Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  TO THE ENGLISH, at first, the threat of murderousness that Rachel posed seemed strictly, therefore safely, classical. Onstage she did not commit murder, imaginary or real, like a Laure in a melodrama. Rather, in accordance with the courtly bienséances, the violence she engaged in took place behind the scenes—and evidently, excitingly, in her mind. She was reputedly chaste; Roxane’s graceful little hand seemed clean enough for the English actress Helen Faucit, who was praised by George Eliot as a model of female virtue, to beg for a cast of it in 1840. Later, in response to gossip, Miss Faucit backed away: as the respectable wife of Sir Theodore Martin, she could visit a “fallen” Rachel no more than she could be visited by George Eliot, who defied Victorian convention by living with G. H. Lewes without being married to him.

  Miss Faucit is the exception that proves the rule often enviously cited in France, that it was easier for actresses to cross over into respectability in England. In general, in both countries, the line between the great world and the demimonde was firm: in both France and England, the theater was a counter-world where many bourgeois conventions were inverted. Plays and novels abundantly dramatize the contrasts between the theatrical and “real” worlds, and their interesting points of intersection: in novels as different as Balzac’s La Cousine Bette (1846) and Charles Reade’s Peg Woffington (1853), encounters between virtuous wives and shady, imperious theater queens with hearts of gold exploit the depth of the divide, the strength of the clichés about the difference, the reliable drama inherent in challenging it. In fact, the world of the theater was in some respects better than any other one for women, and not necessarily a moral abyss. Women of the theater could assume positions of management, as the Béjart women in France and Madame Vestris in England did. For all their comparative raffishness, theater people often led family lives in a separate sphere of unimpeachable respectability: in Hard Times, Dickens sympathetically portrays the devoted husbands, wives, and children attached to Sleary’s circus. In her study of Nelly Ternan, the actress who lived secretly as Dickens’s mistress, Claire Tomalin sketches the interconnecting family lives of Nelly’s people and the better-known Kembles and Siddonses, Keans and Macreadys. For Nelly Ternan, whose actress mother was known as virtuous, it was possible to choose to seem respectable and even to bring off a plausible semblance of bourgeois morality that successfully concealed a secret life (though people did talk). In France, it would have been much less easy. Not impossible: Samson and his wife were exemplary bourgeois theater folk (their respectability being assisted by the moral cachet which the Théâtre-Français had developed as it had declined in popularity). But the expectation was that an unmarried actress’s sexual favors were available, and for sale. She was expected to live as Balzac’s Coralie did, or his La Torpille, or the historical Adrienne Lecouvreur, or Mlles George, Anaïs, or Judith, whom Rachel knew—as the mistress of wealthy men who chose wives from their own class.

  Although the young Rachel was visibly under the protection of Samson and the state theater, it was well known that her own people were of a world too marginal and murky to mirror respectable society, and too poor to be above suspicion. The Félixes did not, like the Ternans, belong to a sub-society of actors, any more than they were members of the respectable Jewish community which also mimicked the majority. The journalists who dwelt on Thérèse Félix’s Bohemian origins meant to suggest that the family were close to Gypsies. Heine thought it hilarious that people talked of Rachel’s making a great marriage—and considered the talk to be a symptom of terminal social disorder. Sardonically, he reported that one man made up to Princess Isabella Fernanda of Spain after Rachel’s father, “who is descended from a good Jewish family, refused him his daughter’s hand.” Mocking more than Jacques Félix’s arrogance, the German poet proclaimed, “All the ladies-in-waiting of both the Castiles—and those of the whole universe—will hold up their hands in horror. Now, at last, they understand that the old world, the world of traditional respect, has come to an end!”

  Heine was overreacting for comic effect. People talked so wildly about Rachel’s marrying into the aristocracy partly because she had convinced them of her innate rank, but largely because they did not know what to make of her. On the one hand just a little actress, she seemed to transcend that category. And her aggressive virginity, like any heroine’s in a novel or a play, demanded a romantic plot.

  It was after her “conquest” of England in 1841 that Dr. Véron, in a mood of expansive mockery, read aloud some compromising letters after one of his famous good dinners; the next day le tout Paris tittered over the commonplace truth about la chaste Rachel. Devastated by the threat to her career, she claimed to be contemplating suicide; it was also said that she tried to buy the letters to protect her image. Mme Crémieux, the lawyer’s wife, wrote urgently to counsel her to marry and save her name at once. (That pillar of the Jewish community had had her children baptized without her husband’s knowledge.) But less extreme expedients were to hand.

