Tragic Muse

by Rachel Brownstein

  Mlle Rachel, caricature by Carjat (photo credit 4.12)

  Raphaël Félix aimed to emulate and equal P. T. Barnum, who had arranged the enormously profitable American tour of Jenny Lind in 1850. The Swedish Nightingale was adored by the American public that had paid to see Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb, and an aged black woman who was billed as the former nurse of George Washington: why should it not queue up for a bona fide French tragedienne? Barnum’s retirement in 1855 gave Raphaël what looked like an opening, and Rachel’s depression inclined her to yield to her brother’s superior energy. During a stopover the company made in England, on the way to America, the manager-brother made a public point of his authority over his star, fining Rachel for some small infraction, and posting the fact and the sum in the theater lobby. (Although she had for years done without her surname, in a show of either closeness or estrangement she had signed her contract with him “Rachel Félix.”) In a letter written as the steamer approached the United States, the tyrannical brother’s employee—responsive as ever to her context—compared herself, in a letter to her mother, to a Negro slave.

  “THE EMPIRE OF FRANCE,” according to Mitchell’s School Geography, published in 1854, “is a great and powerful state. The French are a brave, active, and polite people … fond of show and amusement. The French language is the most refined, and the best adapted to conversation, of any in Europe, and is much used in polite society. The upper class in France excel in dancing, fencing, and other graceful accomplishments; and the women take an active share in all the affairs of life.” New York was pleased to welcome the elegant empire’s representative, selling restaurant desserts and painted fans à la Rachel, as the Russians had done, and newspaper articles that described the contents of her trunks and hinted at sexual scandal. In an effort to educate the public and control his star’s image, Raphaël had an instructive pamphlet drawn up, “The Biography of Mdlle Rachel with Contemporary Criticisms by the most Eminent Writers, and Analytic Notices of the Characters in her Repertoire Written and Compiled from European Authorities.” Rachel appealed to the republican imagination as a celebrity, as an import fresh from Paris, and as a queen risen from the ranks of the people. She was an actively reigning queen; given the choice, what woman would not prefer to be her rather than a figurehead like Queen Victoria or the Empress Eugénie? one American journalist asked rhetorically.

  Her personal power and its political dimension would make a lasting impression in America. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s essay, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sybil” (1863), compares the famous black preacher and abolitionist to Rachel. “Perfectly self-possessed,” endowed with “that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence,” the other dark and dignified performing woman resembles the actress, Stowe writes. “It is said that Rachel was wont to chant the Marseillaise in a manner that made her seem, for the time, the very spirit and impersonation of the gaunt, wild, hungry, avenging mob which rose against aristocratic oppression; and in like manner Sojourner, singing this hymn, seemed to impersonate the fervor of Ethiopia, savage, hunted of all nations, but burning after God in her tropic heart, and stretching her scarred hands toward the glory to be revealed.” (The former slave’s performance of a religious hymn in the Stowe living room is evoked in the terms of romantic theater critics: she sings “with such an overwhelming energy of personal appropriation that the hymn seemed to be fused in the furnace of her feelings and came out recrystallized as a product of her own.”)

  The “Jewish sorceress” was not invited into good company in New York, which had its doubts about actresses from Paris, but her legend caught the imagination of a country already intensely interested in any kind of royalty. Everyone who was anyone went to hear Rachel perform, first in New York and then in Boston: Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant went, and Horace Greeley, who reportedly fell asleep and was awakened only by the pistol-shot in Lady Tartuffe. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had seen her in Paris in 1848, had been impressed by her “goodness,” and by her speaking so clearly that he could understand her, but only one out of twenty people in the audience in New York and Boston and Philadelphia were expected, by her manager, to follow her lines. Accordingly, Raphaël Félix had arranged with the New York firm of Darcie and Corbyn to publish and sell at the gate copies of “her” plays in pamphlet form, the French texts accompanied by what was described as “a literal English translation.” They were decorated with a “Certificate of Authority” signed by both Rachel and her brother, to imply their superiority to any versions of the plays people might already own. The side venture was profitable: it was said that the tragedienne was obliged to pause, mid-tirade, by the rustle of folio-sized pages turning. Advertisers augmented Raphaël’s profits: space at the back of the books was bought by the manufacturers of Mexican Mustang Liniment, of D. J. Allen’s Improved Artificial Teeth, of the manufacturers of elegant pianofortes and melodeons. We can get some idea of what Rachel’s New York audiences were like by the kinds of merchandise that tempted them: “The Balm of Thousand Flowers,” which “removes all tan, pimples and freckles from the face, removes grease spots from clothes or carpeting, beautifies the skin, cleanses the teeth, or curls the hair,” was promoted with encomia from the London Mail praising its inventor, “Dr. A. De Fontaine, of Paris”; Molyneux Bell, of 58 Canal St., Importer and Manufacturer of Cloaks and Mantillas, reported he was “receiving from his Parisian modiste New Styles by the Steamers as they are issued in Paris.”

