Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  Véron, a connoisseur of power, admired the way Rachel deployed hers. He describes the actress offstage, surrounded by powerful men, as more a salonnière than a courtesan. Though she herself said she was a better hand at other people’s verse than at prose of her own, he sketches a brilliant conversationalist: “I have often had the pleasure of having Rachel at my table alongside the distinguished men of our time: Count Molé; General Changarnier; Achille Fould; the Duke of Soto-Mayor, the Spanish Ambassador; Sainte-Beuve; Eugène Delacroix; Meyerbeer; Auber; Halévy; etc. etc. With the most natural air, the young artist showed herself to be a great lady, with all the qualities of mind necessary to charm even superior men—the rare qualities especially characteristic of those women of the last century whose salons were enlivened by the regular attendance of the most splendid names.” Delacroix corroborates this picture. Although he noted in his journal that some of Rachel’s performances were not as good as others, he also observed, after a dinner at Véron’s, that “Rachel is exceedingly witty, very fine in every way. It would have been extraordinarily difficult for any man, born and brought up as she was, to become what she now is quite naturally.” Rachel herself professed to agree that nature and society treated men and women differently. In a letter to Raphaël, who was still a boy at school, she urged him in a big-sisterly spirit to study hard so that he might be recognized as an homme d’esprit. Things are different, she says, for a woman, whose natural curiosity and powers of retention make education quite unnecessary: “A woman,” she wrote, “can arrive at an honorable, esteemed, and suitable position, without quite possessing that polish society properly calls education. How can that be, you ask? A woman loses none of her charm in being reserved in manner and language. On the contrary: a woman responds, she doesn’t ask questions; she never opens a discussion, only listens. Her natural coquetry makes her wish to learn, she retains what she hears, and so without having had any solid foundation, she nevertheless acquires a polish that can pass for education.” People said she knew only her own lines, but she seems to have been aware of the whole scene.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Oh my sweet Racine, it is in your masterpieces that I recognize the heart of woman! I shape my own to your noble poetry. If the lyre of my soul does not always weep with your harmonies divine, it is because admiration leaves my whole being in ecstasy.

  RACHEL, 1851, in a copy of Racine’s Works

  So you see, tragediennes are Comédiennes, after all!

  MLLE GEORGE, tragedienne, to Victor Hugo

  THEATRICAL ILLUSION IS the basis of an actor’s social reality, what status, wealth, and power he or she enjoys in the offstage world. Surely it helps construct character as well—notions of what character is, therefore characters to fit them. By embodying storied women on the stage, acting out the roles of Tragedy’s Muse and victim, Rachel took on increments of meaning for herself. She assumed the severity and scorn of Camille and Hermione, the guilt of Phèdre; she borrowed the solemn dignity and high moral seriousness that she helped persuade the nineteenth-century public to attribute to Racine’s and Corneille’s plays. She glowed with the aura of the opposing aesthetic ideals that she seemed to exemplify, and the general idea of Art and of abstraction. Acting brought her fame; she became a star. The creature of a script and a dramatic tradition; of a moment, an occasion, a stage and a costume; of a culture’s idées fixes, obsessions, and modes of representation; of the psychosocial structures that connect performing women and paying audiences—she was also palpably herself, right there. Her fans were fascinated by the mystery of Rachel’s private, secret self, the question of how much of her was real.

  1. YOUNG PRINCESS

  “High tragedy,” Napoleon is said to have remarked in a philosophical mood one day at Saint-Cloud, “is the school of great men. It is the duty of rulers to encourage and cultivate it. One does not have to be a poet to be a judge of it; one has only to understand men and things as they are, to be acquainted with power, to be a statesman. Tragedy sets the soul aflame, elevates the spirit, can and must create heroes. France, therefore, owes no small measure of its history of glorious actions to Corneille. Yes, gentlemen, if he were alive today, I would make him a prince.” With all but the last, Louis XIV would have agreed. Why else had the Sun King established the Comédie-Française in 1680, pledged to underwrite it, and charged it with the duty of preserving the French cultural heritage? Louis was quite as clever as Napoleon would be about the politics of performance and display; the heroes of Corneille and Racine were models for the theatrical court he directed and starred in. And his creation, the state theater, would redound to the country’s glory for generations.

