Having embellished, shared, and borrowed the emperor’s aura, Talma survived to unnerve Restoration audiences by recalling the lost leader. But after he died, in 1826, tragedy seemed dead as well, unthinkable without him. The Théâtre-Français had become a shrine of an old religion populated by ghosts, its critics said, a gathering place for peevish legitimists who lamented the new order. And then, late in the decade of ambiguously nostalgic Napoleon plays that followed, a slender and very young woman revived Talma’s memory. His mantle fell, or was disposed by the guiding spirit of romantic irony, onto Rachel’s shoulders.
RACHEL MADE HER DEBUT at the Théâtre-Français on 12 June 1838 as Camille in Corneille’s Horace. Chafing at the bit of apprenticeship, longing for the applause she had tasted at the Théâtre Molière and briefly at the Théâtre du Gymnase, thoroughly rehearsed in anticipation of her moment, she was ready for the role and the date as soon as he named them, Védel later recalled. For his part, he was willing to take a chance on a beginner in an extra-slow summer season. In 1830, it had been important for Victor Hugo and his followers to stage the Battle of Hernani in the house on the rue de Richelieu: the victory of romantic drama over classicism, its acknowledged supremacy in France, could only be achieved in that place. Eight years later, partly as a result of the Battle, no one expected more surprises there. The popular theaters of the boulevards were flourishing; the Théâtre-Français had declined into a preserve for an endangered elite art. It could not compete with action-packed historical dramas by Dumas père, and lurid melodramas by Pixérécourt and his followers. The bloody-minded excitements of the Boulevard du Crime, the easy pleasures of song, dance, and spectacle at the Opéra, the titillating amusement of domestic farces, the compelling physical presence of Frédérick Lemaître and his partner, Marie Dorval, made the bienséances seem silly, the rhymed tragedies stiff, slow, cold, and wordy; the large and eager theatergoing public found Corneille’s legalistic arguments and Racine’s moral urgencies artificial, irrelevant, and taxing. Revenues at the state theater continued to decline: the government-sponsored effort to find new young actors who might prove to be drawing cards seemed doomed. For although Talma’s influence had changed the actors’ costumes, his “natural acting” had had small effect on the tradition of declamation and bombast. The sociétaires of the Théâtre-Français continued faithful to the standard repertoire of postures, gestures, and inflections. They could not but seem wooden to fans of expressive Marie Dorval and brilliant Lemaître, called “the Talma of the boulevards.” Dorval and Lemaître melted into their roles, expressed their feelings with their bodies: the romantic desideratum, for actors, was transcending, not transmitting, language. Furthermore, while the Théâtre-Français still could claim a few stars who glittered in the old artificial way, like Mlle Mars, they were aging; in a politicized cultural climate that polarized styles and generations, the state theater, which could not muster the money to match the salary Lemaître commanded elsewhere, seemed well on the way to becoming a museum.
RACHEL CHANGED THAT. During the hot summer months of 1838 she performed the roles of the high-minded, strong-willed jeunes princesses of the classical repertoire: Corneille’s Camille, Hermione in Racine’s Andromaque, Aménaïde in Voltaire’s Tancrède, and Eriphile in Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide. She memorized hundreds of lines of rhymed poetry, perfected innumerable subtle inflections and gestures, acted her heart out. Audiences were small at first. Jules Janin did not hear her until 4 September; it was only after his two rave reviews in the Journal des débats, of 10 and 24 September, that box-office receipts mounted very dramatically, from eight hundred francs a night to more than three thousand, and then to an astounding six thousand on 19 October. Once set, the pattern was permanent: when Rachel performed—and only then—the house was full. She saved the Théâtre-Français, which had been collecting only four or five hundred francs a night, and she made it depend on her.
