Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  The actor Joseph-Isidore Samson, from a photograph by Carjat

  Racine had carefully schooled La Champmeslé, his star and mistress, going so far as to note on her scripts the precise inflections she was to use. (After his death, they said, her acting deteriorated.) When Rachel performed in works by living playwrights, the writer would direct her. Samson saw himself as a surrogate for the dead poet-playwrights who would have shown her how to render their lines. Others saw it differently. Gossip was rife: gossips know that characters, like plots, repeat themselves. A century before Rachel, the adolescent Adrienne Lecouvreur had been similarly spotted and trained by Marc-Antoine Legrand, an actor who, like Samson, was said to have been better as a teacher than as a player; Adrienne presumably became his mistress in exchange for training. Even if we grant that Samson’s virtue was as unimpeachable as he and his wife maintained, there were no doubt erotic forces at work as the older man instructed the girl in the art of playing a woman, praised and criticized her, awakened in her an appetite for his full attention that he could or would not always satisfy. Inevitably, there was rivalry between the possessive feelings of the militantly respectable Samsons (actors who, after all, had to insist on their own dignity) and the raffish, ambitious Félixes; but surely the parents were not altogether distressed to have their daughter thus promisingly taken up. Characteristically, Rachel played off one set of parents against the other, telling Samson that as a father of well-brought-up daughters he of course understood what she owed her parents. “I will always say everywhere that if I am something today, I owe it to you,” she assures him, after he and her father (negotiating for her) have quarreled.

  In February 1838, Samson persuaded Védel, now the director of the Théâtre-Français, to hear Rachel in his living room. Védel was impressed. Early in March she was given a free pass for the theater, and in April she (and her father—she was still a minor) signed a contract: at a salary of four thousand francs per year, the Comédie-Française engaged her as a pensionnaire. The wrangles over whom she belonged to now began in earnest, and they would become more impassioned as the stakes very quickly got higher and higher.

  SAMSON’S PROPRIETARY feelings about Rachel were expressed in a cautionary didactic letter he wrote and published when she first became the toast of Paris. In clumsy rhymed couplets, he laid out the principles of the art of acting as he saw them, and warned against the recitations at private parties that would debase her art and ruin her health. In a suggestive confusion of biblical imagery, he warned against worshiping and being worshiped as the golden calf. The admonition was aimed at the public as well as at Rachel: Samson (and his wife) were not only contemptuous but fearful of the praise of the ignorant. They knew that the quality of an audience could affect a performance—and perhaps a career. The Samsons were Parisians, elitists, proud to be “of the Comédie-Française”: passing through Brussels, Mme Samson was seriously distressed, once, by the sight of a farmer’s cart drawn up in front of a theater where Rachel was performing. More narrowly, it was an article of Samson’s artistic creed that the space of performance affected an actor’s relation to a role. In the intimacy of home, he wrote, an actor might (to his loss) lose himself and feel he had become the character he played: the optique du Théâtre required an art and a calculation that maintained the requisite balance.

  Decades later, when Sarah Bernhardt recalled the different approaches of her various professors at the Conservatoire, she described Provost’s as “broad,” Regnier’s as “true,” and Samson’s as “precise.” In Samson’s view, there was a correct way of rendering not only each role but each word. Rachel, he argued, had needed his teaching: how else would a girl like her, no matter how talented, know what to do with the great roles? He articulated his eighteenth-century aesthetic most emphatically in a public “letter” (this time in prose) to Jules Janin, written in response to the publication of Rachel et la tragédie shortly after the actress’s death. Infuriated by Janin’s breezy dismissal of him as a teacher whom Rachel had soon sent on his way, and determined that a man he despised should not have the definitive word about either her or himself, Samson documented his own sustained importance in her life and art, then went on to argue that she could not have done without him. Acceptance of the playwright’s authority is the ground of his argument. How should an actor know what to do with a text when its author is dead? he asks. The age of creative directors was far in the future: Samson argued that it was the pride of the Comédie-Française to preserve and to honor Racine’s instructions to La Champmeslé. Rachel, he observed, had had no models: when she started out, Mlles Raucourt, Maillart, and Duchesnois were already dead, and Mlle George had turned to the modern repertoire. He himself had performed the function of a necessary intermediary: one of Rachel’s most admired effects had come down to her through him from the great Mlle Clairon, who had been dead for years.