  Rachel’s greatest fans in New York were the members of the small French colony, who invited her to meet their wives and daughters at dinner. For them, she cast her voyage to America as a selfless and heroic act, rather like a journey to a war zone; she included in her repertoire a rousing poem by Régis de Trobriand, editor of the Courrier des Etats-Unis, the newspaper of the French community. The translation in the Boston Daily Advertiser of 20 November 1855 begins: “ ‘O go not,’ they cried, ‘to that far distant land, / Oh venture not life on America’s strand; / ’Tis a nation of labor, they ask but strong arms / For genius they seek not, they know not its charms, / The sweet speech of Corneille to them is unknown— / Oh go not,’ they tell me, and I—I have come.”

  Rachel’s exalting sense of her own heroism intensified as she began to suffer the first stages of her final acute illness: she had carried her name as far as she could, she wrote home in Camille’s tones. On the long ride from New York to Boston in an unheated train, she caught a severe cold that was the beginning of the end. Periods of weakness alternated with energetic and even elated days, as residents of the New Athens, as Bostonians proudly called their city, sought to prove its high cultural tone by applauding Rachel, and she, as ever, responded with enthusiasm to applause. Harvard students—the scions of America’s best families, Beauvallet reported—volunteered for walk-on parts in Virginie; they barely had time to throw off their costumes before crowding the wings to applaud La Marseillaise. The actor was amused by this American lack of dignity. “Some had put on their trousers and shoes but were still in their tunics; others were wearing their coats over flesh-coloured tights, etc., etc. It was a strange sight to see the wings packed with men in this odd sort of fancy dress.” Bostonians joked uneasily about the pharmacist whose sign advertising “European leeches” brought people to his shop to purchase pricey theater tickets. William Wetmore Story, the sculptor, wrote to James Russell Lowell: “Rachel made a great sensation here … nobody understood what she said; but everyone thought her wonderful.… Nobody cared for her character. She was wretchedly supported by a set of dirty Jews, and they too were taken into the general admiration. She was jewier than ever and tried to skin a flint in Boston, which created a little reaction. But you know we go by fashion, and it was the fashion to consider her unequalled.” (Story had seen Ristori in Paris and decided that “Rachel seemed a sham after her. The Italians have the real clou of passion.”)

  Rachel explained with forced gaiety, in a letter from Boston, that “because I imprudently failed to dress warmly e
nough, I cough like a tubercular woman, which I assure you I am not, believe me, for all my pale complexion and apparent thinness.” Her doctors were agreeing with her, conspiring with fate to send her to an early grave. She reported exhaustion so extreme that she actually yawned onstage as Adrienne, in the face of her fat Maurice de Saxe, a certain M. Randoux who always had the effect on her of a large piece of ice thrown into a glass of warm water. Catching herself using a favorite metaphor, she wondered how the rest of the cast would like that analogy. She wrote poignantly to her friend Louise de Saigneville of her regret that “our beautiful French language” was little known, even in New York, where applause came at all the wrong moments. As an artist, she wanted first of all to be understood, she explained. The discomfort was not only professional: she felt thoroughly dépaysée in Boston, where she was unable to make herself understood in her hotel, and had to move to Sarah’s, her sister having had the foresight to bring along an English maid. Rachel insisted she was not sorry she came to America: the twenty-four performances during the first run in New York had brought her more than she had made in Russia. “I am making myself commercial, I take and I pile up the dollars,” she wrote to Louise.

