Like Talma, Rachel invested Racine’s lapidary verses with a natural fire that people called Shakespearean, and like that earlier actor and symbol of France she was compared to English actors. Most frequently, she was likened to the romantic Edmund Kean, who had been fixed in the French mind as a new kind of actor-hero by Kean, Dumas’s 1836 play. (Sartre would adapt it more than a century later.) Kean was dark-haired and pale, small, nervous, intense, like Rachel; watching him, Coleridge wrote, was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. When, as Othello, he quieted the quarreling swordsmen, he seemed to the poet John Keats to embody the authority of beautiful language, the supreme power of speech: “We feel that his throat had commanded where swords were thick as reeds,” the young poet wrote. Kean was famous for his feverish, exhausting performances, and for ruinous offstage binges—he was the actor as self-destructive genius. Rachel, like Kean, seemed to consume herself in performance; her most influential English critic, G. H. Lewes, would write that she was as a woman what Kean was as a man, “the panther of the stage” to his lion. The pairing, the contrast, the animal imagery slipped as if naturally into the strongly polarized field where accepted ideas about England and France, romantic and classical, male and female, informed one another and structured people’s thinking; the opposition, and the similarity, acknowledged Rachel as a significant player in the field. Kean had become a star by dramatizing himself, appealing to the self-reflexive imagination that made a star of the Noble Poet Byron—“the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme,” as he had put it himself. The flexible concept of romantic heroism continued to produce images of remarkable human beings that were ambiguous, self-conscious, even parodic.
It was apropos of Talma that Germaine de Staël had declared that an actor is the second author of his roles. Rachel effectively rewrote Corneille by being who she was: by her strangely rough voice, her flashing eyes, her spectral look, her feverishness. As the unnerving immediacy of her presence in the theater gave the lie to rigid, regular alexandrines, Janin’s characterization of the actress as a waif of the city streets, and his vivid reports of Rachel’s offstage lapses in grammar, undercut the image she presented of literariness and high culture. By lopping off Act V of Horace, the Comédie-Française implicitly acknowledged that people came to see the star more than the play—and also, perhaps, that the play could not altogether contain her. When the peddler’s daughter voiced Camille’s imprecation against Rome, she might be heard as speaking in the name of the oppressed and powerless. The spirit astonishingly housed in the fragile body, her affecting aloneness on the stage, the awesome force of her voice, represented a timely version of heroism more compelling than the image of an all-powerful wise king, or of the hard bodies of heroes fraternally welded together, or even of the splendid Talma. This young woman was a vulnerable human being beset by the brute force, the crude realities, the impurities and confusions of flesh and practical politics against which she has the spiritual force and grandeur to rise up. As Rachel interpreted her, Camille seemed to be propelled beyond the Corneillian conflict between public and private virtue into an empyrean of triumphant, transcendent, romantic self-assertion. When her voice broke at the end of her tirade, one could feel the force of the divine inspiration that threatened to shatter its vessel. The actress made a subtle innovation in her harangue against Rome: at the end of each line, she raised her voice as if to question—contemptuously—Rome’s power and glory. Was Rome the sole object of her hatred? Was Rachel-Camille daring to question her lines? Did she—though letter-perfect—manage to alter their meaning by the way she inflected them? Was this arrogant unbeautiful girl, a daughter of the Orient she exhorted to rise against Rome, playing Camille quite straight?
LIKENESSES of the new young star, dressed for the stage in a chaste white toga or for the street in black, suggest Camille’s dignity and her hardness. She glares out from Charpentier’s portrait, which was engraved and widely reprinted: her hair, parted in the center as in the ancient Greek tragic mask for the virtuous virgin, is skinned back to reveal knobby little ears. She is plain, in her decorous velvet trimmed with lace, and ferocious. There is suppressed energy in the strenuous turn of the neck and the hands clasped tight against the body; dark defiance smolders in the uneven sidelong stare. On her, the matching coral brooch and earrings—civilized, fashionable ornaments—look like teeth. Rachel was almost perversely non-carnal: “On n’a pas de sexe en la voyant,” wrote the correspondent of the Journal de Rheims in 1839. Janin called her a sword of gold in a sheath of clay: the metaphor begins to suggest the threat she posed, the violent fantasies that underlay the awe of what they called her male talent. In Delphine de Girardin’s Judith, the journalist’s image entered the playwright’s text, the heroine’s own dialogue: Rachel, as the murderess of Holofernes, called herself the sword of God. It was not merely that her body and deep voice seemed unfeminine; what was disturbing was Camille’s intelligence and self-respect, her independence, self-possession—above all, perhaps, the strong-minded girl’s scorn and disdain for martial heroes.
