Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  If her connection with Louis-Napoleon was not the finest chapter in Rachel’s story, it did allow her complete administrative and artistic victory. With his help, she chose a director she could manage for the Comédie-Française: on her own, meanwhile, she won the legal case the company had brought against her, and prevailed on the management to allow her to sign a contract that changed her status from sociétaire to pensionnaire, or mere employee, of the theater, who had a full share of neither its profits nor its obligations. It was a demotion—a move quite as unprecedented and scandalous as her youthful elevation to a status that Lemaître and Dorval never attained. But it was what she wanted. The change granted her six months of vacation a year, during which she could tour at will; during the other six months, she was obliged to play in Paris forty-eight times, for thirty thousand francs. The potential profits the change allowed for were enormous: in 1850, she signed a contract that would bring her one hundred twenty thousand francs—ten times more than Mrs. Siddons ever got!—for a single month in England and Scotland. She went on from there to a four-month tour of Germany, where she looked up an old and poor aunt, and lavished gifts on her. On her return to Paris she was pleased to learn that her friends had successfully undertaken a commission she had given them, and managed to reacquire the statue of herself by Barre that she had given to Prince Napoleon. (He had passed it on to his mistress, Judith, who got a portrait of Nap in exchange.) Rachel was in control of her image.

  Her letters to Houssaye in the early 1850s are those of an accomplished charmer, a star weighing the demands of her management and her public, consciously husbanding her physical and emotional resources. She cannily hoarded and deployed her moyens tragiques, as she called them, by alternating the classic and the romantic repertoires. It was she who chose her roles and the days she would appear at the Théâtre-Français, the management reserving the right to require a certain number of performances. Somehow, she managed to return to the status of sociétaire in 1851, and retain her right to long vacations. Sending Raphaël before her to make arrangements, she embarked on an extensive, strenuous, and successful tour of Italy. The splendid Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice was opened for her; in Rome, she reported, the thirty thousand French residents of the “country of Camille” loaded her with flowers. Looking around, she deplored the wars that had impoverished the most beautiful of countries; and she decided on the role of the New Christian Pauline in Polyeucte for her rôle de rentrée in the fall, as she had the costume all ready. The next summer, when she performed for a collection of foreign royalty in Potsdam, the Czar of Russia, one of the guests, invited her to his country.

  6. STAGE EMPRESS

  “Travel makes one’s youth and breaks one’s hatboxes” was an epigram attributed to Rachel. The exhilaration she felt on the road was perhaps a function of her faux-Napoleonism. “Another nation conquered!” she exults in a letter from Brussels to Samson’s daughter Adèle. She had a general passion for accumulation—of lovers, bracelets, francs, furniture, applause, roles, mileage, countries. “I have traveled across Belgium, Prussia, and Saxony, here I am in Bohemia, the day after tomorrow in Vienna, all in one month,” she writes from Prague in 1851. More than eight hundred leagues covered, by rail; twenty-five performances in a single month. The spectacle of her own heroic exertions gave her energy, even, for other people: abroad, she thought about her little sister Dinah’s problems, and planned to solve them by taking her along on the next tour. Although Rachel’s critics insisted on the fact that she cared little about her supporting casts, and hired inept provincial actors in order to save money, one comédien who toured with her, Jean Chéry, gratefully remembered her showing him how to enter the stage in the role of Old Horace, while they strolled together in a field near a train station in Germany. But her own letters usually focus on herself: she makes only sketchy observations of what she saw (the houses of the poor were white in the manufacturing towns of Belgium, where the coal was produced more noiselessly and cleanly than she had been led to believe). One August evening in Brussels she played Phèdre in a theater that was so hot she felt “like a bit of ice in a pot of hot water,” she reports (her metaphor suggesting that as the critics said she was cold, au fond); but the audience response miraculously restored her, she gained substance with every bravo and sympathetic murmur. (Describing another performance to a lover she had left behind, she writes that the whole house rose like one man to applaud her, adding, “Was it I who aroused the public or the public who aroused me? I don’t know: all I know is that we were both hot.”) She enjoys totting up her triumphs, reveling in her exhausting schedule: tomorrow Phèdre at Namur, the next day Hugo’s Angelo and Ponsard’s Horace et Lydie back at Brussels, the day after that at Anvers, etc., etc.; and the receipts are better than ever. She is exultant: one needs a body of iron to go on this way without letup, no? And a head of Rachel? Preening in the sun of her success, proudest as always of her intellect, she glances back at her critics in Paris: this tour of mine might not suit the public, but it’s good for my health, she boasts—and people who complain aren’t worthy of living. Watch me light a candle instead of cursing the darkness, is the rather plaintive message to Véron and his friends of the Tuileries Club. Legible beneath the bravado are a need for love and a sense of doom—and a romantic, resentful sense that love and doom are causally connected: “Life, finally, is sad without friends, and nothing seems sadder to me than not satisfying, at all points, the people who lead us gaily toward the eternal end, Death.” Look at me, she was telling her correspondents, just like you I’m watching myself play out the play.