  The permeability of the “fourth wall” of the stage can have an important political function. Theaters may direct, encapsulate, drain off energies that threaten the social order, or inflame and exacerbate them. The role of the popular theaters of the fairs and the streets in France, before and between revolutions, has been debated by social historians; as for the role of the “legitimate” stage, Napoleon’s view is the decisive one.

  If it cannot be credited with breeding up a martial race of Corneillian heroes, the Théâtre-Français has successfully sustained, over the centuries, an idea of French cultural coherence, and the supporting idea that elegance, reasoned high-mindedness, artfulness, and exigence are characteristically French. It has helped to shape France’s self-image and dazzle foreigners. Goethe, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, and George Bernard Shaw were among the many who envied France a theater dedicated to national and aesthetic purposes that transcend mere commercial interests; England would undertake to match it only in the twentieth century. The national theater was a source of French cultural and linguistic pride: in the nineteenth century, it served as the ideological underpinning of the nation’s colonialist mission civilisatrice—distinguishing France’s cultural obligation from England’s drearier “white man’s burden.”

  THE TRAGEDIES that provided the state theater’s repertoire, along with Molière’s comedies, were neoclassical—for the most part, adaptations of Greek and Roman plays, or dramatizations of stories from ancient history. Obedient to rules of art that had been articulated by Aristotle and Horace, and reaffirmed by their contemporary Boileau, the Renaissance poet-playwrights paid homage to the ancients by their work. Claiming the legacy of the past, they appropriated it, and the cultural authority of antiquity, for themselves, their king, and their country. Neoclassicism has an equivocal relation to history. On the one hand it defies the passage of time, looking to the past for the matter and the rules of “eternal” art; on the other, it holds the mirror up to time passing. Re-creations of the past make us believe that deeds worthy of applause can be performed today, but they also chasten by reminding us of once powerful peoples now defeated and dissolved. Revived, the past is rewritten into time—and the present subtly revises it. A “classical” ideal can only be imagined in the terms at hand at the moment. What can a classical tradition come to but a succession of classicisms?

  In France at the turbulent turn of the eighteenth century, as a revolution overturned a monarchy and an empire succeeded a republic, history dramatically inflected changing visions of ancient Greece and Rome. By the time Alfred de Musset declared that Rachel was Tragedy—just before or just after his putative short term as her lover—a series of national calamities had revised ideas of what tragedy might be. In the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, literary men and politicians of different political persuasions—Louis Blanc, Etienne Cabet, Alphonse de Lamartine, Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adolphe Thiers—rewrote, in many volumes, the history of France, seeking to find and fix revolution’s meaning and its ends. Meanwhile history moved on toward yet another revolution, illustrating one or another proverbial truth about change and repetition. “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice,” Karl Marx began his book about the events of 1848–51. “He forgot to add: the first time as t
ragedy, the second as farce.” In the late 1830s, when Rachel revived the classical tragic repertoire that Talma before her had reinflected to suit a time of revolution, she already seemed a disturbing sign—among many—of history ambiguously or ambivalently reversing or repeating itself.

  The nineteenth-century cult of classicism began with respect for pre-Christian learning and the Roman republic, among Enlightenment philosophers and radicals, and peaked when Napoleon took the Emperor Augustus as his model. The growth of schooling, the development of scholarship, encouraged admiration for the culture of the past. The Greeks and Romans were sought out as models, acknowledged as the sources of French civilization, also looked to for an escape from the present. But the present inescapably informs and colors ideas of the past—had done so even in the Renaissance. And notions of classicism are complicated as succeeding generations interpret them. In Gérard de Nerval’s view, the poets of the seventeenth century were less Greek than decadently Roman: Racine’s Phèdre, he alleged, owed more to Seneca’s version of the play than it did to the Hippolytus of Euripides. Heinrich Heine argued, tongue in cheek perhaps, that Corneille and Racine were not earnest neoclassicists at all but parodists, who were elaborating a witty conceit when they put the elegant periphrases and polite formulas of late Renaissance courtiers into the mouths of ancient Romans and Greeks. Schlegel was wrong, Heine argued, in reading Racine as a poor imitation of Euripides; he missed “the infinite grace, the sweet jest, the profound charm that derived from Racine’s dressing his modern French heroes in ancient costumes and thus adding to the fascination of a modern passion the interesting element of a brilliant masquerade.” This probably sheds more useful light on history-minded, mask-ridden nineteenth-century Paris than it does on seventeenth-century Versailles; certainly it illuminates the figure of Heine’s contemporary Rachel. Reviving Racine after Talma, she revived multiple pasts and superimposed them on one another: an idealized Greco-Roman world that seemed nearly legendary, and the differently, dubiously glorious periods of the ancien régime and Napoleon. And by figuring high tragedy and heroism in female form, she subtly redefined and undercut them.

