The first glorious moment of being forbidden at the Français appears almost to have turned the lucky author’s brain. His preface to “Le Roi s’amuse,” among many other symptoms of insanity has the following: —
“Le premier mouvement de l’auteur fut de douter.... L’acte était arbitraire au point d’être incroyable.... L’auteur ne pouvait croire à tant d’insolence et de folie.... Le ministre avait en effet, de son droit divin de ministre, intimé l’ordre.... Le ministre lui avait pris sa pièce, lui avait pris son droit, lui avait pris sa chose. Il ne restait plus qu’à le mettre, lui poëte, à la Bastille.... Est-ce qu’il y a eu en effet quelque chose qu’on a appelé la révolution de Juillet?... Que peut être le motif d’une pareille mesure?... Il parait que nos faiseurs de censure se prétendent scandalisés dans leur morale par ‘Le Roi s’amuse;’ le nom seul du poëte inculpé aurait dû être une suffisante réfutation (!!!)... Cette pièce a révolté la pudeur des gendarmes; la brigade Léotaud y était, et l’a trouvé obscène; le bureau des moeurs s’est voilé la face; M. Vidocq a rougi.... Holà, mes maîtres! Silence sur ce point!... Depuis quand n’est-il plus permis à un roi de courtiser sur la scène une servante d’auberge?... Mener un roi dans un mauvais lieu, cela ne serait pas même nouveau non plus.... L’auteur veut l’art chaste, et non l’art prude.... Il est profondement triste de voir comment se termine la révolution de Juillet....”
Then follows a précis of the extravagant and hateful plot, in which the heroine is, as usual, “une fille séduite et perdue;” and he sums it up thus pompously:— “Au fond d’un des ouvrages de l’auteur il y a la fatalité — au fond de celui-ci il y a la providence.”
I wish much that some one would collect and publish in a separate volume all M. Victor Hugo’s prefaces; I would purchase it instantly, and it would be a fund of almost inexhaustible amusement. He assumes a tone in them which, all things considered, is perhaps unequalled in the history of literature. In another part of the one from which I have given the above extracts, he says —
“Vraiment, le pouvoir qui s’attaque à nous n’aura pas gagné grand’ chose à ce que nous, hommes d’art, nous quittions notre tâche consciencieuse, tranquille, sincère, profonde; notre tâche sainte....” What on earth, if it be not insanity, could have put it into Mr. Hugo’s head that the manufacturing of his obscene dramas was “une tâche sainte”?
The principal characters in “Le Roi s’amuse” are François Premier; Triboulet, his pander and buffoon; Blanche, the daughter of Triboulet, “la fille séduite,” and heroine of the piece; and Maguelonne, another Esmeralda.
The interest lies in the contrast between Triboulet pander and Triboulet père. He is himself the most corrupt and infamous of men; and because he is humpbacked, makes it both his pastime and his business to lead the king his master into every species of debauchery: but he shuts up his daughter to preserve her purity; and the poet has put forth all his strength in describing the worship which Triboulet père pays to the virtue which he passes his life as Triboulet pander in destroying.
Of course, the king falls in love with Blanche, and she with him; and Triboulet pander is made to assist in carrying her off in the dark, under the belief that she was the wife of a nobleman to whom also his majesty the king was making love.
When Triboulet père and pander finds out what he has done, he falls into a terrible agony: and here again is a tour de force, to show how pathetically such a father can address such a daughter.
He resolves to murder the king, and informs his daughter, who is passionately attached to her royal seducer, of his intention. She objects, but is at length brought to consent by being made to peep through a hole in the wall, and seeing his majesty King Francis engaged in making love to Maguelonne.
This part of the plot is brought out shortly and pithily.
BLANCHE (peeping through the hole in the wall).
Et cette femme! ... est-elle affrontée! ... oh!...
TRIBOULET.
Tais-toi;
Pas de pleurs. Laisse-moi te venger!
BLANCHE.
Hélas! — Faites —
Tout ce que vous voudrez.
TRIBOULET.
Merci!
This merci, observe, is not said ironically, but gravely and gratefully. Having arranged this part of the business, he gives his daughter instructions as to what she is to do with herself, in the following sublime verses: —
TRIBOULET.
Écoute. Va chez moi, prends-y des habits d’homme,
Un cheval, de l’argent, n’importe quelle somme;
Et pars, sans t’arrêter un instant en chemin,
Pour Evreux, où j’irai te joindre après-demain.
— Tu sais ce coffre auprès du portrait de ta mère;
L’habit est là, — je l’ai d’avance exprès fait faire.
Having dismissed his daughter, he settles with a gipsy-man named Saltabadil, who is the brother of Maguelonne, all the details of the murder, which is to be performed in their house, a small cabaret at which the foul weather and the fair Maguelonne induce the royal rake to pass the night. Triboulet leaves them an old sack in which they are to pack up the body, and promises to return at midnight, that he may himself see it thrown into the Seine.