  “The Grand Tragédienne Has Made Her Ninety-Ninth Return,” caricature by Marcellin, Le Journal pour rire, 20 November 1852 (photo credit 4.9)

  Like a Chorus in a Greek tragedy, Paris journalists lamented Rachel’s greed and disloyalty, and hurt her more by observing that she was growing old; her travels were diagnosed as symptoms of insatiable desire, or of the peddler’s daughter’s compulsion to repeat her infantile wanderings. As early as 1843, a year after she was first named a sociétaire, she was criticized for giving fewer performances in Paris than her contract mandated. In the beginning Pa Félix had been excoriated for exhausting her abroad, for his profit, during her “vacations”; later Rachel herself was attacked for thinking that her genius (and ill-timed pregnancies) excused her from her legal obligations. In 1846, when the star wrote her first letter resigning from the state company, and again in 1847–48, her quarrels with the Comédie-Française had focused on her foreign tours.

  She accepted the Czar’s invitation to visit Russia at an especially delicate moment, in the fall of 1853, on the eve of the Crimean War; France and England broke diplomatic relations with Russia the day before she opened in Moscow. Paris reacted, understandably, with vituperation. Although the Russian government was merely opening the theaters to her, and all her profits were to derive from box office receipts, she was perceived in France as an employee of the national enemy. (The tour brought her three hundred thousand francs.) She claimed her goal was to make peace between the French and Russian peoples; Véron’s Le Constitutionnel rated her for greediness, but in La Presse her friend Emile de Girardin argued fluently in another vein—or two or three—that the tour was part of her star’s inevitable triumphal progress, that it would extend French civilization, and furthermore that as a great artist she belonged to the whole world. This was not very convincing; Mlle Plessy—another Samson student—had gone to Russia earlier to gather the gold and jewels of what was already known as the Eldorado of French actors.

  In Russia Rachel was received with excitement and respect, and Latin verses that praised her as Melpomene; princes plied her with jewels and furs; busts and portraits of Rachel, and powders and pomades called by her name went on sale in the shops. Jean Chéry described young ladies from the very best families crowding around to touch her bouquet, and scrambling to pick up the flowers from the floor, when it broke. From the land of the brutally anti-Semitic Czar Nicholas
she punned delightedly that she was treated “like a sovereign, not a make-believe sovereign of tragedy, with a crown of gold-colored cardboard, but a real sovereign made by the Mint.” She enjoyed the Napoleonic echoes: “Moscow will soon be taken; the Muscovites are paying back with interest all that they took from us in 1812,” she wrote. Moscow was burning with ardor for her, she reported later, and, at the end, that she had left it in flames. Better read than their English counterparts in the classics of French literature, the aristocrats of Russia were delighted by the star of the Comédie-Française. But her art and style were ultimately rejected in Russia, where critics and actors preferred the indigenous tradition. Like Sir Theodore Martin, who wrote in the 1880s that England had wrongly praised an actress whose talents were not up to the subtleties Shakespeare required, Rachel’s Russian admirers ultimately decided that her very French art was not for them. Her foreign conquests were brilliant but fleeting; her tours, like many ventures of cultural imperialism, ultimately stirred nationalist reactions.