Engraving of Rachel after a portrait by Auguste Charpentier exhibited at the Salon of 1840 (photo credit 4.2)
RACHEL WAS ACCLAIMED as a priestess of aesthetic exigence, a princess of the spirit, therefore a true aristocrat. Samson would recall that she had the hands and feet of a duchess. Delphine de Girardin, in one of the newsy “Chroniques parisiennes” she signed “Vicomte de Launay” in her husband’s newspaper, La Presse, praised the peddler’s daughter’s “natural rank” and went on to explain what she meant in a heady mixture of elitist and democratic protestations: “The high rank of an actress!… No, her high rank as an individual. For each of us is in some way given at birth an individual rank that must be recognized, and leads us down or up in the world. While our positions in life are imposed on us by society, we also all have ranks bestowed by nature, and nothing is stranger to observe, in our lives, than this often dangerous struggle between social condition and what we may call native or natural rank.” In his memoir of Rachel, Védel cites Sainte-Beuve on her natural charm and distinction: “It’s an accident, my dear man, one of those natures that knows at birth what so many others never can acquire.” Another contemporary defined her distinction in Napoleonic terms, calling her one of “those privileged by destiny, those noble natures who carry upon their majestic brows, their dignified tones and gracious gestures, the indelible titles of that feudal system designed by Providence, of which God is the suzerain.” (The image by the way recalls the Wandering Jew, with the mark, like Cain’s, on his forehead.)
Native, innate, or natural rank was an idea whose time had come at the midpoint of the Bourgeois Monarchy when, although the old order had collapsed more than once, its categories still prevailed. The concept had developed logically from the notion of natural man, which intersected with the ideal of meritocracy developed in the Napoleonic period. It was at once aristocratic and democratic. The remarkable individual—Napoleon, Talma, Byron, the Regency dandy Beau Brummell—was admired as an embodiment of extraordinary selfhood that transcended traditional class boundaries. It was on the one hand natural, inborn; and on the other hand it was attainable, the basis of an aristocracy that qualified new members might enter, regardless of birth. A young man from the provinces making himself over as Lucien de Rubempré attested to the truth that rank was innate. So did a tragedy queen from the lowest social class. The idea of natural rank is explored in many of the novel heroines made in Rachel’s image, for example the Goncourts’ Manette Salomon, the artists’ model who “had those qualities which lift some low-born people above the rabble.” The Goncourts explain that Manette “was born with the mark of pure blood, the quality of rarity and elegance, those personal characteristics which in defiance of accidents of race and fortune distinguish the aristocrats among women, those who belong among first-class people—marks of innate distinction.” Images of women like Manette were compulsively constructed and analyzed in order to contest prevailing noti
ons of distinction—or, more often, merely, titillatingly, to play with them.
IN GRATITUDE for the audiences and profits she brought them, the sociétaires of the Comédie-Française crowned Rachel, in 1839, with a wreath of gold laurel leaves like one the company had once bestowed on Talma, each leaf inscribed with the name of one of the heroines she played. Wreaths of flowers (couronnes) were conventionally given to actresses in Rachel’s time—flung to them, sometimes, as they performed. (Gautier complained that the practice of buying flowers to bring to the theater for the purpose had emptied a once spontaneous gesture of meaning.) In 1843, when Rachel was on tour in Marseilles, such a crown came flying at her in the middle of a great scene in Racine’s Bajazet. Remaining in character as Roxane, she ignored it, in spite of the cries from the audience, “The crown! the crown!” The inferior actress playing opposite her, Rachel scornfully wrote to Mme de Girardin, “playing to the public instead of staying in character, picks up the crown and gives it to me. Outraged by so vulgar an interruption, I take the unfortunate crown and abruptly fling it aside, so as to continue Roxane. Fortune favors the bold: there was never stronger proof of this axiom; three salvos of applause greeted my instinctive move.” The gesture was true to both Roxane’s imperious character and a tragedienne’s dignity, evidence of Rachel’s absorption in her great role, her respect for Racine’s high art and her own.
“Mlle Rachel est un principe,” her detractors claimed—nothing but a banner for reactionaries to mass behind. Following Janin, the critics applauded the new queen of tragedy in a jumble of legitimist and radical rhetoric. “The Comédie-Française is rejuvenated,” one critic wrote in 1838, “with that irresistible ease characteristic of legitimate revolutions.” Another extolled her as “a queen among actors,” comparing her to Adrienne Lecouvreur, “that illustrious actress who sought to revolutionize the art of the drama at the beginning of the eighteenth century.” He concluded, “Mlle Rachel has brought that revolution about in our time.” Louis-Philippe, the so-called Citizen King, honored the new star with a visit to the theater to see her play Emilie in Cinna, Corneille’s play about a conspiracy against the Roman Emperor Augustus. The King of the French, as he styled himself, congratulated her for bringing back the great days of French tragedy; heavily, he apologized that the press of business prevented him from coming often to the theater. She was charming, but notably made the error of calling the king monsieur, not sire—not out of ignorance, she explained later, but because she was in the habit of addressing emperors (Augustus, for instance, in Cinna). Many on the left had been critical of Rachel’s too contemptuous pronunciation of le peuple, in a crucial political speech in the play, but everyone enjoyed the anecdote about the sharp little actress pulling rank on the dull old king. And her point was good: a uniform honorific—monsieur nearly as much as “citizen”—effects a measure of leveling.