  Sophisticated Paris in the mid-nineteenth century was not really comparable to puritanical America in the mid-twentieth, which felt itself betrayed when Ingrid Bergman, the Nordic nun of The Bells of St. Mary’s, left her tall doctor husband for the Italian Roberto Rossellini on Stromboli. Disapproval of Rachel could not be so stern, but the objection to being fooled was as real. The star’s image was shattered; some fans felt taken. Rachel had little choice but to seize the alternative persona that was awaiting her, as it were, in the wings. She slipped into it easily: youth and impudence, physical grace, a slim figure, a brilliant dressmaker, and an edgy, brittle look equipped her nearly as well as beauty would have for a new, more sexual role. In exchange for glamour, pleasure, and freedom, it was not at all hard to leave her mother at home, along with her white dress, and brave the scorn of the virtuous. People with reason to fear being compromised avoided her—a Mme Crémieux, or a Helen Faucit. On the other hand, a Mme Récamier could rise beyond convention: “Mlle Rachel is a great artist, she is willing to put her talents at my disposal, she has impeccable style,” the old woman supposedly declared. “I have nothing more to ask of her.” And in England Queen Victoria would continue to be her loyal fan for years, sublimely unperturbed by gossip.

  RACHEL’S EVENTFUL LOVE LIFE, like every female star’s, lends itself to being read in theatrical terms: as enacting a self fractured by role-playing or softened into insensibility or vice, as a revelation of a “true” concealed self, or perhaps as a response to the repression that was imposed on her by her roles. (In one biographer’s view, she made and broke her liaisons, and lived “with utter freedom of mind and body, as though she wished, by dissipations, to divest herself of the chaste and reverent priestly character she assumed on the stage.”) As stars of subsequent times would do, Rachel served as an image of the split between the private and the public selves, and also as an exemplary, dramatic instance of their interaction. She was the more fascinating, perhaps, for defying the biographical imperative that a tragic actress must be a grande amoureuse in the standard sense, a woman consumed by amorous passion and dedicated to love alone. Onstage, she never found a man to partner her the way Dorval found Lemaître, and Ellen Terry found Irving, and Bernhardt, Mounet-Sully. In private life, she did not follow the model of Adrienne Lecouvreur, who was famed (and admired) for pawning her silver to underwrite her hero-lover’s patriotic martial adventure. She was not like Duse, who endured the torments of sadistic Gabriele d’Annunzio, or Marilyn Monroe, who, at the end, let herself be victimized by a series of cynical, powerful men. Rachel had a great many lovers, both men she enthusiastically cared for and more casual ones, but no single passion for a man that began to equal her commitment to the stage and her parents, her sisters and brother, and her two children. The story of her love life has lent itself more easily, therefore, to cynical than sentimental emphasis.

  “I am free, and mean to remain free,” she wrote emphatically to a persistent suitor in 1846. “I will have renters, but not owners,” she is su
pposed to have quipped during the time she lived openly and lavishly in a house she shared, as his maîtresse en titre, with a man about town. Unlike Bernhardt, she never risked marriage. The courtesan heroines of the nineteenth century are victims; their opposite numbers in popular legend are ambitious, heartless schemers. Rachel fell between the stereotypes, seemed sometimes the one and sometimes the other, or deliberately both at once. She loved not particularly wisely and not always remarkably well, but energetically—the way she did everything. “I love to be loved as I love when I love” was one of the personal “mottoes” the peddler’s daughter adopted, aping the aristocracy with a flashy hint of self-parody. (Another was Tout ou rien; was Bernhardt’s Quand même an extension of or a response to it?) The most dramatic and effective of her corrections of received ideas about women was made by her professional accomplishment: she made money by acting, not by sleeping around. But she did like lavish presents, and (therefore) the rich men who had it in their power to give them to her. And she liked power—the company of powerful men as well as her own power over them.

  The adolescent Rachel seems to have taken her first lover during her years at the Théâtre Molière. He was an actor who called himself Ancelin, who lent her parents money. The affair was sordid but the man, committed to believing in Rachel’s genius, was discreet. (No evidence of the connection was published until Chevalley’s 1989 biography.) The somewhat less quiet connection with Véron occurred during the summer of 1838. Rachel’s first public, indeed publicized, liaison did not take place until 1842, after the affair of the letters. The man she chose made for a pert rejoinder to those who bemoaned her “fall”: François de Bourbon-Orléans, Prince de Joinville, the third of Louis-Philippe’s five sons and the hero of the expedition to Saint Helena and Napoleon’s Second Funeral. Arsène Houssaye’s story of how the two met is no doubt apocryphal: the prince is supposed to have sent his card backstage with the scrawled message, “Quand? Où? Combien?” to which Rachel responded in kind, “Ce soir. Chez moi. Pour rien.” While those telegraphic “love letters” were probably the work of another actress more overtly on the market and another, more sophisticated prince, or even of a single fabulist, the story has stuck to the legend of Rachel because of the two significant points it makes: that Rachel had the wit to match even a rude proposition, and that she didn’t want money in exchange for sexual favors. (It was said that in her heyday Rachel “had two bracelets entirely composed of rings given her by her lovers, so heavy that she could wear only one at a time, the other being carried in her pocket.”) Joinville was a prince to be enjoyed for the pleasure of it: charming, handsome, and twenty-three, he was a prowler of theatrical corridors who had a private hideaway on the rue Montpensier where he could entertain her. They were a high-spirited couple, even on paper: she writes to her “old dog,” he of his “good old Rachel.” The solemn tragedienne is nowhere in evidence when, during Joinville’s absence, she fondly reminds her lover of her claims on his “tail,” demanding that he return to her: “since you’re willing to wag your tail in my honor, move your four paws as well and get to Paris.” After the young prince made a politically correct marriage she continued to keep his statue on display in her living room. Among her papers she kept the affectionate last letter in which he had taken leave of her: in the margin she wrote dramatically, “Poor Joinville! You take with you my first, my last love. I will live, I will love, never again.” For his part, Joinville recalled her fondly in old age (he lived until 1900).