  But of course, how was a Janin to comprehend such matters? He was nothing but a cheap journalist, a mere phrasemaker. He knew nothing of art or technique; his own work lacked consistency, he had no memory, no powers of observation or discrimination, no seriousness, no respect for even his own words, which he himself freely contradicted. He had no theory, no ideas, only phrases that made no sense. The man of a hundred voices, as Janin called himself, was a pen, not a man! Samson, the representative of Racine, lambasted Janin for pandering to the mindless masses, and for being as ignorant as they. For only ignorance could explain his belief that Rachel’s genius was absolutely spontaneous, purely inspired. The art of acting is to make the public believe that the deliberate and studied is spontaneous and accidental: Rachel had fooled the poor critic. The niceties of her art were lost on him; altogether, she had taken him in. Janin had made much of her ignorance; Samson protested that she knew a great deal, not that she had had a classical education but that she had been educated in her art. Her perceptions were unusually quick, her taste and her ear very delicate, she had a nature d’élite—but at sixteen she had needed (and afterward she continued to need) someone to help her interpret the difficult words of the finest poets. For an actor is an interpreter, not a creator, he insisted. (Years later, his wife assembled clear evidence from her letters that Rachel continued to depend on Samson’s counsel and coaching well into the 1840s.)

  The critic Jules Janin, from a photograph (photo credit 3.1)

  The argument between Samson and Janin was between an Enlightenment aesthetic and a Romantic one. Janin had lauded Rachel as an inspired pythonisse, a Danaän vessel miraculously filled with divine afflatus; Samson defended her as a deliberate and conscious artist. He valued technique and above all control, believing that the best actor kept a part of himself in reserve, and submitting anecdotes that proved Rachel had done that. When Talma, Samson’s ideal and mentor, had courteously rejected (as only a philosopher’s) Diderot’s proposal that the best actor is one who feels least, he had offered (with a practicing artist’s authority) a less mischievous formulation that did not altogether contradict its basic premises. An actor is an artist, Talma believed, precisely because he can watch and gauge his own performance, keep the distance from the character he represents that allows him to shape it. On the days he threw himself into his part and exhausted himself on the stage, he confessed, he was not very good. Samson insisted in the same vein that the famous evening when Rachel collapsed after playing Camille was not at all evidence of her genius: she just had an unfortunate taste for applause, became overexcited by it that night, and lost herself. Samson made the point haughtily early on in his diatribe: he was responsible for Rachel’s art, and Janin for her fame. When one weighed art in the balance against celebrity, money, applause—when he did—there was no question which mattered more. The mandarin actor’s contempt for the general audience and the critic’s contempt for the mere player have survived the battle of classic vs. romantic.

  To attack Janin, Samson mockingly used the image of Columbus, not Pygmalion. “She’s my discovery, my creation,” he mimics Janin a
s saying. But what of Saint-Aulaire, he asks, and Delestre-Poirson, and Védel, and the comédiens-français, and the audiences who applauded her for three months before Janin even saw her? (Not to mention her teacher.) “Voilà bien des Christophe Colomb, qu’en dîtes-vous, Monsieur?” His choice of image nearly concedes the embattled point, that Rachel was a creature of nature and not a creation of art, that (as Védel claimed) all her gifts were instinctive, God-given. But the lines were delicately drawn, from his eighteenth-century perspective: nature and art were friendly collaborators; Rachel had come to him admirably equipped to be a great tragedienne and he had instructed her. Janin’s more romantic aesthetic required the dramatically ungrammatical and ignorant waif, ridiculous offstage but noble in action, miraculously transformed by Art’s power, Tragedy’s, Racine’s, his own. For Janin as for Samson, the word was everything: the teacher claimed he had had to explain Racine to Rachel, the journalist that the immortal poet’s soul informed hers.

