Emile de Girardin, photograph by Pierre Petit (photo credit 4.7)
DURING HER EARLY YEARS with Walewski, Rachel was proudly monogamous. When she haughtily turned down a proposition from Alexandre Dumas père, the novelist retaliated by writing a hearty, elaborately metaphorical letter congratulating Walewski for being the possessor of a city that was impregnable to a siege. But Walewski’s territory had a will to wander. Her lover was away on a diplomatic mission when the bored Rachel set about deliberately to seduce Emile de Girardin. The pioneer journalist, brilliant and cold, was a self-made man in a style that probably would have attracted her even if he had not been popularly known as the Napoleon of the press. (He even dressed his hair in Napoleonic style.) He was clever, hardworking, and powerful, famous for having killed a man in a duel and known for the extensive dossiers on everyone important which he kept in alphabetized boxes. He was much older than Rachel—too old for love, he interested her by insisting as their affair began—and committed both to a mariage blanc with his literary wife and a longtime liaison with a certain amusing Esther Guimont. Flattered by his attention to her intelligence, Rachel wooed him with arguments that theirs was a singularly advanced and intellectual relationship, and finally he allowed himself to be won. Girardin, who later would be a lover of Sarah Bernhardt’s, was an interesting character who had a life that resembled a novel. Understanding as much early on, he wrote it himself. The illegitimate son of a married noblewoman and a man of rank, he had been named after Rousseau’s Emile and then abandoned by his parents, who denied him either of their names. At the age of twenty-one he published a well-received autobiographical “fiction,” Emile (1827), which had the didactic purpose of arguing for the rights of bastards (the title of the first chapter is “The Conquest of the Name”). Literary success and notoriety quickly put him in a position to claim his father’s recognition. He went on to further distinguish the family name he had won for himself by virtually inventing the cheap daily newspaper funded by advertising revenues. He founded La Presse in 1836, solidified his power by marrying the beautiful, well-connected, and accomplished Delphine Gay, and became a power in political life.
Delphine preferred to avert her eyes from Girardin’s sexual life; his mistress of ten years preferred not to. Outraged by Rachel’s incursion onto her property, Esther Guimont threatened in a letter by one woman of the world to another that she would inform Mme de Girardin unless Emile was returned to her. Rachel had spent years cultivating the vanity of Delphine, who as a playwright and journalist had a strong hand in her career; she had no choice but to retreat—but not before Walewski returned to Paris, got wind of the affair, and stormed out of the house on the rue Trudon, devastating Rachel by taking his fifteen-month-old son with him. She worked herself up into a state calculated to mollify the moralizing Walewski: “I am a monster indeed!” she wrote him, echoing the accents of Phèdre. Walewski generously returned the child—to be its mother’s good angel, he pedantically wrote her—and proceeded to marry a few months later. Rachel was distressed.
She went on to collect a series of new lovers, one of the first of whom was young Arthur Bertrand. He had marched along with Joinville at the Second Funeral; like Walewski, he was the ex-lover of another well-known actress, in his case the mature Virginie Déjazet, who had been chosen by his mother to instruct him in the arts of love. Arthur begged gambling money from Rachel, and pilfered it from her purse when she denied him. For some months Rachel was pleased to play the role of his “little wife,” and to enjoy his interest—equal to hers—in things Napoleonic. She writes to Arthur that she regrets missing the celebration of Napoleon’s birthday in May 1847 (the Invalides is no place for a woman, she tells him); she describes an encounter on a train with a weathered veteran of the wars whom she felt like kissing. But the enfant de Ste Hélène was not closer to Napoleon than several other available men in Europe. In the summer of 1847, pregnant with Arthur’s child, Rachel toured England and Scotland, and embarked on parallel affairs with the man who would be the Emperor Louis-Napoleon and his cousin Prince Napoleon, known as Prince Nap or Plon-Plon.
