Diderot’s paradox obtained offstage as well as on: Rachel was so good at passing for a young girl of good family precisely because she kept a part of herself apart. In effect, her play implied that manners, ton, Frenchness itself might be acquired, that a foreigner could get herself up to be absolutely comme il faut, as it were plus française que les Françaises, and breach the wall of French high society and undermine it. Was Rachel laughing at her hosts in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, observing and criticizing them as she would criticize the English aristocracy when she wrote home from London that she longed to “disenduke” herself? From Paris she wrote no telltale letters to her family comparable to the sharp-eyed reports she would send home about the barbaric table manners of upper-class Russians. She merely kept her mother at her side as her chaperone—with whom, perhaps, she could chuckle over the triumphs of the evening later on.
IN THE EXCLUSIVE SALONS she graced, Rachel was expected to entertain with excerpts from her tragedies, as Adrienne Lecouvreur had done in the eighteenth century. But the world was further than it had been then from the formal stage. In a modern, bourgeois context her recitations were sometimes seen as implausible and even ridiculous. Samson was not the only one to be distressed: Mérimée found her absurd and vulgar, declaiming Pauline’s exalted periods between a piano and a tea-table, and George Sand was disturbed by a discrepancy in scale. “Rachel, Rachel herself, breaking the last cords of her admirable instrument in order to move all the waves of her public, appeared up close to be a victim of epilepsy,” she declared. Those who most respected Rachel’s art believed its proper place was the stage on the rue de Richelieu, where her voice and gestures had been trained, and where they would continue to be appreciated, evaluated, and further perfected by the trained eyes and ears of connoisseurs, for the sake of her own development as well as for Art’s sake. But the young Rachel wanted more flattery and applause, more scope, more freedom and excitement, more money and social recognition, than confinement to a single stage could give her. She was brilliant in the roles of stern young heroines who were unhappy in their affections, exiles in a strange land, solitaries in a hostile universe, reliant only on their wit and strength of mind, on irony and paradox, to assert their personal worth. Was she obliged to stick to the plot as well as the tenor of the tragic scripts, and maintain not only the dignified bearing but the renunciatory mode of a heroine by Racine?
A FEW MONTHS BEFORE her eighteenth birthday, in November 1838, the Comédie showed off its new dark-eyed star in a gorgeous, expensive production of Racine’s Bajazet. The setting of the play is a Turkish seraglio; in his preface, Racine had explained that he hoped the geographical remoteness would compensate for the fact that the story was contemporary. The conquests and orientalist fantasies of the mid-nineteenth century had narrowed the distance from the East: as Roxane, the wily, imperious, bloody-minded mistress of a sultan, Rachel was a familiar figure, a dusky, demanding, desirable woman out of fashionable paintings by Chassériau and Delacroix, an image that flattered France for possessing its luxurious Eastern pleasure-dome. But either the strength of her play or her initial awkwardness in the role—it is hard to tell which—proved at first to be disturbing.
Rachel in the costume of Roxane, after a painting by Devéria, 1840 (photo credit 4.4)
Her elaborate costume altered the image of chaste Camille. She wore red velvet Turkish slippers with turned-up toes, embroidered in gold, on her fairy feet: above them, pantaloons billowed under a long skirt, an overskirt, and a sash—yards of fabric richly colored and trimmed. This Rachel was no starved waif, no spectral emblem of an ideal: the costume emphasized her womanly curves. Its sheer excess and the contrast with her usual chaste garb insisted on the fact of masquerade. Gold and gems clasped her arm, swagged across her chest, hung from her ears, and one jewel even fell, in an oriental fashion, from her turban onto the high pale forehead, still imposing but no longer seeming quite so severely intellectual or virginal. (It is hard to know exactly how to read the ethnic nuances of this costume: in Balzac’s Les Illusions perdues, Mme de Bargeton is described as wearing “a Jewess’s turban, enriched with an Eastern clasp.”) The costume became her—and newly sexualized her. Long loose sleeves gave a flourish to the pointing finger by which Roxane seals the doom of the man who dares to turn her down. Rachel was formidable, enchanting, adorable.