  A THIRD MAN, another candidate for Rachel’s Pygmalion, altered the literary terms of the struggle. For Rachel’s more naive biographers Dr. Louis Véron is a monster, a powerful middle-aged man who first seduces the ambitious telenager by promising to make her career, and later on ruins her reputation for Attic chasteness—the phrase is Musset’s—by reading aloud to his friends some compromising letters in his possession (it is unclear who wrote them to whom). The caricaturists of his time delighted in his grotesque fatness, sparse hair, gross features, and the neck scarred by scrofula which he hid in enormous cravats, prompting one joker to address a letter to “Dr. Louis Véron, Dans Sa Cravate, Paris.” (The letter, like one addressed to “Mr. Barnum, America,” is supposed to have been delivered.) Daumier’s big-bellied, naked Véron as St. Sebastian is the most widely known send-up of the powerful Parisian, but few books on Rachel have not reprinted the drawing of the tragedienne in her toga between the sinister man of commerce and the aesthete Arsène Houssaye. You made her a star but I made her an artist, Samson insisted to Janin, conceding to the journalist a (lesser) role in her story: who could deny that the performing artist needs a public? With Véron a third figure is introduced, an agent to manipulate public opinion, a man whose covert operations, deliberately undertaken for the purpose, give an actress the cachet a critic can praise and puff. At the time, the modern figure seemed sinister; the idea of a free press and an enthusiastic voluble journalist as midwives for genius is still more attractive than the notion of a commercial-minded middleman.

  It was therefore easy for Janin to present himself—and be remembered—as the man who rolled into the Théâtre-Français on a hot August evening to be astonished by the young Rachel, when in fact Véron was the one who first appreciated how rare she was. It was he who, in June 1838, began to whisper in the ears of le tout Paris—that is, the twelve or fifteen hundred Parisians who made public opinion, all of whom he personally knew—that a phenomenal new actress had appeared. “Have you seen Rachel?” he recalled saying throughout the summer of 1838, in lieu of “Good day.” Rachel was his “new religion,” he wrote, adding (slightly shifting the metaphor) that before he intervened she had been preaching in the desert at the Théâtre-Français. He had been one of the five people seated in the orchestra on 12 June, the evening she made her debut, and he had recognized that “Racine and Corneille were living among us once more, as in the great century of Louis XIV,” he remembered. (The idea of the splendor of the past, revived, appealed to the self-styled bourgeois de Paris, whose nostalgia was characteristic of the Bourgeois Monarchy: a few years later, the twenty-one-year-old Flaubert went home after seeing Rachel in Rouen and wrote in his notebook, with a quite different emphasis, “She makes Corneille and Racine into contemporary geniuses, full of immediacy.”) Janin had been out of town in June, traveling in Italy; he took his seat at the Théâtre-Français in mid-August not because he was glad to be home and eager to cool off on a hot evening with dull familiar pleasures (as he wrote), but because he had heard, through Véron, about Rachel.

