Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  Samson (after Diderot) might deplore this kind of passionate acting that leads to a collapse, but the general public was thrilled. As she knelt to adore the French flag “as if it were an animated creature,” the exhausted actress seemed to strip herself of her own creatureliness, to be somehow elemental, a “being.” To the English especially—Arnold and Brontë as well as Stanley—Rachel seemed remarkable first of all for her strangeness, for being at once human and not human, physical as well as spiritual, a woman but somehow male. Gautier had written that she made Rouget de Lisle’s “very male hymn of such great musical thrust” more virile than ever, “more energetic, stronger, more fierce, and more impressive, by the incisive sharpness, the rancorous thunderings, the metallic flashes of her diction.”

  Gautier became sardonic when she added a tricolor belt to her costume, altering her persona, as he saw it, from Nemesis into a provincial mayor, or a police commissioner on parade. And the American Ralph Waldo Emerson, impressed by Rachel’s Marseillaise, observed it did not bear hearing more than once. But by its very lack of subtlety the spectacle claimed world-historical importance. Among the foreigners who thrilled to it was the German-Jewish writer Fanny Lewald, best remembered now as a friend of Heine and recorder of his conversational sallies. Lewald took Rachel most seriously. As Charlotte Brontë would do three years later, she responded with special intensity to a fellow woman artist, and for her as for Brontë it was crucial that Rachel became something other than human on the stage, as if to reflect the otherness that the woman in the audience saw in her and sensed in herself: “Rachel is the personified Marseillaise become human, the concept of the struggle for freedom incarnate,” Lewald wrote. “On and on ‘and the word became flesh!’ resounded in my soul! Yes! The word should do that! It should, it must become flesh in order to be! And there is also good in that this Marseillaise become flesh is a Jewess, the daughter of the oppressed.” The evening Lewald saw her and was moved to quote the New Testament, Rachel played Pauline, the convert to Christianity in Polyeucte, before she declaimed La Marseillaise. The performance seemed to dramatize the difficult coexistences of the daughter of the oppressed and the reine de théâtre, the Jewess and the new Christian, and in doing so to confirm miraculous transformations of the literal into the metaphorical and back again: of the word becoming the flesh, and the flesh becoming the word—of the actress become an idea incarnate, her speech-act not merely affirming but making historical reality, and identifying her with the nation.

  Rachel as La Marseillaise, terra-cotta statuette, ca. 1848 (photo credit 4.17)

  A generation earlier, another woman, German-Jewish like Fanny Lewald and bearing the same Hebrew name as Rachel, had speculated excitedly in her journal that it was possible for a Jewish woman undistinguished by beauty to represent, therefore to be, anything. Rahel Levin Varnhagen, the friend of Goethe, had argued that unlike a princeling, who represents his hereditary lands and people, or a Goethe who can speak for all of Germany, a woman like herself, in and as herself, stands for nothing at all; therefore she can make what she wants of herself. Rand’s Jewish family was very different from Rachel’s, being German, wealthy, urban, and well-placed; and unlike Rachel, Rahel lacked a remarkable gift. Nevertheless, it is not only the nominal similarity between the two women that makes Rahel’s private reflections (as re-presented by Hannah Arendt) seem relevant to Rachel’s condition as a representation. Rahel, who was celebrated as a salonnière, struggled to erase her Jewishness and to make herself up as a member of the new aristocracy of the cultured that emerged in Europe in the years after Napoleon, after the old hierarchies had collapsed. This “class” was peculiarly inviting to Jews. It was cosmopolitan and international; its characteristics were acquired, not inherited; and its members might quite naturally, as it were, include a people that identified itself as “of the book.”

  The two Rachels were in many ways opposites—the important difference between them being that Rachel the tragedienne had what Rahel thought she lacked, a great gift (and great confidence in it). Where Rahel aimed credulously at assimilation, Rachel flaunted her Jewishness as something that looked good on her, therefore was quite good enough for anyone. She disdained to marry a gentile aristocrat; she made no claim to be a member of a cultural aristocracy, only to embody the best that had been written and felt. As a star who took care to keep her persona present in the minds of her audiences, she stood (metonymically) for the Jews, all the while standing (metaphorically) for Camille or Hermione or Phèdre, Corneille and Racine and Tragedy, the Classics, and Art. So doing, legitimizing herself as no actress, gentile or Jew, had done before, she raised questions about what it means for a person to stand for something. They were the quintessential questions that nourished the romantic distaste for the bourgeoisie, and encouraged the romantic interest in actors.