  JOINVILLE was barely gone on the naval expedition from which he returned with a wife when, in January 1843, Rachel became the mistress of the amant en titre of another actress, Mlle Anaïs of the Comédie-Française. Alexandre-Florian-Joseph Colonna, Count Walewski, fell heavily in love with her; and it pleased Rachel to be adored by the son of Napoleon. The product of the Emperor’s liaison with the beautiful Polish countess Marie Walewska, he had become a French citizen in adulthood, and lived in Paris dabbling in journalism, playwriting, and Polish and French politics. With some notion of being her Pygmalion, Walewski took Rachel’s manners and daily habits in hand: in his biographer’s view, it was he who made a lady of her. Walewski was a possessive, protective, suffocating lover who directed her (in writing) to renounce coquetry, tell him everything, and do everything he prescribed, in order to avoid the dangers of her theatrical milieu. That she found him dull and conventional may be guessed from her letters to him: “My conduct is beyond reproach, as you say,” she writes him coyly, “but this doesn’t prevent me from making a few blunders. Don’t go getting worried on my account: they’re only small blunders.” About him, she writes rather dismissively, in a postscript to a long letter to Adèle Samson: “The Walewski begs me to tell you a thousand things (believe they are pleasant things, as he means you to do).”

  Count Alexandre Colonna Walewski, from an engraving by Mottez (photo credit 4.6)

  Seriously domestic, Walewski bought a pretty hôtel particulier on the rue Trudon, where the two of them set up house (Rachel would buy him out in 1850, when their affair was long past). The little street, which was to disappear in the course of urban renewal later in the century, was a charmingly quiet retreat within the city, and the luxurious style of living there quickly became legendary. Guests were received by a servant who bore himself like an English butler, and were then ushered into a vestibule where rich carpets covered the marble floor. An elegant curved stairway led to the upper stories: light filtered down onto it from an Eastern-style cupola made of stained glass. Fresh flowers filled magnificent vases. In the large salon, decorated in white and gold, a table displayed a variety of bladed weapons with handles wrought of gold and jewels, and in one case, human bone. Otherwise the room was redolent of comfort—and glory. The Nine Muses, each one floating over her name in Greek, looked down from panels on the walls. Thrown on the red damask sofas and chairs were shawls and lengths of lace at least as valuable as the fabrics they protected. The silver and china of the household were marked with a single “R,” and other furnishings bore the anti-family crest Rachel had devised for herself, her single initial framed by a buckled belt. The salonnière received on regular Thursdays, when everyone who wanted to know everyone in Paris was eager to come to enjoy the food and drink and the gambling that went on in one of the smaller rooms, not to mention the wit of the perfectly charming hostess, and the sense of being enviably in the right place. On a white bearskin in the salon, visitors could watch a pretty child at play—the son of Rachel and Walewski, and the grandson of Napoleon—the real master of the house, some people said. Walewski’s friends of course maintained that he was the master—at least in the bedroom, a boudoir de parade with a bed more magnificent than the one Louis XIV had enjoyed at Versailles. The curious visitor could glimpse its rich hangings, and even the chamber pot of costly Sèvres porcelain decorated with risqué scenes. Off the room was a Spartan closet furnished with a narrow bed and little else: there, they said, the tragedienne devoutly invited her muse, brooding in gloomy solitude.

  A widower whose children had died, Napoleon’s half-Polish son had none of his mother’s beauty or his father’s brilliance. But he was steady and uxorious. He was distressed and sympathetic when Rachel miscarried in November 1843, and elated when she bore him a son a year later. She was somewhat less than carried away by maternity: “You ask whether my son is beautiful,” she writes to a friend. “Do you want me to answer frankly, and tell you what I think straight out? He is pretty, very pretty, and what is more he promises to take after his father.” Walewski recognized his son (who signed himself “Alexandre Colonna W” as a youth, foregrounding the noble Roman part of his name). The surname of Rachel’s second son, by the feckless young Arthur Bertrand, was Félix: his mother named him Gabriel-Victor (“Victor-Gabrielle,” she ungrammatically wrote, in the note announcing the birth to Mme Samson). Enjoying the nominally huge disparity of class between the boys, legend-mongers like to repeat Rachel’s probably apocryphal remark that little Gabriel would be
his nobler brother’s coachman. But she was equally solicitous about both her children, and encouraged them to be friends. Both boys grew up to be successful in the service of France: Alexandre-Antoine-Colonna Walewski became a diplomat who died at his post in Turin in 1898; Gabriel-Victor Félix, a navy man, died in Brazzaville (Congo), Africa, in 1889, where he was the French consul. From his letters we can know Alexandre as a tender boy and man, who faithfully corresponded, well into middle age, with his mother’s servant Rose Halff, whom he called his second grandmother.