Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  RACHEL SEEMED TO BE PLAYING with the image with similar aplomb and authority, offstage and on. In one of the letters written for public consumption that she sent back from Florence in 1851, she marvelled that she had been able to “reproduce the folds so beautifully chiseled by the tools of Michelangelo, Canova, Lorenzetto, Morelli, etc., before having seen them.” She put her self-image through its paces: “But it is my pride to have divined them; the daughter of the people knew how to drape herself in the antique fashion, and the Romans have just admired and applauded me with fury, on many evenings the crowns and bouquets have hidden the floor of the stage.” Houssaye says she told him that as a child traveling through the Alps, she jumped off the family wagon and rolled herself in the snow “for love of whiteness,” crying that she wanted to turn into a statue. Reiterated, the figure called attention to Rachel’s insistence on her likeness to images, her making an image of herself. The double role written for her in Valéria et Lycisca, a play about sin in high places in the decadent late Roman Empire, traded not only on the notion of her moral doubleness—Rachel as queen and courtesan—but also on the pervasive idea of the statue-woman. One reviewer attacked her for imitating the sculptor Clésinger (Sand’s son-in-law), who had exhibited twin busts of Rachel as Comedy and Tragedy: the model was accused of aping her own portraits. (For his part, Clésinger was criticized for giving Tragedy the features of the actress: “he made the mistake of thinking Tragedy was the same thing as a tragedienne—even though she be Mlle Rachel,” Edmond and Jules de Goncourt remarked.) A grudgingly good notice of her long-awaited performance of Tisbe in Hugo’s Angelo includes an innovative elaboration on the statue image: “It was a rare and moving spectacle, that first act, when the tragedienne entered the scene, the dead woman who wanted to live, the marble moving toward the men and women. It was almost like the Commander’s entrance at Don Juan’s supper—only in this case, it was the statue who was afraid.” The avenging statue from hell and the carousing victim struck stone-dead are one: the image suggests the writer’s disturbed sense that Rachel was acting out her own desires and also someone else’s.

  The ground floor of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris testifies to the hold marble had on the nineteenth-century imagination: with a mixture of self-conscious wit and despair, the sculptors of Rachel’s time grasped at eternity, denying that flesh is not stone, regretting it, defying the fact, always assertively going their predecessors and their contemporaries one better and bigger—or two or three. The silent, overstrenuous chorus laments mortality and history, and links up dreams and reality, sex and death, in the obsessive image of marble Woman. One recalls the painting (not in this museum) by Magritte, in which a famous verse by Baudelaire, their contemporary, is spelled out in crumbling stone letters: “Je suis belle, ô mortels, comme un rêve de pierre.”

  THE IMAGE OF A WOMAN who turns from stone to flesh or the other way round, or who turns men to stone, reflects anxieties about creation, sexuality, representation, identity. Primary, perhaps, in the nineteenth century, were the particular anxieties of the men who trained their eyes on female performers, and the men who were trained as artists by copying from a nude model, usually the only woman, as well as the sole undressed person, in the room. The group of artist-model-statue, so interesting to writers from Balzac to James, is related to the group of actress-audience-role: in both, Woman’s mutability is crucial. Nina Auerbach has argued that sexually repressed Victorian men, anxious about the limits of their power, were haunted by the image of a demonic woman who could enlarge, distort, and transform herself, turning the natural unnatural, as in a nightmare. As I see it, the women stars of the nineteenth century fascinated men and women by being self-contradictory images of womanly power and its containment. Taking on different roles and selves, they made the female body seem now the image of a wild idea, then a container of a vulnerable human soul, then again a commodity. Woman as Image of Nature and Object of Art was complicated by Woman as Actress, and by romantic ideas of embodied genius, of Art as Nature’s equal and opposite.

  In Crisis in the Life of an Actress (1848), the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard meditates on these themes. His essay’s avowed scope is modest: it sets out to be a tribute to one of Rachel’s contemporaries, the Danish actress Johanne Luise Heiberg, having been inspired by her performance, at the age of thirty-four, of the role of Juliet, which she had first played at not quite sixteen. Kierkegaard was an acquaintance of the actress, who was known as Fru Heiberg—no less than the King of Denmark himself having resolved the national problem of whether she was to be called Madame, à la française, as most actresses were, or Fru, the Danish equivalent of Mrs. Like Mrs. Siddons’s and unlike Rachel’s, her stage name marked her married respectability; it furthermore acknowledged the stature of her husband, a writer and prominent member of the Copenhagen intellectual and artistic community whose importance augmented hers. Kierkegaard’s respectful admiration of Heiberg’s wife strengthens his argument that her mature Juliet is superior to the one she had created as a girl. He begins by observing that actresses tend to please by their “playfulness, liveliness, luck, youthfulness”—he does not quite say sexual attractiveness—which appeal naturally to men. Precisely for that reason, he goes on, the actress is challenged as an artist only after nature and time have denied her those assets. He acclaims Fru Heiberg for brilliantly rising to the challenge, for becoming the antagonist of time itself. Like time, an actress works transformations, metamorphoses; her art is to go against nature. Altering herself, she takes the spectator beyond the simple, natural, vulgar delights a youthful woman offers, thrills him by the sense of a challenge risen to, and met. The thirty-four-year-old Fru Heiberg is a more wonderful Juliet than the younger one, Kierkegaard concludes, because she shows that imagination and art prevail over the flesh.