Blanche meanwhile departs; but feeling some compunctious visitings about the proposed murder of her lover, returns, and again applying her ear to the hole in the wall, finds that his majesty is gone to bed in the garret, and that the brother and sister are consulting about his death. Maguelonne, a very “delicate female,” objects too; she admires his beauty, and proposes that his life shall be spared if any stranger happens to arrive whose body may serve to fill the sack. Blanche, in a fit of heroic tenderness, determines to be that stranger; exclaiming,
“Eh bien! ... mourons pour lui!”
But before she knocks at the door, she kneels down to say her prayers, particularly for forgiveness to all her enemies. Here are the verses, making part of those which have overthrown Racine: —
BLANCHE.
Oh! Dieu, vers qui je vais,
Je pardonne à tous ceux qui m’ont été mauvais:
Mon père et vous, mon Dieu! pardonnez-leurs de même
Au roi François Premier, que je plains et que j’aime.
She knocks, the door opens, she is stabbed and consigned to the sack. Her father arrives immediately after as by appointment, receives the sack, and prepares to drag it towards the river, handling it with revengeful ecstasy, and exclaiming —
Maintenant, monde, regarde-moi:
Ceci, c’est un bouffon; et ceci, c’est un roi.
At this triumphant moment he hears the voice of the king, singing as he walks away from the dwelling of Maguelonne.
TRIBOULET.
Mais qui donc m’a-t-il mis à sa place, le traître!
He cuts open the sack; and a flash of lightning very melodramatically enables him to recognise his daughter, who revives, to die in his arms.
This is beyond doubt what may be called “a tragic situation;” and I confess it does seem very hard-hearted to laugh at it: but the pas that divides the sublime from the ridiculous is not distinctly seen, and there is something vulgar and ludicrous, both in the position and language of the parties, which quite destroys the pathetic effect.
It must be remembered that she is dressed in the “habit d’homme” of which her father says so poetically —
Je l’ai d’avance exprès fait faire.
Observe, too, that she is still in the sack; the stage directions being, “Le bas du corps, qui est resté vêtu, est caché dans le sac.”
BLANCHE.
Où suis-je?
TRIBOULET.
Blanche! que t’a-t-on fait? Quel mystère infernal!
Je crains en te touchant de te faire du mal....
Ah! la cloche du bac est là sur la muraille:
Ma pauvre enfant, peux-tu m’attendre un peu, que j’aille
Chercher de l’eau....
A surgeon
arrives, and having examined her wound, says,
Elle est morte.
Elle a dans le flanc gauche une plaie assez forte:
Le sang a dû causer la mort en l’étouffant.
TRIBOULET.
J’ai tué mon enfant! J’ai tué mon enfant!
(Il tombe sur le pavé.)
FIN.
All this is very shocking; but it is not tragedy, — and it is not poetry. Yet it is what we are told has heaved the earth from under Racine!
After such a sentence as this, it must be, I know, rococo to name him; but yet I would say, in his own words,
D’adorateurs zélés à peine un petit nombre
Ose des premiers temps nous retracer quelque ombre;
Le reste....
Se fait initier à ces honteux mystères,
Et blasphème le nom qu’ont invoqué leurs pères.
As I profess myself of the petit nombre, you must let me recall to your memory some of the fragments of that noble edifice which Racine raised over him, and which, as they say, has now perished under the mighty power of Victor Hugo. It will not be lost time to do this; for look where you will among the splendid material of this uprooted temple, and you will find no morsel that is not precious; nothing that is not designed, chiseled, and finished by the hand of a master.
Racine has not produced dramas from ordinary life; it was not his object to do so, nor is it the end he has attained. It is the tragedy of heroes and demi-gods that he has given us, and not of cut-purses, buffoons, and street-walkers.
If the language of Racine be poetry, that of M. Hugo is not; and wherever the one is admired, the other must of necessity be valueless. It would be endless to attempt giving citations to prove the grace, the dignity, the majestic flow of Racine’s verse; but let your eye run over “Iphigénie,” for instance, — there also the loss of a daughter forms the tragic interest, — and compare such verses as those I have quoted above with any that you can find in Racine.
Hear the royal mother, for example, describe the scene that awaits her:
Un prêtre environné d’une foule cruelle
Portera sur ma fille une main criminelle,
Déchirera son sein, et d’un oeil curieux
Dans son coeur palpitant consultera les dieux;
— Et moi — qui l’amenai triomphante, adorée,
Je m’en retournerai, seule, et désespérée.
Surely this is of a better fabric than —
Tu sais ce coffre auprès du portrait de ta mère;
L’habit est là, — je l’ai d’avance exprès fait faire.
I have little doubt but that the inspired author, when this noble phrase, “exprès fait faire,” suggested itself, felt ready to exclaim, in the words of Philaminte and Bélise —
Ah! que cet “exprès fait” est d’un goût admirable!
C’est à mon sentiment un endroit impayable;
J’entends là-dessous un million de mots. —
— Il est vrai qu’il dit plus de choses qu’il n’est gros.