  In another letter, in another mood, Rachel—feverish, coughing, exhausted—acknowledges failure in her killing tragic-heroic tones: “My body and mind have dwindled to nothing. I bring back my routed troops to the banks of the Seine, and perhaps, like another Napoleon, I will go to die at the Invalides and request a stone to lay my head upon.” The Napoleonic self-image had always required a fall. She had looked forward to playing in Philadelphia and then in Charleston, South Carolina, where there was a substantial French community, and perhaps the sun. But there, as Adrienne Lecouvreur, she collapsed onstage. The reviewer of the Charleston Mercury proved correct when he wrote that in Adrienne’s farewell to the theater—in which she mourns the ephemeral lives of actresses, and charges her friends and her audience to remember her—he heard Rachel’s own.

  Adrienne dies of smelling poisoned flowers; tuberculosis destroys the lungs less melodramatically. Rachel dragged herself to Cuba, where the doctors gave her hope that she would recover; shivering with fever, she was astonished by the Creoles in their light muslins. She sailed back to New York in January and from there to France in early February, arriving in Le Havre on the twenty-fifth of that month. “Notwithstanding the losses which she is said to have sustained by her visit to America, she continues the embellishments of her hôtel in the rue Trudon on the most expensive scale,” the English papers noted disapprovingly in March. Rachel was spending much of her time recovering in the country, receiving visits from her admirers, and planning her return to the theater. But in May her doctors advised her to go to Ems, to take the waters, and her leave of absence from the Comédie-Française was extended for another year. Diligently, at the spa, she worked at her health—ass’s milk, rest—and at avoiding the curious; she played cribbage, a card game she thought was called “garbage,” and squabbled with her maid Rose. In September she left Paris for Alexandria, which was more like Europe than she had expected; she wrote that she felt more comfortable there than she had in the New World. She set off from that city to be rocked on a barge on the Nile in the sun. Accompanied by Sarah and Rose, she rested, receiving some visitors, doing some sewing, reading, and writing letters. But her fevers and cough continued, and, as always when she wasn’t acting, she suffered cruelly from boredom. She wrote her father hopeful descriptions of her abating symptoms; she sent orders to her agent, Bellevaut, about selling her furniture—except the armchair, recently reupholstered, that had come to her from M. Walewski, and the round table with gold feet and marble mosaic from Florence, a gift from Prince Napoleon. Did she hope to live yet among her keepsakes, or think her children would be able to sell such historic items at a greater profit later on? Or was she holding onto the solid evidence of her history and identity? To Arsène Houssaye she wrote, “I have no more hopes, no more expectations. And frankly, rather than lead the beastly life through which I have dragged myself since the onset of this long, painful, and sad illness, it would be a hundred times better to be enclosed within four tightly sealed boards and to wait there to be disposed of as we now dispose of Egyptian mummies. Perhaps I will not die of consumption after all, but of boredom. What a sad loneliness has settled in around me! Imagine me alone with a Polish doctor who is nothing more than that, a cook, and my maid Rose. Still, I always have before me a clear sky, a mild climate, and this hospitable river that carries its patient’s boat as gently and maternally as a mother her newborn child. But the majestic memories of ancient Egypt, the partial ruins of marvellous temples, the enormous giants carved in the flanks of granite mountains, so many works and masterpieces ravaged by the force of the centuries, toppled from their pedestals by earthquakes—when all of this spectacle is seen up close, even discounting the ways the imagination makes it even more frightening, it is far too much for weak creatures and worn spirits to bear.” It pained her to be unable to rise, as she had been able to do in the past, to the level of spectacular circumstances.