  “Souvenir of a sentimental voyage to St. Petersburg,” contemporary caricature (photo credit 4.10)

  Rachel was dazzled by the wealth and amused by the crudeness of Russia: when she performed before the court, after a banquet in her honor, she watched incredulously as men climbed onto the tables, heedless of the gold plates. It tickled her to see “a whole tralala of princes” devouring the least words and sighs of “the daughter of Ma and Pa Félix.” With an eye on her critics in France, she insisted on her patriotism: when some Russian soldiers boasted that they would be drinking champagne in France soon enough, she retorted that the French didn’t treat their prisoners quite that well. The witticism was repeated with pleasure in Paris, where Rachel’s Russian tour was quickly written into her legend. The last role she would create exploited that tour: she wore the ermine-trimmed robes of Catherine the Great in La Czarine (1855).

  RACHEL’S TRIUMPHANT RETURN to Paris was interrupted by personal tragedy: in June 1854, Rébecca Félix died of tuberculosis at twenty-five. It was the first death in the Félix family, and it seems to have brought them even closer. Rachel recovered with difficulty from the loss, in a year when war in the Crimea increased the general gloom. The press remained resentful of her Russian adventure, and the theatergoing public was encouraged to embrace a rival star when the Italian actress Adelaide Ristori arrived in Paris. Ristori was simultaneously new and familiar, as a star must be—and flamboyantly a romantic. Demonstrative and emotional, she performed Corneille’s and Racine’s tragedies with none of Rachel’s sense of their constraints, and—the more operatically—in her native language. Rachel, one critic explained, had played only one side of Phèdre—“the fatal side, the majestic breadth, the calculated effects, the statuesque posture undercut by frenetic fits, the funereal threnody deployed in five dramatic monologues worthy of her gifts: the diction.” Mme Ristori showed the other side, “the one most in accord with her instincts; tender, burning love, jealous fever and secret terrors, expressive pantomime: in a word, passion. She makes her a woman.” Genius was pitted against instincts, artist—once again—against woman.

  G. H. Lewes took Rachel’s side: the difference between the two actresses, he wrote, was “the difference between talent and genius, between a woman admirable in her art and a woman creative in her art.” Ristori was merely an imitator, he wrote, who lacked the transformative power Rachel had shown she possessed by rising as she had above herself (“Rachel made a common Jewish physiognomy lovely by mere force of expression,” Lewes had written with offhanded anti-Semitism). What Ristori lacked was soul: “Ristori has complete mastery of the mechanism of the stage, but is without the inspiration necessary for great acting.” Fanny Kemble was of the same opinion, and so, engagingly, was the generous Ristori herself, who wrote that after seeing Rachel she agreed with the people who thought there was no comparison between them. For her part, Rachel expressed admiration for her camarade; she went to the theater, heavily veiled, to see Ristori perform, and sent her rival tickets to a performance of her own. But the papers polarized the women: the war of divas is a compelling concept, especially provocative when coupled with a rivalry of nations. Rachel represented artful, intellectual France, Ristori passionate and natural Italy: decades later, the equation would subtly alter when some of flamboyant Bernhardt’s followers betrayed her for the more soulful and spiritual Eleonora Duse.