  Although the classic French repertoire is unparalleled in tragic roles for women, and although actresses worked on the French stage long before women came on the boards in England, France had never had an awe-inspiring tragedienne like Mrs. Siddons. La Champmeslé had been acknowledged as Racine’s best interpreter; the brilliance and pathos of the eighteenth-century actress Adrienne Lecouvreur had been widely admired and appreciated. But France, which loved its tender Adrienne, was inclined to jeer at more commanding tragic actresses. A caricaturist of the First Empire portrayed Mlles Duchesnois and George as robust viragoes disputing the crown of tragedy with muscular contortions and whirling drapery, as they gestured histrionically around a sacrificial fire suggestively crawling with snakes, for an audience of geese and turkeys. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, beautifully controlled Mlle Mars was admired for her charm and wit, polish and skill—in other words, as the model of an elegant woman. But all that hardly added up to genius. Jules Janin pointed to the visit of the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson to Paris in 1827 as the moment that the French understood an actress could be taken seriously, and began to want a great tragedienne of their own. A member of the English troupe—it included Kean and Kemble—that had moved Stendhal to praise Shakespeare over Racine, Smithson gave a thrilling rendition of Ophelia out of control. Stage madness had never been so convincing or attractive before, and ladies’ heads dressed à la Smithson, stuck with bits of straw, were all the rage in Paris. The young Rachel was said to be reminiscent of her violence and her pathos—and also reminiscent of the very different, majestic Mrs. Siddons. As Talma had before her, she stood for France partly by reminding people of England.

  FRANÇOIS-JOSEPH TALMA, the remarkable tragic actor who was the favorite and friend of Napoleon, had become a star in one spectacular move, in the revolutionary year 1789. Cast in a minor role in Brutus, a proto-republican tragedy by Voltaire, he appeared onstage clad in a toga, with his bare feet in sandals, and his hair cut short and left unpowdered. By that startling sartorial gesture Talma claimed the national theater for the people, and all eyes for himself. The costumes actors had traditionally worn identified “high” tragedy with a social elite: the Greeks and Romans as the Renaissance poet-playwrights imagined them wore silk knee-breeches, ruffled shirts, and embroidered coats. In a period when actors were expected to supply their own costumes, these outfits were usually handed down by courtiers to their servants, the players, who by wearing them in effect claimed a semblance, at least, of eternity for the court. Talma’s plain republican cloth proved that change was possible, and in context it encouraged thoughts of wider, deeper changes. His revolutionary act of revisionary dressing was made independently: the other actors were as surprised as the audience was by the costume he had concocted with his friend the painter David (who was soon making mantles on the same model for the senators of the new republic). Of Talma in his toga, the actress Mlle Contat is supposed to have said in the wings, with a giggle, “He looks like a statue!” Everyone repeated the mot, but not at Talma’s expense: the charismatic actor was not a man to be laughed at.

  Talma’s implicit call for a more natural, historically accurate style was based on new ideas he had gathered in the London theaters, where as a young man he had seen the actors John Philip Kemble and Charles Macklin in costumes based on drawings of art and artifacts newly uncovered by excavations at Pompeii. Although classicism had strong associations with courts, the political implications for France, at the moment, were clear: the show of plainness was an unmistakable warning of populist, revolutionary changes. The applause for Talma in his toga echoed the excitement in the state theater of five years earlier, when Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1784) had been heard as a trumpet call to revolution. It was a sign of the rapidly altering times that a common actor, rather than a literary man like Beaumarchais, should now be the one making the call for change.