  Rachel, photograph by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, 1853 (photo credit 4.13)

  While the vestiges of past glory in Egypt oppressed her spirit and increased her sense of her own impending doom, she carefully monitored her body and her emotions: Phédre dies of self-awareness, and like every patient Rachel clung to physical facts as if it would preserve her life to know them. Having been taken by litter to the foot of the Pyramids, she checked her pulse: she reported eighty-six beats. She pitied her children and herself, and managed as always to transcend herself through irony that was perhaps innate, but surely also informed by the grandiloquence of Corneille’s and Racine’s heroines, which she had absorbed and made her own. Napoleon, exhorting his troops to glory in Egypt, had told them that the centuries were looking down on them from the peaks of the Pyramids; Rachel wrote in this vein, “At the foot of the Pyramids, I contemplate twenty centuries lost in the sands. O my friend, how I see here the nothingness of tragediennes. I thought I was pyramidal, but realize now that I am a mere passing shadow. I came here to find the life that is fleeing me, and all around me I see only death.” Recalling the imagery of marble that had been invoked so often to describe her, she reflected that it had foretold the graveyard.

  Virginia Woolf speculated of Rachel that her most real life was lived in the course of acting out the passions of the women she imagined—in other words, that the reality of her own life pales beside that. I have argued to somewhat different effect that her life was embroiled with fictions—and that her star-struck public correctly understood her, and her romantic biographers have portrayed her with inadvertent accuracy as a woman part real and part ideal. The theme was underwritten by insistence on her doubleness: Rachel the child of the streets and stage queen; chaste courtesan; classical tragedienne and romantic actress; monstrous egotist and loving daughter, mother, and sister. Her self-consciousness was a function of her métier and the mechanisms that made her a star. Different plays, surely, would have formed her otherwise—the new tragedies that Alfred de Musset called on his contemporaries to write for her, the one he himself began to write and failed to finish. They do not figure in her story; but one play she never appeared in does.

  Like so many of the stories about Rachel, the one about the role she turned down with great éclat, at great expense, features a man who imagined that he had made her and was therefore entitled to break her. Ernest Legouvé was a feminist and a prodigiously prolific playwright, the author, with the equally prolific Eugène Scribe, of Adrienne Lecouvreur. In the memoir he wrote in old age, he tells the story of how Rachel had refused that role at first, and then in a lucky intuitive flash decided she had to have it: he goes so far as to reprint the prettily penitent letter she wrote saying so. It was he who told, with the same complacency, the spooky story of how he came upon her rehearsing Adrienne’s death scene alone in a darkened theater, tears rolling down her cheeks, and she told h
im that she was mourning her own death in Adrienne’s. The impulse to mythmaking is inspired by success—which perhaps in turn encourages myth-unmaking.

  The historical Adrienne Lecouvreur, as Scribe and Legouvé depict her, is adorable and witty, and a mistress of artifice; no spontaneous romantic Dorval, she depends (as Rachel was known to do) on the teacher who instructs her in the traditions of the Comédie-Française. In parallel scenes set in a princess’s boudoir and a greenroom, Scribe and Legouvé elaborate the Balzacian point that the artifice involved in a society lady’s life is the same as an actress’s. The connections between low life and high; the difference between the true love of Adrienne for Maurice de Saxe (George Sand’s grandfather) and the schemes of the aristocratic adulteress who also wants the hero; above all the rivalry between the actress and the Princesse de Bouillon, which titillatingly joins and evades the themes of class warfare and the differences between “good” women and “bad” ones—all these gave authenticating “historical” narrative form to themes inherent in the image of Rachel. As the play depended on the celebrity of its star, the plot depends on playing real life against the stage: Adrienne, who is first seen rehearsing the role of Roxane in Bajazet, later humiliates the Princesse de Bouillon by pointedly alluding to Phèdre’s comparison of herself to “those brazen women who … Dare flaunt a face where not a blush is seen” (III, 3). The infuriated princess retaliates by sending Adrienne a bouquet of poisoned flowers. Adrienne inhales their perfume and dies, exhorting her audience to remember her: “Nothing survives us … nothing but memories. Your memories, is that not so?” Delighted by her great success in the role, the star insisted on the connection with the earlier actress. Apprehensive that she would die young as Adrienne had before her, Rachel had nevertheless insisted on identifying herself with her role. She hung a picture of Adrienne in her home; she made up a quarrel with Samson onstage during a rehearsal of the play, when, at the moment Adrienne thanks her teacher Michonnet for all he has done for her, Rachel turned to him despite the fact that he was not playing that role. The rest of the cast applauded them both: Adrienne-Rachel was a collaborative creation.