  DR. VÉRON is always given his honorific, although he never finished his medical studies or practiced as a physician, and was important in medical circles only as the marketer—he made a fortune—of a patent medicine invented by a colleague of his who had died. (Like Sarah Félix, he was before his time in making money by packaging nostrums.) A great maker of opinion and artistic careers, he was called, by one wit, “the Mercury of intellectual materialism.” In 1829, he founded La Revue de Paris, which published Dumas, Balzac, and George Sand; in 1831 he became the director of the Opéra, where he produced La Juive, Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, and ballets featuring Taglioni and Elssler; later, the political journal Le Constitutionnel came into his hands. But because his modern professions, of producer and impresario and publisher, were not yet recognized as categories in which a man might be said to have distinguished himself, Véron was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor as a doctor. He boasted that he had drunk champagne and been asked by the government for his advice every day of his life, and slept with every woman he ever wanted. Delacroix, in 1849, noted that Véron “lives in amazing luxury; great apartments hung with magnificent brocade, including the ceilings … superb silver and an orchestra playing during dinner.” Fond of wielding power behind the scenes, fascinated by power of all kinds, Véron left indelible images of Rachel: not only of the tragedienne (“that strange physiognomy, that fiery gaze, that spindly body, that voice of such intelligence”) but also, most compellingly, of a charming and clever woman. Summing up his assessment of her career, he pointed out “how much study, strength, and seductiveness, I want almost to say how much political savvy, Mlle Rachel needed in order to maintain her brilliant popular reputation over the long period of sixteen years.” In an extraordinary view of the private woman, the pragmatic doctor compared Rachel to the powerful minister Adolphe Thiers, who like her had been his antagonist and his friend. If there is some ambivalence in the description, it is nevertheless remarkable in the annals of rhapsodies about actresses. This is no object of the male gaze, no pawn or slave to passion, no doomed or driven tragedienne, no man’s Galatea. Of Thiers and Rachel, Véron writes that “they had the same sharpness of vision, the same commitment to the goal they had in mind, the same ingenious ruses, the same calculated seductions, the same wealth of expedients, the same philosophical tolerance that seeks neither vengeance nor hatred, and is ready to negotiate.… I would estimate that, having a loftiness of spirit almost equivalent to an education, Mlle Rachel, in ordinary conversation, displays as much wit, judgment, common sense, and unexpected, pointed insights as the great orator and statesman of the July Monarchy. The art of oratory (by which I don’t mean eloquence) and the art of the stage demand almost the same talents, the same tricks—the same make-up, almost.” Mocking the politician is more than half of Véron’s point, but the comparison that belittles Thiers dignifies Rachel. He was as false-faced as an actress; she was as astute and insightful as he. This is far from the standard stereotype of the cold, heartless woman, empty of everything but ambition—or of a little actress formed and promoted by a clever man. Véron’s Rachel is charming and worldly, calculating and manipulative, understood to be using her considerable wits and talents fairly to get what she wants—which is not really very different from what “great” men want, and get.

  Janin’s quarrel with Samson over Rachel was about her authenticity; Véron’s Rachel adds a disturbing modern dimension to the discussion. She is like a great man, as he sees her—an intelligent professional, consciously and deliberately excelling at her metier, and managing her career. Like all visions of Rachel, it is legibly a projection—of the man of the world and fortune-maker, disparaged in the English papers as “the old lozenge-maker,” without whom “Rachel might have lain buried like a truffle, for want of the judicious pig’s snout to disinter and give its fragrance to the world.” But it makes one wonder. What if he didn’t seduce and exploit the young tragedienne (who had had at least one lover before him)?
Might Melpomene, the Tragic Muse, have embraced Dr. Véron not because he forced or bribed her but because he was her sort, during that first summer when she set about to make it in the world?

  In his memoir, the bourgeois de Paris follows up the discreetly told tale of how he saw Rachel in the theater and made her famous. He gave a lavish party for her at his magnificent house on the rue Taitbout in the fall of 1838, where his discovery gratified her host as the gracious star of the evening, a credit to her patron’s taste (tastefully, he does not hint he was her lover). She had none of the gloom of the tragedienne about her, he recalls (how Samson would quiver in fury!); she danced and talked and charmed everyone. In his worldly way, Véron reasons that this talent was logical and necessary for an actress, who needed, after all, to affect the poor sitting in the paradis as well as the rich in their boxes. “Like Célimène, Mlle Rachel has the policy of pleasing everyone,” he reflects, invoking the clever, hypocritical young widow who drove Molière’s misanthrope mad by her promiscuous charm. (Later, Rachel would have great success in England in the role of Célimène, but would fail in the role in Paris: it is hard to know whether it was because she fell short of Mlle Mars, who had been brilliant in the part, or because Paris was invested in the idea of a grande tragédienne unfit for comedy. Her performance in 1853 as the heroine of Delphine de Girardin’s Lady Tartuffe, a latter-day Célimène, was effective in the manner of a chronique scandaleuse: much more venomous, less engaging and girlish, than Molière’s Célimène, Virginie de Blossac was understood by the knowing to be a compound of Rachel and the clever playwright, as well as some well-known Parisian ladies the latter said she meant to satirize.)