Though parallel, they were unequal—Prince Nap being more interesting and interested—and they intersected from the start. Empress Eugénie repeated the story as her husband had told it: how the three French friends were together in a compartment of an English train when Louis, awakened by a sudden swerve, opened his eyes to see his mistress in the other man’s arms. Diplomatically, he shut them again, playing possum (“So like him,” was his widow’s nostalgic comment). Prince Nap was a different type, a bon vivant (a Napoleonic medal dipped in German fat, one wag called him) just a year younger than Rachel. He was famously a republican, and known for his passion for classical art; in respect for Camille and Phèdre, he commissioned a toy Greek temple as a gift for Rachel. He loved her briefly and remained her friend for life, but it was her colleague, Mlle Judith, who was his mistress for years. As for Louis-Napoleon, he also stayed friendly: when he became emperor, Rachel was in and out of the Elysée Palace—the mistress of the house, people said with a knowing wink. And by the way, feminizing the legacy of Talma, who taught Napoleon to carry himself like an emperor, she showed Eugénie how to curtsy while sweeping a crowd with her eyes and seeming to meet the gaze of every single person. (When the palace guards mistook her for the empress one day, Rachel was reportedly insulted.)
Rachel’s many more or less anonymous lovers included a country gentleman with whom she dreamed of living a pastoral life. She attracted men individually and also in groups: Michel Lévy and the playwright François Ponsard considered themselves to be members of the cénacle Rachel; the so-called “Tuileries Club” of her admirers centered around Dr. Véron. The sentimental Ponsard had loved his “Rachellina” in Italy; back in France, he wrote private poems as well as plays for and about her, including a paean of praise describing her as a madonna with her young children at her side in the country. It was a pretty idea of herself that Rachel encouraged and shared—when she was not dining with Achille Fould and Delacroix, deploying canny letters to get what she could from Delphine de Girardin and the Comédie-Française, seducing the likes of Prince Nap, or presenting glimpses of herself on tour in Italy for Véron and his buddies to enjoy. To them, she writes highly rhetorical letters (“Ah! how this Italy has deceived me!!”), reporting on her tours and dramatizing herself: she tells, for instance, how she entered the Pope’s garden protected by a phalanx of escorts (the Marquis de Custine and others), and stole two oranges, which she washed in holy water and saved (“Jewess that I am”) for luck. Spoken by a representative of France, which had backed the papacy and helped put down the Italian revolution, Rachel-Camille’s “Rome” was more ambiguous than ever; she was conscious of her Italian tour as a dramatic occasion.
Prince Napoleon, photograph by Disdéri (photo credit 4.8)
Unromantically, she enjoyed protracted friendships with her ex-lovers. Not only the Second Emperor remained devoted and useful: Girardin continued always eloquent in her defense; Prince Nap came by yacht to visit her at Le Cannet, and promised to look after Gabriel’s career when she was dead. Most shockingly of all, she stayed chummy with Louis Véron, the Balzacian character credited with “corrupting” her in the first place, and “ruining” her in the second. The liaison with Véron that titillated contemporary caricaturists continued to amuse generations of biographers, who savored the spectacle of pure Camille in her toga squired by the fat-necked entrepreneur. Hector Fleischmann’s analysis of the association relies on a predictable play of rhetoric and prejudices: “The doubleness of Rachel’s character gives itself away clearly here. A woman, that is to say, hot-tempered, passionate, all nerves and anger, she will spurn Véron; a Jewess, that is to say, prudent, calculating, forward-looking and self-interested, she will use him. On the one side, her honor and dignity; on the other, her future and fortune. And would she hesitate? Would she place the one before the other? Do you think she isn’t a daughter of Father Félix?” Lege
nd (propagated by the dramatist Ernest Legouvé, in his memoirs) says she once planned to shoot Véron from the stage during a performance, with a gun she took with her for the purpose, but in fact she never even dropped the double-dealing doctor from her acquaintance. The scandalous affaire Véron—the reading aloud of the compromising letters—had occurred in 1841; all through the early 1850s, Rachel wrote her old friend boasting letters about the strenuousness and enormous profits of her tours. He was one of the most powerful men in Paris, still; she was an ambitious actress who carefully cultivated public awareness of her international fame. In 1849, before embarking on one tour, she wrote and prettily begged Véron not to forget her during the three months she would be away. She lists proudly, for his benefit, all the cities and the dates on her itinerary, commenting, “What a journey! How exhausting!! But what a take!!!” (Her word is dot, which means dowry.) In closing, she professes her love: “I love you with all my heart and am your most devoted friend.” The choice of pronouns and gendered nouns is perhaps flirtatious, certainly hard to gloss: Rachel addresses Véron with the formal vous, also strangely refers to herself as his ami, underlining the masculine noun and its matching article. There may well be a private joke involved. But from here it seems that Rachel, sure that the old ironist would appreciate her self-knowledge, is signaling her amused awareness that she appears unwomanly in a world where energies and appetites and aims such as hers are not the sort of thing a tragedienne, or any woman, can confess to.