Protective of the Grecian myth he had so heavily invested in, jealous of his power, eager to make news, Janin was obliged to object to the radical change. He damned the whole expensive production, and protested that the inexperienced Rachel was miscast as the doyenne of an oriental seraglio. One barely needed to read between the lines: the experience at issue was sexual, the implied threat was of exposure. Anticipating the wreck of a promising career, Jacques Félix urged his daughter to withdraw from the play. For the first time on record, Rachel openly disobeyed him. She responded superbly in Camille’s tones, pulling herself together in daring defiance of her father—and counting on her convenient superfluity of fathers in the wings. She had played off Samson against Félix for some time; now, in a girlish note, she wrote to Védel, vowing to stay with the production, disingenuously explaining that when one liked people, one naturally wanted to please them. She went back into dogged rehearsals with Samson, and three days after the premiere repeated the role so brilliantly that Janin was forced to recant.
Alfred de Musset, who had nearly come to blows with the critic of the Journal des débats after his review, praised the “reprise de Bajazet” in the Revue des deux mondes of 1 December 1838. He attacked Janin for hearing sexual innuendoes in Roxane’s speeches. When she speaks of the “charms” of her lover Bajazet, what could she have in mind, Musset asked, but “the beauty of features, the gracious manners, the sweetness of language, which a man as well as a woman can have?” Since when had charmes meant anything else?—except in Janin’s mind, which was fit for a world of crude spectacles and newspapers. Used to vulgar plays and players, the critic was deaf to higher things. Janin’s paragraphs were an insult to Racine as well as Rachel, Musset argued, suggesting that the purity of the one was surety for the other. Of Racine, he wrote, “How the poet would have blushed, only heaven knows, if someone had proposed an obscene interpretation of his verses! But what do you expect? In Racine’s time, Robert Macaire didn’t exist.” The critic of a fallen world was effectively silenced by the poet, whose call to arms to defend the glory of the patrimoine brought Rachel more high-minded enthusiasts. After her second performance as Roxane, Védel wrote, Rachel might have said à la Louis XIV, “La tragédie, c’est moi.”
The Comédie-Française duly gave her a legitimately royal role—inevitably, the Jewish queen, Esther. The move might have been predicted: the alternative would have been Bérénice, Racine’s other Jewish heroine, who is considerably less pure (Rachel did not perform that role until 1844). Esther, more a dramatic poem than a play, was taken out of mothballs to be a vehicle for her. The first performance was pointedly set for the Jewish holiday of Purim, when the biblical Book of Esther is read in the synagogue. Purim, which is calculated according to the Jewish lunar calendar, fell unusually early in 1839, on 28 February—which the certificate prepared in 1840 would duly specify as the birthday of Rachel. While the chronology is suspicious, the relation of cause and effect is not quite as easy to define as it seems to be: very possibly, the Félixes dated events by the Jewish holidays, and remembered Rachel had been born around Purim. (This might be one reason why the month of her birth is sometimes given as March.) Probably, the theatrical event served to confirm a less than clear fact, corroborating if it did not quite create it.
The Feast of Esther celebrates the victory of the Jews over their enemies through the agency of a Jewish woman. Esther becomes a queen after winning a beauty contest held by King Ahasverus (no relation of the Wandering Jew, and denominated, in Racine’s play, Assuérus). The king, who reigned from India even unto Ethiopia, has dismissed his old wife, Vashti, because of her proud independenc
e: she stubbornly refused to show herself at a feast where he was entertaining his friends. Advised that no man in his kingdom will be master in his own house unless the woman is rebuked severely, Ahasverus sets about to find a new queen to replace her. Esther is Vashti’s compliant opposite, a heroine—an instrument—of patriarchy. She is entered in the beauty contest by her pious guardian Mordecai, who intends to exploit her position at court; at first, she does not reveal her ancestry (or her Jewish name, Hadassah). When Mordecai learns of a plot to murder all the Jews, he directs Esther to invite the king to a feast in her quarters, where she reveals the plot, acknowledges her own Jewishness, and saves her people. Showing her beauty instead of concealing it, inviting and serving her husband instead of refusing his invitation, Esther is a traditional good woman. Vashti seems to be her rebellious opposite, but the structural similarities between their stories suggest a complex connection between them, to which Charlotte Brontë’s choice of name for the Rachel figure in Villette perhaps begins to point. In Racine’s play, Esther has neither a foil nor a shadow: Vashti is not even mentioned.
Rachel’s performance got some cool reviews, but it was on the whole successful. The Jewish actress’s appearance in a play in which a King (Assuérus) describes the Jews as unclean (impure) was calculated to compel the attention of the public. The so-called juiverie turned out in force, as expected, and Paris generally was fascinated by the curiosity. The exquisite ambivalence in the air, about a Jewish reine de théâtre, is suggested by a poem offered at the time as a “Bouquet à Mlle Rachel”—along with its attendant footnote. The poem celebrates the Jewess as a new Esther, idolized by the thousands of Christians of Paris; the note soberly points out the “fact” that Rachel had been circumcised in accordance with Hebrew ritual.