  The hero of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship becomes infatuated with an actress and runs off with a theatrical troupe because he desires to develop himself “harmoniously,” in the manner of a nobleman. He explains:

  A nobleman can and must be someone who represents by his appearance, whereas the burgher simply is, and when he tries to put on an appearance, the effect is ludicrous and in bad taste. The nobleman should act and achieve, the burgher must labor and create, developing some of his capabilities in order to be useful.… I have an irresistible desire to attain the harmonious development of my personality such as was denied me by my birth.

  Therefore he resolves to be an actor.

  RACHEL BEGAN the summer of 1848 with a tour of the Low Countries and Switzerland, where she performed La Marseillaise along with her standard repertoire. At the end of June, an insurrection of workers, provoked by a government decree, was suppressed by the troops of General Cavaignac; three thousand people were killed, and fifteen thousand transported without trial. The Second Republic ceased being the party of the working people, and as the Catholic, legitimist Party of Order struggled with the conservative bourgeoisie for control, the way for Louis-Napoleon was prepared: he would be elected president of the republic in December. The nervous government underwrote the tour of “Citizen Rachel” to the French provinces in an effort to retain or regain confidence. For her part, she was hopeful that chanting La Marseillaise would prove more profitable than touring Holland had been. But France, when her traveling troupe reached it in June, was distressingly unstable: “the provinces are stricken, as Paris is,” she wrote Sarah from Liège, a week before the bloody June Days. In the south, La Marseillaise was generally well received: pure-blooded reactionaries were heard to hum the anthem as they exited the theater. But there were a few violent protests in the streets: two years later, when she refused to play Charlotte Corday, the murderess of Marat, in a new drama written for her by Ponsard, Rachel would deplore having acted as an agent of the revolutionary government and therefore as an “angel of death.” (The actor Edmond Got suspected she had other reasons for refusing the role, which Mlle Judith accepted: he observed waspishly in his journal that La Grande was “ever attentive to the capricious winds of success,” but had “small interest in republican issues.”)

  She was convincing in the role of Muse of the Republic, and her legend was embellished with new stories. People liked to tell how she had graciously chanted La Marseillaise in a forest, at the request of some soldiers who had helped her out after a carriage accident on a country road. There was praise of her charities in the provincial papers—also some complacent right-wing reflection that, at least in the theater, royalty still lived. Rachel herself would claim, after the revolution, that her prime allegiance had always been to her profession and to the Théâtre-Français. Preparing one of her many professions of loyalty to the company, she charged Lockroy to recall “that I sang La Marseillaise only out of devotion, at a more than critical moment, since without it, after all, the Théâtre-Français would have perished like so many others in that shipwreck of revolution.” If her timely fervor of patriotism was self-serving and pragmatic, it
was also appropriate to the shifting state she served.

  In 1846–47, she had been applauded at home and abroad as Jeanne d’Arc, symbol of Catholic, monarchical France. In 1848–49, chanting La Marseillaise, she persuasively embodied the counter-image of Marianne. In 1852, she would appear at the Theâtre-Français as the Muse of History, welcoming Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire. Too bad she didn’t live to see—to be—the Third Republic! Rachel’s politics of expediency and theatricality reflected the dominant mode. The darling of the right had always been a dubious version of the Catholic Maid of Orléans; the “child of the people” was expected to whine that “the republic is costing me dearly.” One did not have to be against the people, of course, to deplore the violence and bloodshed of the June Days and the torching of the Rothschild château, as Rachel did, or to pray as she said she did that God would preserve France, since men knew only how to destroy. And it is only reasonable for a grande tragédienne, reduced from Racine to Rouget de Lisle, to write, as she did in a letter, that she hoped for a king to release her from endless recitations of La Marseillaise. And only reasonable for an actress to love a good show. On the first of October 1852, Rachel wrote with evident excitement to her young son Alexandre, “Tomorrow the republic exits France, our climate does not favor it. Tomorrow will be the Empire, tomorrow Paris will be bright with lights, I am sorry, my sweet little angel, that you will not be able to help me hang up my lanterns. I am a bit ill, I will unfortunately not be able to go to the Champs-Elysées to see the Emperor’s entry into Paris.”