  Such a view evolves logically into fin de siècle decadence—Huysmans’s preference for art that goes against nature, spelled out in A Rebours (1884), and the aestheticism of the Goncourt brothers or Oscar Wilde. Bernhardt’s admirers would adore her for flying in nature’s face when, playing Jeanne d’Arc at sixty-five, she stoutly responded, when the inquisitors asked her age, “Nineteen.” On the other hand, Kierkegaard also sounds like his mid-century contemporaries—Gautier admiring Rachel although she had nothing merely pretty or French about her, or Janin (the former lover of buxom Mlle George!) making a point of his admiration of Rachel’s “flat chest.” Like these Parisian men of the world, the Danish philosopher is boastful of a taste that marks his superiority to ordinary sensual men. His high regard for the actress is based on an analogous superiority of hers. He honors Fru Heiberg’s struggle against time and physical decay, admires the daring and the effective magic of her self-transformation into a young heroine nothing like her real self.

  TIME AND TALK together changed Rachel’s image: she turned from a pure chaste child into a dangerous mature woman, from Camille to Phèdre, from a princess of the theater to the powerful queen who in 1854 could flatly refuse the Empress Eugénie’s special request that she perform Marie Stuart, instead of Cinna. (The request was brought to her by Fould, the government minister, after ten o’clock in the evening: she claims to have told him that the unfortunate queen of Scots got on her nerves, whereupon “the minister understood me and didn’t insist; in return for his tact, I offered him a cup of tea; we then discussed Sebastopol.”) But Rachel never had to grapple with the natural changes predicted for her, vindictively, by Mlle George, who had lived to be fat, old, poor, and superfluous. The older actress had complained enviously to Victor Hugo after Rachel refused to assist at her benefit: “Look, I’m all for Rachel,” she told him. “She’s a clever one. How she brings to heel all these comical Comédie-Française people! She reviews her contracts, makes sure she has warm dressing rooms, time off, and mountains of money; then, once everything has been signed, she says, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that I’m four and a half months pregnant and I won’t be able to perform for five months!�
�� She has it all figured out. If I had her ways, I wouldn’t be starving like a dog on the streets.” And in her anger George predicted that for all her brilliance on the stage and her equally brilliant backstage maneuverings, the other actress would end quite as wretchedly as she.

  Rachel did grow ill, and paler and more shadowy, but she only got to make believe she was old. She was brave enough, at just twenty-six, to undertake the reverse of Fru Heiberg’s masquerade: she put gray in her long droopy curls and made lines in her face with makeup for the role of Athalie, startling Paris by the sight of a woman who willingly pretended to be uglier and older than she was. In October of the following year, she played Néron’s mother in Britannicus, prompting Gautier to wonder whether she proposed to regress instead of going forward, and end up taking the roles of babies at the breast. Appreciative as he was of her flexibility, he counseled nevertheless that she try to stay young as long as she could. If an actress is to make herself a sign of transformative power, she is well advised to transform herself in one direction only: the power to alter the self and change it into a sign is most powerful—most pleasing—when mortality is defied, not invited.

  5. SYMBOLIC MOVES

  The 1847–48 season was a strenuous one for Rachel. During the summer, in the early months of her second pregnancy, she had left the country retreat she called “Ma Santé” (“My Good Health”) to tour England and Scotland. In the fall she retired to the country to read the mixed reviews of Cléopâtre, await the birth of her child, and write letters to Buloz, the director of the Comédie-Française, who was trying to force her to play the full nine months in Paris that her contract required, and also to compensate the company for her past absences. Shortly after the court pronounced in favor of Buloz, the government fell.

  Rachel’s flirtation with the cousins Napoleon in England in 1847 must have seemed to her, in retrospect, shrewdly prescient. During that summer, opposition to Louis-Philippe’s government had begun to rally around the cause of electoral reform. Dissidents had held a series of “banquets” designed to circumvent the laws against free assembly, and revolution finally broke out when a banquet planned for Paris was forbidden by the apprehensive authorities. Workers rioted; barricades were thrown up; people were killed; bodies were paraded in the streets. At the end of the month the king abdicated in favor of his grandson, and fled, disguised, to England, with the queen. “Your Majesty, it’s time to leave,” Rachel’s old friend Adolphe Crémieux had told him on 23 February, escorting the king to his carriage. Caricatures of Louis-Philippe bustling off with his umbrella delighted the large but fatally divided camp of his enemies.