The young actress studied her lines in the tiny dressing room under the roof that had been assigned her (she moved her things in herself), repeated them in her continuing lessons with Samson, said them over in the squalor of the Félix apartment, as she scraped the carrots for the stew. We can only conjecture about the effect, on her otherwise untrained mind, of the old-fashioned language, the rhythmic, symmetrical rhymed alexandrines, the elaborate phrasing, the moral and aesthetic values of another age. Getting her lines by heart, did she take them to heart as well—and the ideals between the lines, of high-mindedness and high artifice? Samson initiated her into the structured mysteries of the Théâtre-Français: he showed her how to mime the inflections of Mlle Clairon, whom Diderot had praised for staying separate from the passions she rendered. The standard of self-control that the philosophe had ascribed to the very best actors, in his Paradoxe sur le comédien, was not the least lofty of her goals. To enter the acting profession where and when Rachel did was to give over part of oneself, and retain the rest. The required psychological gymnastics would have marked a very young woman for life, as well as for the stage. Samson surely urged on her a reverence for the weight of the words she spoke, taught her to respect the authority vested not only in them but in the actor who delivered them on the stage of the state theater. To take herself seriously. Did she persuade herself, along with her public, that she was a heroic Camille, a scornful Hermione? How do actors carry their audiences with them if not on the strength of their belief in their imagined selves?
SHE PUT SHAKESPEARE in Racine, they would say—was at once wild and regular, astoundingly natural and elegantly artful, an original genius perfectly faithful to tradition. The force of rules, rhymes, and regularities served to set off her emotional intensity, to contain, constrain, compress, and thus to increase it. The very orthodoxy of her repertoire underscored the sense of her newness; speaking line after line, couplet after couplet, putting antithesis upon antithesis, she pushed to the limits of the rules of art, and by doing so proved their truth. If the elevated persons she played were on the one hand palpably discrepant with the very young, pale, and plain-faced girl, on the other they fit her like a second skin, or a life-mask. She had appeared to be miming her own personal circumstances at the Gymnase, playing the poor girl from the Vendée who walks to Paris to save her father; she played as real an aspect of herself now, as Camille, the Roman maiden who bravely defends her high ideal of personal integrity. Standing up alone for Corneille, assuming the grand manner and making it thrilling once more, she seemed to chasten the corrupted taste of the Boulevard du Crime, and to stand for France at its noblest. Engravings of the proud and rigid young woman in her toga reveal how well it suited her. The actor Edmond Got wrote wickedly that no matter what the script was, Camille was the only role she ever played.
The heroine of the baroque tragedy Horace (sometimes called Les Horaces) is nothing like the more popular theatrical “Camille,” Marguérite Gautier, the tubercular dame aux camélias of the 1852 play by Dumas fils that Sarah Bernhardt was to make so famous. The most interesting character in Corneille’s play is a virgin who speaks up for the personal life against the state. The story of her struggle with her family, based on an anecdote told by Livy and Plutarch, is most familiar today outside France as the situation depicted in David’s painting The Oath of the Horatii (1785). During the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution, in 1989, it served as a forceful image of fraternal solidarity and, by the way, a representation of exclusionary maleness. It portrays three helmeted, hard-limbed heroes accepting the blessing of their father, joining their swords as one in bright sunlight in the center of the canvas, while off to the right, in the shade of a portico, their women mourn, collapsed together. David borrowed more than its classical subject from Corneille’s 1640 heroic tragedy, notably the tensions between public and private virtue, and violence and cold control. He follows Corneille also in coding public and private as male and female. But he makes a very significant change in focus: in the play, only one glorious brother is a speaking character, and on
e of the gracefully draped women in the heap to one side is his chief antagonist.
The conflict in the story of the brothers Horace, who are obliged to fight for Rome, is between allegiance to the state and to the family. The champions of rebellious Alba, the brothers Curiace, are connected to the Horaces through their women: a daughter of the Curiaces is one brother’s wife, and Camille, the daughter of Old Horace, is engaged to a young Curiace. As the play begins, she and her sister-in-law Sabine implore the men not to fight, while the father urges his sons to defend Rome and pursue glory. The patriarch wins. In the ensuing battle—which, following the precepts of the Roman poet also named Horace, takes place offstage—two Horaces and all three Curiace brothers are killed. When, in Act IV, the surviving Horace returns home victorious and describes the battle, he meets the scathing scorn of his sister; in the most famous speech in the play, she reviles not only the man acclaimed as the hero of the state but Rome itself.
Rachel in her toga, engraving after a portrait by Edwin D. Smith, 1841 (photo credit 4.1)
Rome, l’unique objet de mon ressentiment!
Rome, à qui vient ton bras d’immoler mon amant!
Rome qui t’a vu naître, et que ton coeur adore!
Rome enfin que je hais parce qu’elle t’honore!