  She had always admired an emperor, and enthusiastically she helped arrange the November gala to celebrate the new regime. Houssaye had written a poem for the occasion, based on a slogan taken from a speech by the new leader; the plan was for Rachel to recite it after a performance of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire. But she wrote to urge Houssaye to change the program, and substitute Corneille’s political play, Cinna, ou la clémence d’Auguste—with her in one of her best-known roles, as Emilie. Comparing a recent act of the French head of state to Augustus’s clemency, she praised “our Emperor Louis.” Furthermore, she added, even though His Imperial Highness would not be in his box until the middle of the tragedy, playing Emilie would give her the energy for interpreting Houssaye’s verses, and making sure they were heard. The mix of flattery and subtle put-down is professional; the desire to shine in the imperial eyes is clear. More interesting than either is the actress’s apparent conviction that playing the one role would give her the verve for the other.

  She did her reliable, rousing Emilie. Then, in her all-purpose toga, standing beside the flag she had held while chanting La Marseillaise—the flagpole that was surmounted, now, by an imperial eagle—she reappeared as the Muse of History. Respectfully, she intoned the tinny stanzas that hymned the new imperialism, Houssaye’s confused, toadying verses ringing variations on Louis-Napoleon’s self-serving phrase, L’empire, c’est la paix. (The poem describes Phidias as another Prometheus, sculptor of a goddess whose feet are on the ground.) If Rachel had trouble emoting lines that did not even aspire to Corneillian eloquence, she had none at all accepting the diamond bracelet that Louis-Napoleon sent her with his note of thanks and congratulations.

  MORE RELEVANT than Rachel’s own politics are the changes in her career that accompanied the political changes in France. La Marseillaise, Gautier noted, was her first modern role. She went on from it to plays by Dumas and Hugo, and virtually a second career as a romantic actress. In her brief maturity, she increasingly took control of her performances and her image, using men like Lockroy and Houssaye and her brother Raphaël to front for her. She created an ever more authoritative persona.

  In December 1848, Louis-Napoleon was elected president of the republic. As if to reflect the apparent abatement of national tensions, Rachel appeared in her trademark toga the following March as a clever and seductive Roman courtesan, in an insubstantial, amusing playlet by Armand Barthet, Le Moineau de Lesbie. Playing the mistress of the poet Catullus, she traded wryly on her classical aura: Lesbie was a far cry from what Rachel referred to as the “solemnities” of Phèdre. On 14 April 1849, she made her decisive shift into contemporary drama, in the consummately self-reflexive role of an actress that the popular playwrights Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé had written for her. Adrienne Lecouvreur was a huge success: at every one of the nineteen performances before Rachel left in May for her long vacation, the box office took in five thousand francs. 1849 was the year Rachel was described in the Revue des deux mondes as “ce que les Anglais appellent une étoile (a star).”

  Playing a classical tragedienne in a modern melodrama was something like a rehearsal for the romantic repertoire, in which women victimized by passionate love rise, like Adrienne, to heroic, pathetic self-sacrifice. In January 1850, Rachel made her debut in Mlle de Belle-Isle by Alexandre Dumas. The role had been created by Mlle Mars in 1839, and audiences still had fond memories of the older actress, who had died only three years before. There were unpleasant comparisons to her predecessor’s charm and beauty, but Rachel successfully made the role her own. Loyal Gautier called her superior to Mars. (And Dumas never forgave her for doing only seventeen performances.) The triumph was followed up in May when Rachel played a Venetian courtesan, Tisbe, in Hugo’s Angelo—once again, quite in her own grande tragédienne’s mode, a brilliant re-creation. Marvelling at her brilliance, Gautier modified his favorite trope, praising the way she had changed from a classical statue into a Renaissance painting, with all the warm tones of the Venetian school. Her sister Rébecca played against her; it was to celebrate their joint triumph that Rachel surprised her with the extravagant gift of a fully furnished house.