Janin was moved to create even more excitement, and draw attention to himself, by attacking again ad feminam, now from another angle. He insisted the “real” Rachel was insufficiently the lofty vestal to play Esther: he argued that she could not believably perform a role that had been conceived by Racine, the Catholic poet of Port-Royal, for one of the virgin schoolgirls at Mme de Maintenon’s academy at Saint-Cyr. People thought of her as Camille, he insisted—and also as the greatest of her creations, the Parisienne Rachel, the creature out of Balzac or Gavarni! Debate about who Rachel really was, and what she stood for, and whether she had a claim to stand for anything, raged right alongside arguments about the quality of her art. Many insisted that the daughter of the dead was hardly an artist. The painter Courbet, for instance, had only contempt for the party of “Ingres, Mlle Rachel, and M. Scribe”—all three, presumably, bloodless. The resentful Dumas would also class her with Ingres, and mockingly relegate the two of them to a room apart from the salon where modern artists exhibited—the salon des morts. The charges that she was a mere creature or puppet of Samson’s, and/or the creation of newspapers and claques, helped make the more general point that she was nothing but a mimic, nothing but hype, nothing in herself. In January 1840, at the height of her fame, the Courrier du théâtre mocked her as everything and therefore nothing, with its “example” of “Le Puff Rachel”: “Genius, Goddess of Love, liberator of Racine, toast of the salons, the Théâtre-Français personified, the teacher of its actors, cosmopolitan tragedienne, idol of the Jews, spoiled child of the aristocracy, eighth wonder of the world, jewelry shop.”
The ambivalences and alterations of public opinion did more than make Rachel’s fame and her image: it informed her craft as well. It is hard to say in retrospect, and was hard to estimate at the time, whether her several failures were her fault or the crowd’s. In either case, they kept the question of her genius open, and kept her a subject of debate. When she played Hermione before an unresponsive audience one evening in February 1840, she unaccountably lost her grip on her role. The Journal des débats reported that the unaccustomed coldness of the spectators chilled her and brought her up short. “She could not get used to the silence; she wished her gestures, her words, to have immediate effect; if not she hesitated, worried, forgot—not her role but the play she was in; so as to get the applause she needed, she called on all the exaggerations of dramatic art; where she should have shown irritation, she became enraged; where she had been great, she became swollen.” A stage queen reigns at her people’s sufferance; her only job is to subdue and conquer them every night.
2. FORTUNATE FALL
In Gautier’s opinion—and he admired her—Rachel’s success was not to be interpreted as a tribute to Corneille and Racine and Tragedy, or to the traditions of the Comédie-Française. It was, he insisted, an utterly modern phenomenon. She was the darling of a lazy nation that had been stupefied by opera and dance and music, and went to the theater now only for the spectacle. He wrote this in 1843, the year gaslight was installed in the Théâtre-Français, where a central chandelier, which glowed throughout the performances, allowed people to train their glasses on one another, or enjoy the newly brightened paintings on the walls—or glance languidly, if they chose to, at the stage, more softly illuminated by oil lamps, where Rachel in her tragedy toga stood framed and set apart. The poetry she so beautifully spoke was scarcely heard by her distracted audiences, Gautier maintained. The public dozed or chattered through the dull parts of the old plays, and only came to life to cheer vigorously, and hurl the bouquets they had bought for the purpose, in response to star turns. Her recitations of familiar and melodious tirades suited a modern taste for arias and for oddities, and for stars. Perfect as it was, he maintained, her diction contradicted the spirit of the smooth old regular alexandrines: “her delivery—precise, rigorous, staccato, raging, if I may put it that way—is at variance with the large periods, the elegant circumlocutions, the long enfolding phrases of classical poetry.” He concluded that “the contrast itself is the source of her success.”
The romantic taste for contrasts accounted also for her sexual appeal. Unfeminine and unyielding, Rachel was the womanly Marie Dorval’s antithesis—was “beautiful, but not lovable,” as G. H. Lewes wrote. It was a crux. In the middle of the nineteenth century, she raised “the whole issue of a woman’s lovability.” That phrase is the film critic Molly Haskell’s, from a 1988 article about Meryl Streep, who, she writes, “brings to dramatic point something that has been nosing its way to the forefront of consciousness for some time.” Rachel’s “terrible beauty,” as Lewes called it, first put the question of whether an actress’s job is to be pleasing. (Bernhardt said she thought it was.) The pale waif with burning eyes, the self-contained young woman rigid with disdain and contempt, the serious classical actress engaged in something more exigent and difficult than simply and artlessly playing herself, unsettled unexamined assumptions about Woman’s nature.