Rome, the sole target of my burning pain!
Rome, for whose sake my darling you’ve just slain!
Rome, who engendered you, whom you adore!
Rome, whom for honoring you I now abhor!
Rome’s defender turns on Camille and she flees; he pursues and murders her.
Horace’s sister is hardly a revolutionary or even a rebel: her first arguments against war, and for the holiness of the heart’s affections, are couched in the rhetoric of monarchy and patriarchy. She thinks the will of the gods is made manifest in the bosom of kings, rather than the voice of the people; she believes that her brother’s wife owes no allegiance to her family of origin, and that she herself, being promised but not yet given by her father, hangs suspended between the warring parties. When she argues that she loves Curiace more than her sister-in-law Sabine loves Horace, she explains that the passion her father has sanctioned is no tyrant but a legitimate king: Corneille plays on a standard poetic vocabulary of periphrasis, in which love is always referred to as a flame and the lover as a tyrant. Only after her two brothers are reported dead and her father alleges that their glory repays him for the loss does she begin to see the patriot-patriarch as the enemy of the personal relations she values, and therefore as her enemy. Doubting the authority of Old Horace brings her logically to question the state’s. She insults the masters of the civilized world as tigers, brutes, and barbarians, and imagines Rome’s enemies rising up against the fatherland, and Rome turning—as Rome’s daughter Camille has done—against itself.
Puissent tous ses voisins ensemble conjurés
Saper ses fondements encor mal assurés,
Et si ce n’est assez de toute l’Italie,
Que l’Orient contre elle à l’Occident s’allie,
Que cent peuples unis des bouts de l’univers
Passent pour la détruire et les monts et les mers,
Qu’elle-même sur soi renverse ses murailles,
Et de ses propres mains déchire ses entrailles!
May all her neighbors in a grand alliance
Sap her foundations as they hurl defiance!
And if all Italy prove insufficient,
May Occident ally itself with Orient;
May a hundred peoples from the ends of the world
Cross mountains, seas, to crush her, flags unfurled!
May she herself crash down her ramparts stout,
And with her own hand tear her bowels out!
Adrienne Lecouvreur had played Camille as a pathetic creature maddened by her losses; Rachel was different, a threatening, avenging fury. Mme Samson (disapprovingly) recalled that she was unwilling to give up a crowd-pleasing spasm of horror she had improvised as Camille hears her brother describe her lover’s death at his hand: the innovation, the little rebellion against Samson’s authority, is further evidence that she made the role her own. As her tirade develops, Camille grows from a wounded, angry young woman to a prophet of disaster and finally a monster of destructive, ambitious egotism. (Rachel grew to Homeric proportions onstage, Janin wrote.) She imagines herself as the cause and the spectator of Rome’s fall, imagines dying, in ecstasy, of the pleasure she has brought herself:
Puissé-je de mes yeux y voir tomber ce foudre,
Voir ses maisons en cendre, et tes lauriers en poudre,
Voir le dernier Romain à son dernier soupir,
Moi seule en être cause, et mourir de plaisir!
May I, with my eyes, see Heaven’s lightning flash,
Her mansions dust, your laurels turned to ash,
See the last Roman breathe out his last sigh,
Myself, sole cause of all, ecstatic die! (IV, 5)
It is a vision of the self transcendent—and a fit of self-destroying despair. The Russian critic Pavel Vasil’evich Annenkov, who would see Rachel’s Camille in St. Petersburg in 1853–54, found the whole scene “practically unendurable,” from Camille’s spasm, when she learns of her lover’s death, through her ringing monologue, which was so beautifully integrated in the action as to be no longer the set piece earlier actors had made it. He wrote that “it is impossible to differentiate the couplets, feelings, nuances in her and present their significance out of context; everything originates in and flows with the fiery rush of passions which tears to pieces all moral barriers and pours forth as a hideous phenomenon of the human soul. One might simply mention the plainest, positively savage pleasure of Rachel, when she disgraces Horace’s laurels, tramples all his beliefs under foot, mocks what he holds holy. She no longer cares about her words, her predicament, herself. Her face is distorted, her mouth agape as if from a bloody flux, her very tongue, it seems, parched, and her voice sometimes alters, breaks and turns into a strident shriek—a startling effect which completes the ghastly picture of frenzy and self-oblivion which you see before you. The sword of the enraged Horace encounters a she-wolf even then, as with the last word of the monologue she trembles and collects herself for a new vengeance.”