To show its commitment to the arts and to the past, the Citizen King’s government presented Rachel with a library of the classics. Bourgeois society, eager to parade its elite tastes, embraced, enveloped, and claimed her. The class that had profited most from the revolution of 1830 was hostile to romanticism, especially in the theater, therefore hospitable to Rachel. And the Catholic aristocracy of course valued what she stood for, Racine and Port-Royal. Careful parents allowed her to dance alongside their daughters in the Faubourg Saint-Germain—“not only society women but young ladies of the highest rank aspire to the friendship of a woman of the theater,” Sainte-Beuve observed. At evening parties, in her white dress, Rachel traded on Camille’s high moral tone and sexual purity, and Hermione’s proud disdain for a faithless lover. Her Hermione soon became a favorite: thrillingly, she acted out “passions so profound that their depths can only be glimpsed through a smile of irony,” one critic wrote, “restrained melancholies that look inside themselves, analyze their own despair.” If, as people said, her Jewish audiences especially identified with Rachel’s scorned and scornful Hermione, Christian fans were awed by the Jewess’s unexpectedly pure elegance and grace. They praised “this young girl, this poetic Rachel, who wears upon her brow a halo of purity, the loveliest adornment of a woman, just as, in the evening, she wears a diadem, the most splendid ornament of a queen.” The Racinian aura of loftiness provided the ground for an extraordinary reputation for sexual virtue, the memory or residue of which, even after Rachel’s “fall” into scandal, lent the unmarried actress unprecedented dignity.
In France, a reputation for wit did not—as it would have done in England—make a woman’s morals automatically suspect. On the contrary: Rachel’s sallies were delightedly repeated as proof of her spirit and self-possession, her salonnière’s charm. Everyone talked about the scornful reply she made when a man of rank proposed to marry her: Marquise indeed, she had snorted, when she could be a princess every evening! (That the suitor to hand was the homosexual Marquis de Custine seemed beside the point.) Mme Récamier invited Rachel to her Catholic salon at l’Abbaye aux Bois, where (people said) schemes for her conversion were hatching, and she was introduced to the aged Chateaubriand, the hostess’s longtime lover. Gallantly, the author of Mémoires d’outre-tombe told Rachel that her arrival on the scene increased his reluctance to die; some men never die, she replied as gallantly. It was at l’Abbaye aux Bois that she was asked to perform, before an archbishop, the speech in Corneille’s Polyeucte in which the newly converted Pauline declares her faith with a dramatic, “Je crois.” She demurred and pointedly chose one of the Jewish queen’s speeches from Racine’s Esther instead. Diffidence, or defiance? When the prelate pressed her hand on parting, and murmured that one surely had to believe the words one uttered in order to speak them as she had, she replied very ambiguously, “Je crois”—which is to say either, in Pauline’s phrase, “I believe,” or merely the conventional, formulaic “I believe so.”
Rachel in 1842, from a contemporary lithograph (photo credit 4.3)
From the first glittering party for Rachel at Véron’s large house on the rue Taitbout, admirers had marvelled at her gaiety and charm, her wit and self-possession. Not yet twenty, the daughter of people of no substance or consequence, she moved easily in the most elegant salons, notably not dazzled. Shrewd and watchful, the studious child was centered by her commitment to her art. “People invite me on all sides, baronesses, duchesses, counts, and if I accepted all these invitations, I would never have time to open a book,” she wrote her sister Sarah in her early years of fame. “The only society appropriate for an artist is her roles, not these pretty ladies and gentlemen who pay you flattering compliments at their parties, and trash you and tear you apart once you’ve left.” (They’ve offered her eighteen thousand francs for sixteen performances at Bordeaux and Lyons, she adds complacently.)
The theater had taught her to play the lady, and to know pretense when she saw it; success had taught her to think well of herself. Her hostesses found her self-confidence disturbing: Was it that easy for a vulgar little Jewish actress to assume the appearance of a young woman of good family, to look and act like the real thing? A hundred years later, another French actress speculated (along lines that must have presented themselves to people of Rachel’s time) that Rachel’s poise had its roots in her distance, and constituted a kind of mockery. Because she was an outsider, Béatrix Dussane conjectured in the 1940s, Rachel was able to take less than seriously the conventions true Frenchmen respected, and therefore had no trouble imitating and exploiting them so as to pass in good society: she succeeded “precisely because she did not believe in it, because she understood the amount of snobbery and imitation involved, because, beneath her show of respect for proper manners, she remained a foreigner. A foreigner intent on pleasing in order to conquer and dominate; a foreigner upon whom none of our conventions and hierarchies ever imposed themselves.”
Tragic Muse Page 17