  Portrait of Rachel, or La Tragédie, by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1859; Salon of 1861

  François-Joseph Talma in the Role of Nero, by Eugène Delacroix, 1853

  Rachel, by Edouard Dubufe, 1850

  La Sybille au rameau d’or (The Cumaean Sybil), by Eugène Delacroix, 1838(?); Salon of 1845

  Mlle Rachel, by William Etty, 1840

  Contemporary lithographs of Rachel’s costumes

  TOP: Rachel and the company of the Théâtre-Français, watercolor by Henry de Montaut

  BOTTOM: Contemporary caricatures of Rachel

  La Tragédie, by Eugène Emmanuel Amaury-Duval, Salon of 1855

  Mutely asserting that the past had been different from the present, Talma’s costume hinted at what the future could be. By his gesture he cast his vote for a socially responsible theater involved in national political life as “high” courtly dramas no longer could be. He was applauded for the ideas he represented, also for himself; he was understood as an inspiring model of individualism. Among other things, Talma changed the view of his profession. For the first time in France, the actor was recognized as an artist—a romantic creator—rather than a mere interpreter. Talma’s silent declaration of independence shifted the emphasis from the company to the individual star, from repetition to re-creation, from imitation to performative action. An Anglophile, he admired the English verbs by which an actor could be said “to perform tragedy” or “to act a part,” rather than, as in French, either to play (jouer) or speak (dire) tragedy. In his book on acting, he differed gently with Diderot, claiming the authority of experience, and stressing process: an actor, he wrote, was not so much detached as divided. Talma’s intelligence and artistic brilliance were transformative. When he performed, one theater historian writes, “Britannicus and Brutus ceased to belong to a world of reference dominated by the court and the ancien régime, and became historical and deeply political tragic dramas. By his reappropriation of classic aut
hors, Talma ‘invented’ the national theater that the philosophes had so long wished for.” In the act he enhanced the status of the actor and made himself a symbol of the nation.

  Talma’s subsequent history proved him to be politically capable offstage as well as on. He shrewdly navigated the shoals of the 1790s, surviving the threats and political schisms that afflicted the Comédie-Française. His personal popularity prevailed in spite of the fact that bloody spectacles in the streets made stage tragedy look pale, and melodrama and romantic drama mimed the “mode of excess” prevailing in real life, where there were spectacular executions on the Place de la Révolution, and, later on, huge and expensive communal rituals in which the republic celebrated itself. Offstage, Talma was both romantically and classically theatrical, a star who received his friends at home dressed as an ancient Roman, and gave his twin sons ostentatiously double names, one Christian and one pagan (Roman, that is, and therefore republican): Henri-Castor and Charles-Pollux. His style might have been deliberately calculated to match Napoleon’s taste—if it did not form it.

  Commenting on Napoleon’s remark that high tragedy is the school of great men, Sainte-Beuve pointed out that when he made it the emperor had seen not merely Corneille, but Corneille as performed by Talma. Napoleon’s severe, exclusive taste for classical tragedy was sharpened, if not created, by a single actor’s art. Like Nero before him, the emperor was a theater buff: the statuesque Mlle George had been his mistress (she was later Jules Janin’s), and among his more effective moments, during the siege of Moscow, were the ones he spent revising the administrative structure of the Comédie-Française. After he seized absolute power it was Talma, they said, who instructed him in imperial bearing. In at least one instance, the actor even had an effect on imperial policy: his performance as King Assuérus, the monarch who repudiates the enemy of the Jews in Racine’s Esther, is supposed to have moved Napoleon to rethink the position of French Jews and eventually to accord them further rights. In return the emperor gave Talma the benefit of his experience. When the actor undertook the role of Néron in Britannicus, the tyrant contributed his insider’s insight: “I would like to see you make fewer gestures,” said Napoleon; “natures like these aren’t so expansive; they are the more powerful for being restrained.”