Rising against Rome, Corneille’s Camille transcends not only her woman’s place but her humanity. Killed by the sword of a hero whom she taunts to match her crime for crime, she suffers the suggestively sexual, heroically martial death that is the fate of virgins in Greek tragedy. In the play’s last act, Corneille spells out its moral: that patriotic virtue justifies and may fairly require the murder of even a sister who is an enemy of the state. In Act V, the wise king, who refers to himself as a demigod, is supposed to come onstage to render justice, and Old Horace advises his son that a king’s words and not a stupid people’s make a man a hero:
Horace, ne crois pas que le peuple stupide
Soit le maître absolu d’un rénom bien solide,
C’est aux rois, c’est aux grands, c’est aux
esprits bien faits,
À voir la vertu pleine en ses moindres effets,
C’est d’eux seuls qu’on reçoit la véritable
gloire;
Seuls des vrais héros assurent la mémoire.
Horatius, do not think that the foolish mob
Are arbiters of a renown that’s sure:
It is for kings, for great men of sound judgment,
To weigh up probity in all its aspects;
It is from them alone that springs true fame;
And they alone assure a hero’s name. (V, 3)
But the distinction Corneille drew in 1640, between a stupid populace and a wise absolute monarch, would have sounded problematic two hundred years later. So did the ruling about who has the right to confer and to receive true glory—and perhaps also the very definition of glory itself. By 1838, struggles for power and influence among legitimists, Bonapartists, Orléanists, and various factions of the bour
geoisie had made it hard to delimit and define les esprits bien faits. The lessons of history and the new machinery for creating and marketing fame were changing ideas about true, eternal glory. When Rachel played Camille, the last act of Horace was cut. Purists protested the mutilation of the text, but the curtain fell after the heroine’s tirade and her death.
The bienséances required that violent deaths take place offstage, but the playwright’s stage directions were ignored in the mid-nineteenth century. Annenkov describes an extraordinary climax: “Struck by her brother’s hand, Rachel emits a howl, falls silent and to the ground. Simultaneously the curtain descends, but for a long time afterward you cannot recover and collect your thoughts and feelings, scattered, so to speak, in all directions by this cruel and incredible scene.”
JANIN’S REVIEWS in the Journal des débats—there were two, but he later would cultivate the legend that he had made her a star overnight—hailed Rachel as the actress of the moment. She was introduced as an ideal of the status quo ante, an avatar of true, legitimate art. Janin’s rhetoric was reactionary: he rejoiced that noble sentiments and chaste true love—forgotten among nameless, violent modern barbarisms—had at last found a voice. The man of the world marvelled that such excitement could be generated in the Théâtre-Français, of all places; the patriot celebrated Rachel, with a fine dramatic sense of his own national importance, as the herald of a new kind of revolution—the return of the nation’s identity, its aesthetic standards and moral values. “Be it known,” the critic intoned, “that at this very moment there exists at the Théâtre-Français—I repeat, the Théâtre-Français—an unexpected triumph, one of those lucky victories of which a nation like ours can be rightly proud. We have happily escaped from endless barbarisms, and been returned to honest feeling, proud language, chaste and refined love. What a joy for an intelligent nation to find itself suddenly brought back to the masterpieces that have been wrongly neglected for so long. Praise be to ye gods and goddesses, who have indulgently granted immortality to these great works of art!” That the actress herself was only “an ignorant little girl, without art, without polish, fallen into the midst of old tragedy” made her genius the more authentic: her sense of tragedy was inborn, not acquired, Janin argued. Her humble origin made the triumph of high culture the more absolute, to his mind: that Tragedy could transform and exalt the likes of Rachel attested to its power. On the other hand, “she was born in the realms of poetry,” he raved with mounting illogic; “she knows its geography; she unveils all its mysteries. The actors who perform alongside her are stunned by her daring; tragedy itself grows hopeful; the audience, moved and charmed, lend enchanted and delighted ears to that divine poetic language of which we have been deprived since the death of Talma; full of superb pride, the crowd abandons itself to these all-powerful great poets, to the honor of France, to the pride of the human spirit.”
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