Only in her teens when she made her debut, Rachel grew literally as well as figuratively: she grew as the applause grew, Janin wrote. Sure of her strength, although always most confident when most rehearsed, she stuck to the classical repertoire, resisting criticisms of her “narrow” range and challenges to undertake romantic drama. But there were just so many roles of young princesses, and Alfred de Musset’s passionate plea for modern tragedies for Rachel had not been answered (he himself attempted but didn’t finish writing a play for her). Briefly, she undertook comedy at the Théâtre-Français, and failed as she had at the Gymnase: her Dorine in Molière’s Tartuffe, in April 1839, was not a success. (Gautier, who insisted that an actor must be versatile, later on praised another of her attempts at comedy, which most critics considered a mere caprice.) She performed a vivid variation on the regal theme in December 1840, when she triumphed opposite Mlle Maxime as Queen Elizabeth in Lebrun’s Marie Stuart: the great éclat attendant on the event was partly due to Janin, who had inflated Maxime’s importance as an actress in order to exaggerate the rivalry. Having successfully toured the provinces—she played Rouen, Corneille’s birthplace; Lyons, where she had been a child; and other cities—Rachel was ready to accept an invitation to England that was proffered by Benjami
n Lumley of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London—“M. l’Omelette,” she liked to call him. Actors in England enjoyed considerably better salaries than their opposite numbers in Paris, especially those who were expected to draw nourishment from the cachet of the Théâtre-Français. Rachel would be paid the considerable sum of thirty-five hundred francs for five performances in May. In return she was able to pull off the star’s economic magic trick: “she propped up the declining fortunes of Her Majesty’s Theatre, and filled its deserted benches.” Rachel’s reception in England was unparalleled. And in France her conquest of the land of gentlemen and ladies—and its queen—was taken to be further proof of her innate rank.
She had appealed to the British imagination even before she arrived in London: as early as December 1840, an astonishing number of column-inches in the English papers were devoted to the Paris production of Marie Stuart. Filtered though it was by Schiller and Lebrun, the subject of rival British queens was particularly interesting to the subjects of the young Victoria. So was Rachel, who was just two years younger than the queen who had come to the throne in 1837. By the time the actress appeared at Her Majesty’s Theatre in May 1841 she already had an English reputation and was seen as something like a qualified pretender to the English throne.
The audience that came to see her first performance was full of anticipation—so eager that it broke into premature applause for the first actress who walked onto the stage, who turned out to be a certain insignificant Mlle Larcher, in the title role. Had they not read on the posters that Rachel played Hermione and not the titular heroine, and understood that she was still in the wings? Had they any idea of what was being said on the stage? Embarrassed after discovering their error, people clapped all the harder when the idol of the hour did appear. For her part Rachel, always unsure of herself in new circumstances, was frightened at first by the serious English faces, and gratified by a welcome “which was only a mark of kindness, as they had yet to hear me.” Watching the audience watch his daughter perform, Jacques Félix reported the “bizarre” transformation from cold and solemn silence to absolute attentiveness, animation, and more. He said he could see Rachel’s emotions and expressions register on the bland British faces of the people who watched and listened to her: initial impassiveness dissolved, and pleasure, shrewdness, irony, vehemence, anger, fury followed one another in succession. Virtually unmediated by language, Rachel’s appeal to the emotions was direct: in England she was unfailingly successful. Some years later, anticipating a tour of the secondary cities in Britain, she wrote mischievously to Mme Samson that “it will be highly amusing, as I have been assured that they don’t at all understand the French language in the places where we’ll be playing.” (The Glasgow papers duly advised ladies to go to the theater to see Rachel, and learn more French, in an hour, than in a whole year of lessons.) The alien, distancing formality of seventeenth-century tragedy, its emphasis on aria-like tirades, the melodious rhythms and rhymes, the focus on a tragic heroine, the incomprehensible words, were all pleasurable in Britain, where operagoers had the habit of hearing tragic dramas sung in foreign languages. After Rachel became the rage in London, her repertoire quickly became fashionable too. Her fame came to qualify the national distaste for icy Racine: in 1843, posters in Birmingham advertised the performance of an English actress, Mrs. Foster, in “A Selection from Racine’s Tragedy of Bajazet, in the Original French, in Imitation of MADEMOISELLE RACHEL.”
Tragic Muse Page 18