AT THIRTY, in a letter to Véron and his friends written from Prague, she reflected on her career and life in general, and therefore on money. Young as she was—and in spite of what the papers were saying, she was still young, she insisted—she had learned a great deal in the course of extensive experience. First of all she had learned that true glory was independence. And what, if not money, makes independence possible? she asks. Noble sentiments are at the root of her strong desire to be rich, she concludes. Rachel was very aware of the limits and the ambiguities of independence. “My dear older and independent sister,” was one of her mock-respectful salutations to the willful Sarah: she knew that independence was not always glorious or noble. “When will I find an independent man who is able to come to visit me during this long exile of a tour?” she writes to Sarah at around the time of the letter to Véron, complaining of fatigue, and of being dirty as a little pig from the dusty roads, and tired of having a lover who was in Paris. “If by chance you take a stroll on a nice day, and run into a man with a nice face and figure, mail him to me poste restante to Munich, where I shall be in a fortnight.”
3. FATAL WOMAN
Alfred de Musset’s account of an evening he spent with the actress in 1839, frequently anthologized as “Un Souper chez Mlle Rachel,” is usually read as a telling sketch of her in private, a domestic counterpart to the picture of Rachel the public performer in Villette. Like Brontë’s chapter, Musset’s essay is an exercise in the art of literary portraiture. A portrait, as the aesthete Gabriel Nash explains in Henry James’s The Tragic Muse, is uniquely “a revelation of two realities, the man whom it was the artist’s conscious effort to reveal and the man (the interpreter) expressed in the very quality and temper of that effort.” (When the artist and the subject are not both men the process and product are different, perhaps, but Gabriel Nash avoids that issue.) He says that a portrait offers “a double vision, the strongest dose of life that art could give, the strongest dose of art that life could give.” When one artist makes a portrait of another, the double dose is even stronger; when the one is a romantic poet and the other a lovely young actress, various more and less artificial flavorings color the “dose.”
Musset tells of leaving the theater one evening with the gay young actress and some friends, who invite him to share their supper at the Félix apartment. Once there, Rachel discovers she has left the jewels she wore in the play behind her; she sends the maidservant back to fetch them. There is no other servant, and she is ravenous, so she cooks the dinner herself. The little white hands prove remarkably skillful as they prepare the simple meal of steaks and spinach, and the punch that is set aflame in the dimness. Finished cooking, Rachel snatches up a dish and implements and begins to eat without serving anyone else. But her mother complains that she is also hungry, so pewter plates get laid out for the company. (Showy sister Sarah grumbles about this, but the keys to the silver and china are gone with the maid.) The dinner is delicious; after eating, Rachel reaches for Musset’s sword, which she uses to pick her teeth. Relaxed now, she talks freely about her early life, telling how, with the change saved up by careful marketing, she managed to buy herself the works of Molière. Her mother and sister listen, nodding agreement. Then the maid comes back with the forgotten rings and bracelets, which she tips out on the table. The bracelets are magnificent, worth a good four to five thousand francs, and thrown in with them is a really valuable gold diadem: Musset savors the sight of the jewels tumbled together with the salad on the table. After the other guests leave, the mother drowses heavily in a chair like a Rembrandt duenna, while the young actress reads Racine to her poet by candlelight. Phèdre: her ambition is to play the great role. Enraptured by the poetry, she is still reading when her brutal father, back from the Opéra where he has just seen Mlle Nathan in La Juive (what else?), bursts in to pack Rachel off to bed and dispatch her admirer. Portrait of the artist as Cinderella, of life and art ill-met by candlelight: on the one hand the vulgar family and the vegetables, on the other the brilliant jewels, the great poetry, the adoring poet. Painterly chiaroscuro; also, perhaps, a sly hint of what Roland Barthes would call “Racinian tenebroso,” the playwright’s characteristic imagery. Musset’s Rachel is a white-handed daughter of the Muses misplaced by some ironic fairy in the bosom of the tribe of Félix; also—ardent, earthy, energetic, calculating, ambitious—she is clearly the daughter of precisely those Félixes. She is dead set on playing the greatest tragic role ever written for a woman, and defiantly tells her father she will finish reading Phèdre in bed.
