comédie-Française to encode certain emotions and accompany particular verses in the classical repertoire. She emerged from Saint-Aulaire’s workshop a different kind of person, confident of her ability to impersonate.

  Some conservatives disapproved of Saint-Aulaire for being less rigorously prescriptive than he should have been. Védel’s defense of him suggests he was (quietly) one of those advocates of more natural acting who, since Diderot and Talma, had sought to overthrow or undermine the faith in absolute fidelity to tradition. “Everything in the theater is only an illusion,” Védel wrote, “everything depends on the character, the voice, the appearance of an individual, on something indescribable that leads a person in the direction of one genre rather than another. M. St.-Aulaire attempted to discover the dramatic instincts of his students, rather than impose them; correctly, he wanted the theatrical process to make those instincts evident.” Saint-Aulaire’s laissez-faire policy allowed the young Rachel to do comedy as well as tragedy, to take men’s roles as well as women’s—much has been made of this—but her natural bent for tragedy soon was clear. The American actor Edwin Forrest, passing through Paris in 1834, was struck by “that Jewish-looking girl” he saw at the little showcase theater; his description of Rachel strikingly anticipates most of the rhetorical figures that would be used to construct the star. In “that little bag of bones with the marble face and flaming eyes” he could see “demoniacal power.” He predicted, “If she lives and does not burn out too soon, she will become something wonderful.” When Védel, then the treasurer of the Théâtre-Français, came to the Théâtre Molière to see another actor one day, he was much struck by Rachel in the title role of Andromaque. Her intelligence, the purity of her diction, her naturalness in speaking Racine’s lines impressed him: so did her puniness, the weirdness of her dignity. Like Edwin Forrest and nearly everyone else who wrote about Rachel, Védel was probably projecting his own uncomfortable self-division onto her when he traced her unusual power to the force of irreconcilable opposites: “I was unable to reconcile that fragile nature and that remarkable intelligence,” he wrote. He urged the Comédie-Française to audition her, and she was admitted to the Conservatoire in October 1836. A small stipend of six hundred francs was allotted her.

  Gratified by success, the young actress was soon pining for the applause of real audiences, the exhilaration of great roles. And the birth of the last Félix child, Mélanie, made her parents eager to have her work for money. Before Rachel had been given a role at the Théâtre-Français, she was successfully tempted to sign a contract with the directors of the Théâtre du Gymnase: the lure of a real paying job, the flattery of a play written expressly for his daughter to star in, were hard for Jacques Félix to turn down. Later, people would interpret Rachel’s early move to the Théâtre du Gymnase as symptomatic, observing that even in her youth she was easily deflected from service to France and high art by her appetites for money and applause. Gérard de Nerval wrote critically much later that far from being a miraculous born tragedienne, Rachel was merely an ambitious little boulevard actress who had willed herself to be something more.

  Father and daughter signed with Delestre-Poirson of the Théâtre du Gymnase, who advertised the Paris debut of the actress Rachel, and the fifteen-year-old girl began rehearsing. The plot of the new play written for her by Paul Duport, La Vendéenne, adapts the story, from Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian, of Jeanie Deans. In the novel, the heroine walks from Edinburgh to London to ask the king’s mercy for her sister, who has been condemned to death for the crime of infanticide. In Duport’s play the heroine is from the region of France that resisted the Revolution and remained loyal to the king even after Napoleon came to power; her father has been condemned for taking part in the legitimist uprising in the Vendée, and she walks to Malmaison to plead for the clemency of the Empress Joséphine. Paul Duport’s was one of fifteen staged versions of the Scott novel, and a variation on the popular Napoleon play designed to please legitimist and Bonapartist alike. It meant also to exploit Rachel’s youth, starved pallor, and fervor—and it began to elaborate her legend. It was easy to believe in this girl’s dutiful daughterliness, and her fierce fidelity to a private vision of the Virgin Mary, who appears to the Vendéenne and directs her to go to Paris to save her father—as Rachel had done, people would say, looking back.

  Suddenly she moves toward me

  And with a finger seems to point

  To a huge and unknown city

  Only one sole word she breathes:

  “Paris!” whereupon she adds,

  As if in answer to my prayer,

  “Go alone on foot, for there

  You will save your father’s life.”

  Most people had only moderate praise for the new actress in La Vendéenne, including the fluent Jules Janin, who had become theater critic of the Journal des débats in 1836. In the opinion of the self-styled “prince of critics,” as he fatuously called himself, “the child would never be acclaimed as a prodigy.” (Janin, who made a career of Rachel as he helped make her a star, would use up a good deal of ink in an effort to drown this assertion.)

  Nevertheless, La Vendéenne had a decent run. It was followed by Le Mariage de raison, in which Rachel attempted to re-create a role recently played by a deft comic actress with a high feminine voice and healthy good looks. She was unsuccessful. Delestre-Poirson agreed to let her break her contract, and she set about to seek readmission to the Conservatoire. Was it because she saw she had no gift for comedy that the hope of doing tragedy returned with force? Because she was—Samson would say it—intelligent enough to know how little she knew? She wrote to Védel, who had first admired her, appealing for his help; when he made no reply she turned directly to Samson, who had been one of her three teachers at the Conservatoire. He agreed to take her on as a private student to prepare her to return to the Comédie.

  IN A SPLENDID PHOTOGRAPH by Carjat, Joseph-Isidore Samson looks almost like a bronze. The face is clever and benign, with shrewd eyes and a wide mouth—also a little weary. If he is not quite an absolute bourgeois, with his tie askew and his perceptible rumple, he is clearly a man of substance and decisiveness, definitely proud of himself, and more than a bit of a ham. He and his wife had three daughters and a son, an apartment near the Théâtre-Français, and a house in the country. The maître took no money from Rachel for his lessons, but did demand a small sum from Jacques Félix to pay
the governess of his daughters, whose lessons Rachel shared. It was said that in the Samsons’ foyer she acquired the basics of those elegant manners that would carry her in triumph through the palaces of kings; more likely, she learned them as Samson spoke the lines of princes, rehearsing her. During the summer of 1837, she studied as much as she could with her teacher, sometimes spending weekends with his family in the country; but she lived with her parents still, practicing the role of Hermione in the cramped quarters under the roof, scraping a carrot for the family stew—brandishing it in the face of an imaginary Pyrrhus, legend goes, then ferociously chopping it up into pieces with great glee, the carrot having become the faithless lover. She had to wait for her single dress to dry, she wrote Mme Samson, in a note asking to be excused for tardiness. Samson was as enthusiastic and as tireless as his pupil: he was committed to the Comédie-Française and its repertoire, proud of his art of teaching acting, excited—as Choron and Saint-Aulaire had been—by the possibility of grooming a star, above all thrilled by his new pupil’s aptness. Biographers like to say he set about his work on her as if on a block of marble.