  There was almost universal applause for Rachel’s breadth and versatility as an actress, and her condescension in performing the works of her contemporaries, as only she among actors had so long refused to do. But romantic drama had already gone into decline: rather than changing, herself, in performing Hugo and Dumas, she could fairly be seen as conferring on their plays canonical status and literary-classical cachet. Her success with La Marseillaise had perhaps emboldened her to make any text over in her own image. Did it make her want to be a symbol of all of France, the romantic party as well as the classical? Or did she “stoop” so as to conquer in non-classical plays in order to save the Comédie-Française from its abiding financial problems? Did she act under the gun of a legal judgment the management was once more seeking against her, for the long vacations when she made money only for herself? Or was she responding to an inviting artistic challenge? Was she finally taking charge of her own career? Or merely acquiescing in the role of Louis-Napoleon’s cat’s-paw, and helping him rehearse, within the Théâtre-Français, the larger coup he was planning to make of the nation?

  Some critics and most actors took that view of the Prince-President’s appointment, in November 1849, of Arsène Houssaye as director of the Comédie-Francaise. Houssaye himself disingenuously described it as simply the replacement of a parliamentary with an authoritarian republic. Napoleon’s nephew, protesting that he had no desire to tamper with the administrative structure his uncle had put in place by the Decree of Moscow, claimed in his modern way that his only aim was to make the state theater a better business. (A few months later, having put the big one in his pocket, he imposed censorship on all the other theaters.) Neither the politics of the coup—Louis Bonaparte’s, Houssaye’s, Rachel’s—nor the mechanics of it were probably as dramatic or operatic as they are in Houssaye’s version, which is, on the other hand, too good a story to be altogether without truth.

  He was sitting quietly at home one evening, Houssaye recalled, when two men dressed in black suddenly appeared and instructed him to accompany them to the Elysée Palace. Sure that he was being arrested, as so many others had been, he reminded himself, as he kissed his weeping wife and child good-bye, that the palace had been named, not the police station. Arrived there, he was graciously greeted by la grande Rachel, who seemed quite
the mistress of the house. Houssaye had met her only a few times before. They chatted; she asked him to write her a play about Sappho (but whom did she not ask to write her plays? modest Houssaye later reflected). Soon the Prince-President himself appeared, and made Houssaye the startling offer of the directorship. He had Rachel to thank for it, Louis Bonaparte said: she had chosen him from a list of six men of letters—chosen him because she knew him least well, Rachel pertly added. (Like almost all women, she loved the unknown, sanguine Houssaye comments.) He heard the Prince-President urge his star to undertake Hugo, Vigny, Dumas, and Musset, and heard Rachel agree to set about to study the modern repertoire. And he agreed to take the job.

  Popular objection to Louis Bonaparte’s conquest of the Théâtre-Français was based in part on resentment of Rachel; her enemies argued that the theater was in its weak position, and susceptible to such a takeover, only because she had been spending so much of her time abroad. The other actors blamed her for their losses; Parisians blamed the company’s inability to control its star. Houssaye’s appointment was delayed. But here as elsewhere, as business interests increasingly dominated and France moved farther to the right, the Prince-President’s project of administrative streamlining eventually was seen as an attractive solution. Like all the efforts of the Nephew, as Marx memorably denominates him, this venture into the affairs of the Théâtre-Français is easily read as a debasement and a parody of the Uncle’s. Napoleon I had structured the Théâtre-Français as a democratic meritocracy, in which voting privileges and profits were shared in exchange for clear obligations; the man who would be Napoleon III brought in an amiable, politic outsider to rule the company, and kept only the appearance of democracy. In their personal relations with the star actors, the two were also dramatically different. Where Napoleon I had had the grace and acumen to recognize Talma as his counterpart, people said, the Prince-President who honored Rachel’s wishes was merely giving the run of the palace to his mistress, letting a woman manage him.