The story captures Rachel’s energy and frankness, her gift for improvisation, above all her steely will. Arsène Houssaye claimed she told him one night at dinner that she had made herself beautiful—straightened out the curves of her nose and forehead—by sheer will. At the height of her stardom, Gérard de Nerval recalled the little actress of the Théâtre du Gymnase who became a great artist not because of fate or talent, but by virtue of her fierce, formidable determination: “the will of Mlle Rachel and the consent of the public have made a tragedienne of her.”
Though her public called insistently for that ultimate test and treat, she put off playing Phèdre until January 1843. Gautier considered her reluctance only natural: Phèdre, after all, is the supreme test of whether an actress has real genius or mere talent. Marie Dorval’s failure in the role at the Odéon in October, during a rainstorm that drowned out the actors’ voices, may have helped Rachel finally to decide to master—or submit to—Phèdre. Gautier admired Dorval, but he had found her natural quality at odds with this role; implicitly, the severe avatar of classicism was urged to show the way it ought to be done. A hasty note Rachel dispatched to Samson on her gold-trimmed stationery embossed with an “R” inside a shield suggests how apprehensively she approached it: “I have studied phedre a lot I will come tomorrow to ask you to judge the result of my profound research.”
Racine’s Phèdre is based on Phaedra in the Hippolytus of Euripides—a mythic figure like that other classical female criminal, Medea, and like her a descendant of the sun. Phaedra’s parents are Minos, the judge of hell, and his wife Pasiphaë, mother also of the Minotaur, a half-human monster sired by a bull; her sister is Ariadne, who saved Theseus from the labyrinth; her husband is Theseus himself. That hero’s absence from his kingdom provides the situation with which Racine’s play begins: the queen alone in a foreign land. In her first words, she confesses she is sick, and the action proceeds to chronicle her illness. Her affliction began on her wedding day, when
Phèdre conceived a passion for the young hunter Hippolyte, the son of her bridegroom. In the Hippolytus of Euripides, he is a youth whose passionate devotion to the goddess of chastity infuriates the goddess of love; Racine makes him more worldly, and more credible to a courtly French audience, by inventing the new character of Aricie, a young woman Hippolyte loves. Normalized by the introduction of a potentially comic plot, Racine’s Hippolyte makes Phèdre seem more grotesque. The character of Aricie, her rival and opposite, points up Phèdre’s aberrant nature; and on the level of plot, young Aricie functions to compound the agony of the older woman.
Racine’s critics, condemning Phèdre for too quickly believing her husband was dead and she was free, saw her as the archetype of lustful Woman. She defies the divinely given laws of marriage and the family, and the interdiction against incest, as well as the aesthetic rules that structure young love. In the early nineteenth century, Chateaubriand sympathetically interpreted Racine’s heroine as a prototypical suffering Christian soul; Rachel’s secular audiences probably understood her as a radically self-assertive woman guilty of Camille’s scandalous irreverence and Hermione’s—that is, of insufficient respect for heroes. The story of Phaedra and Hippolytus, as the classicist Froma Zeitlin writes, explores “the best-kept secret of cultural ideology, that is, the reality of the sexual, even adulterous wife.”
In the secular mid-nineteenth century, when the religious resonances of Phèdre’s passion—Euripidean-pagan and Racinian-Christian—were muted, the psychological dimension of the action was commensurately intensified. Phèdre is even more self-aware than Camille is. Her unrequitable lust is matched—her agony is increased—by her own intense scrutiny of her symptoms. She can tell her confidante Oenone exactly how she felt when she first saw Hippolyte:
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