  Rival actresses had been set up as the superiors of La Grande before: Edmond Got was of the opinion that her own sister Rébecca had run rings around her in Angelo. But since Rébecca had died in her arms—pathetically protesting it was impossible that death should come to one so young, and the sister of the great Rachel—mortality had oppressed her. At thirty-three, she was thinking of herself as no longer young, and worrying more than ever about the future of her children and her parents. Looking back over her life, she reflected that she had never been beautiful, and therefore had aspired to be a great artist. Wounded, she was seeking to retreat—away from Paris, toward her family. Her enterprising brother Raphaël, who had managed her successful tours of Italy and Russia, seized the moment, and called on the Félix family to close ranks around their star, and go off to make a spectacular fortune. He proposed to take all but the mother and Rachel’s two children to America.

  In letters she wrote before she left to two of the more persistent men in her life, Rachel betrays her nervousness by invoking her sense of distance—now morbid, then mocking—from herself. To Prince Nap, the fancier of classical subjects and women, she writes en grande tragédienne, calling the voyage pure madness, describing herself as driven, like Phèdre, by a tragic fatality toward the abyss. To Michel Lévy she sends a note together with a tapestry seat cushion embroidered with her own hands, she explains, for “M. ton derrière.” She takes a tone of cozy vulgarity with an intimate who felt like family, but less demanding: “My good old friend Michel, I make you the judge of my devoted attachment to your very dear person; for don’t forget that I am a tragedienne, that my loves are out of the pages of Corneille, whose male and virile tastes are also mine.”

  IN SECOND EMPIRE PARIS, it was hard to believe that Americans could possibly appreciate a tragedy queen. What would the republic make of her aristocratic art? Louis-Napoleon’s subjects wondered condescendingly, and concluded that the rabble could only admire her as a rabble-rouser. Janin imagined that a voice in the American audience would demand La Marseillaise at the moment when Rachel, as Emilie in Cinna, urged her lover to join the conspiracy against Augustus. She would debase her gifts before crowds used only to the crudest spectacle, uncomprehending of her language, deaf to the subtleties of art. Janin summed up the case against the American tour in the Journal des débats of 13 October 1855, when Rachel was already in New York: “Indeed, by virtue of the art she practices and the masterpieces she performs, she belongs to all that a Republic or a Monarchy can have of elegance and courtesy, of the elevated, the aristocratic, the refined. Athens is a court; the Rome of Augustus is a court; Louis XIV is a sun which gives its light to the stars; the great poets Euripides, Sophocles, Corneille, and Racine address chosen spirits, elite souls, elegant feelings, speak to grandeur, omnipotence, and majesty. Their dramas take place in a complex and exigent world apart; they speak to the souls of discriminating audiences, not the passions of masses.” Janin’s argument against American audiences might have been strengthened by a reference to the bloody and destructive Astor Place Riots of 1849, in New York, in which drunken patriotic supporters of Edwin Forrest had protested the visit of the English actor William Macready (both were early admirers of Rachel). New York was tough territory in the mid-nineteenth century. The actor Léon Beauvallet, a member of the Félix troupe, would write incredulously of the frequent fires in the city, and the people who enjoyed nothing so much as running after fire trucks; Rachel would report that when she went out alone one evening in a taxi, and the driver got lost, she feared for her diamonds and her life. Many respectable women would not be seen i
n New York theaters—not that Parisians credited American women (les blooméristes, as they called them) with an elevating influence. The elite of the Second Empire shuddered delicately at the idea of the pearls of French literature cast before swinish American crowds. Beauvallet would duly report back to them that American audiences could only respond to large movements and a raised voice, being deaf not only to niceties of diction but to the subtle play of features and gestures that French connoisseurs admired. By 1855 some discriminating Parisians had ceased to admire Rachel; and, of course, there were some who had never begun. Auguste Vacquerie wrote dismissively of Rachel in America: “May she stay there and succeed there, and be crushed by all the dollars, and take her pleasure, and make love to Racine there and marry him, and may they have many little tragedies!”

  Rachel as Phèdre, photograph by Mayer and Pierson (photo credit 4.11)