  Rachel as Athalie, 1847, photo illustration from Jules Janin’s Rachel et la tragédie

  The Comédie-Française, renamed Théâtre de la République, had closed its doors during the most severe days of street fighting, but opened them soon again; people were not in the mood for stage entertainment, but the management, hurting financially, was eager to feature its star—and make a show of her obedience. Rachel begged to be excused from scheduled performances, saying the doctors had ordered her to rest for six weeks after childbirth. She was suspected of lying, and of maneuvering to arrange the replacement of Buloz with her candidate, Lockroy, who promised to be more indulgent of her demands for long vacations and short seasons. Lockroy was indeed installed by the new republican government on 3 March. Three days later, probably at his suggestion, Rachel made a dramatic appearance onstage after Act IV of Horace, celebrating the people’s victory over the king by reciting the hymn of revolution, La Marseillaise.

  It was electrifying. Gautier enumerated her perfections: the menace and power of the pale mask, the black eyes agleam with suffering and revolt, the brows twisted like serpents, the nostrils flaring as if to inhale the air of freedom upon emerging from a fetid prison. When she lifted her arm with a gesture of “tranquil violence,” he wrote, letting the sleeve of her tunic fall back, it seemed to all the world as if Nemesis, sculpted by an invisible artist, were emerging from a block of Grecian marble. She neither sang nor recited, but spoke in a musical antique manner that could be described only with a Grecian term, as a mélopée. It was the word that had been used of the traditional tragic style of declamation that Rachel—and Talma and Adrienne Lecouvreur before her—had rejected for more “natural” acting. But these measured, dignified cadences transcended both declamation and natural speech. It was indeed the tocsin of revolution that made her voice vibrate, the fever of vengeance that made her frail body tremble, Gautier wrote. At the end of the hymn she collapsed on her knees, as if overcome by the sacred idea of the nation; she buried herself in the folds of the tricolor. The bravos and the stampeding shook the theater; the applause was like thunder.

  IT WAS THE APOGEE of her career as a symbol. The British impresario Lumley believed that a symbol was her model: for the Marseillaise, he wrote, “she took her attitude from the figure of liberty among the victories on the Arc de Triomphe.” He had in mind the famous muscular fury known as La Marseillaise in the high-relief carving by François Rude. Celebrating the partisans of 1792, it had been installed on the Arc after the revolution of 1830, which had installed the regime that the revolution of 1848 overthrew. Embodying Revolution for her generation, Rachel staked the claim—as Rude’s statue did—that its spirit was high, irrepressible, and immortal. The slender actress hardly resembled the muscular allegorical female figure on the Arc; but if we set Annekov’s description of Rachel’s black-mouthed Camille beside the face of Rude’s marble fury we can get some idea of the sense she conveyed of the creature possessed by violent passion, intent on inspiring it in others. Her blazing eyes and extravagantly distorted mouth recalled the Gorgon. At the same time, as she chanted the patriotic hymn, she gave republicanism the sanction of high art. She also presented herself more directly than ever before as France, embodied: not its mock queen now, but a child of the people who had suffered and earned the right to represent the spirit of the whole nation. She did thirty-seven performances of the hymn in the Théâtre de la République, and more in the suburbs for benefits organized by George Sand. A trace of her popular appeal is retained in a small, crude terra-cotta figure (found near Metz, and now in a private collection) of a strong-faced stalwart woman—a mature and very Jewish-looking Rachel—on her knees, holding up the flag. In April 1848, the editor of La Fraternité, the organ of the communist party, requested tickets for her performance for his wife and daughter. He himself had been overcome when he heard the patriotic hymn of “our great tragedienne,” he wrote; “if her heart and soul are like her play,” he added a little warily, “I acknowledge her as the first Republican of the French Republic.”

  Cover of sheet music portraying Rachel as La Marseillaise (photo credit 4.14)

  Foreigners had no trouble identifying Rachel with republican France, reborn. In Germany, young radicals like Carl Schurz were cheered by reports of her “throwing her audiences into paroxysms of patriotic frenzy,” celebrating the fall of a king. For visitors who came to Paris to see the revolution, Rachel chanting La Marseillaise was high on the list of spectacles. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the future Dean of Westminster, was wildly enthusiastic. He was impressed by “her great simplicity, and the total absence of rant” in Ponsard’s Lucrèce; when she followed up the play with La Marseillaise he was stunned by the transformation:

  she came forward for the “Marseillaise,” in white, as before. It is difficult to describe it. She had seemed to be a woman—she became a “being”—sublime irony, prophetic enthusiasm, demoniacal fierceness, succeeded each other like flashes of lightning. And then, with a solemn march, she advanced at the last stanza to the tricolour standard and knelt, folding it in her embrace, as if with a determination that nothing should ever part her from it—a love, an adoration as if it were an animated creature. It was very grand—Morier declared that it was itself enough to annihilate a monarchy. Madame de M. thought it the “most shocking sight she had ever seen.” Certainly it did seem as if the
expression of such feelings was beyond what the occasion called for. Had Nero fallen instead of Louis Philippe, the impression conveyed could not have been more ferocious. They say Rachel enters into it herself heart and soul, and is so wrought up by it that she faints away when it is over.