But to take the matter seriously, let us examine a little the ground upon which this school of dramatic writers found their claim to superiority over their classic predecessors. Is it not that they declare themselves to be more true to nature? And how do they support this claim? Were you to read through every play that M. Hugo has written — (and may you long be preserved from so great annoyance!) — I doubt if you would find a single personage with whom you could sympathise, or a single sentiment or opinion that you would feel true to the nature within you.
It would be much less difficult, I conceive, so strongly to excite the imagination by the majestic eloquence of Racine’s verses as to make you conscious of fellow-feeling with his sublime personages, than to debase your very heart and soul so thoroughly as to enable you to fancy that you have anything in common with the corrupt creations of Victor Hugo.
But even were it otherwise — were the scenes imagined by this new Shakspeare more like the real villany of human nature than those of the noble writer he is said to have set aside, I should still deny that this furnished any good reason for bringing such scenes upon the stage. Why should we make a pastime of looking upon vulgar vice? Why should the lowest passions of our nature be for ever brought out in parade before us?
“It is not and it cannot be for good.”
The same reasoning might lead us to turn from the cultured garden, its marble terraces, its velvet lawns, its flowers and fruits of every clime, that we might take our pleasure in a bog — and for all consolation be told, when we slip and flounder about in its loathsome slime, that it is more natural.
I have written you a most unmerciful letter, and it is quite time that I should quit the theme, for I get angry — angry that I have no power to express in words all I feel on this subject. Would that for one short hour or so I had the pen which wrote the “Dunciad!” — I would use it — heartily — and then take my leave by saying,
“Rentre dans le néant, dont je t’ai fait sortir.”
LETTER XX.
Versailles. — St. Cloud.
The Château de Versailles, that marvellous chef-d’oeuvre of the splendid taste and unbounded extravagance of Louis le Grand, is shut up, and has been so for the last eighteen months. This is a great disappointment to such of our party as have never seen its interminable chambers and their gorgeous decorations. The reason assigned for this unwonted exclusion of the public is, that the whole of this enormous pile is filled with workmen; not, however, for the purpose of restoring it as a palace for the king, but of preparing it as a sort of universal museum for the nation. The buildings are in fact too extensive for a palace; and splendid as it is, I can easily believe no king of modern days would wish to inhabit it. I have sometimes wondered that Napoleon did not take a fancy to its vastness; but, I believe, he had no great taste in the upholstering line, and preferred converting his millions into the sinews of war, to the possession of all the carving and gilding in the world.
If this projected museum, however, should be monté with science, judgment and taste, and on the usual scale of French magnificence, it will be turning the costly whim of le Grand Monarque to excellent account.
The works which are going on there, were mentioned at a party the other evening, when some one stated that it was the intention of the King to convert one portion of the building into a gallery of national history, that should contain pictures of all the victories which France had ever won.
The remark made in reply amused me much, it was so very French.— “Ma foi!... Mais cette galerie-là doit être bien longue — et assez ennuyeuse pour les étrangers.”
Though the château was closed to us, we did not therefore give up our purposed expedition to Versailles: every object there is interesting, not only from its splendour, but from the recollections it revives of scenes with whose history we are all familiar. Not only the horrors of the last century, but all the regal glories of the preceding one, are so well known to everybody, that there must have been a prodigious deal of gossip handed down to us from France, or we never could feel so much better acquainted with events which have passed at Versailles than with any scenes that have occurred at an equal distance of time at Windsor.
But so it is; and the English go there not merely as strangers visiting a palace in a foreign land, but as pilgrims to the shrine of the princes and poets who have left their memory there, and with whose names and histories they are as familiar as if they belonged to us.
The day we passed among the royal spectres that never fail to haunt one at this palace of recollections, was a mixture of sunshine and showers, and our meditations seemed to partake of the vicissitude.
It is said that the great Louis reared this stupendous dwelling in which to pass the gilded hours of his idleness, because from St. Germain’s he could see the plain of St. Denis, over which his funeral array was to pass, and the spire that marked the spot where his too precious dust was to be laid. Happy was it for him that the scutcheone
d sepulchre of St. Denis was the most distant and most gloomy point to which his prophetic glance could reach! Could the great king have looked a little farther, and dreamed of the scenes which were destined to follow this dreaded passage to his royal tomb, how would he have blessed the fate which permitted him to pass into it so peacefully!
It is quite wonderful to see how much of the elaborate decoration and fine finishing of this sumptuous place remains uninjured after being visited by the most ferocious mob that ever collected together. Had they been less intent on the savage object of their mission, it is probable that they would have sated their insane rage in destroying the palace itself, and the costly decorations of its singular gardens. Though far inferior in all ways either to the gardens of the Elector of Hesse Cassel at Wilhelmshöhe, or to those of the Grand Duke of Baden at Schwetzingen, those of Versailles are still highly interesting from many causes, and have so much of majesty and pomp about them, that one cannot look upon them without feeling that only the kings of the earth could ever have had a master’s right to take their pleasure therein.
Before we entered upon the orderly confusion of groves, statues, temples, and water-works through which it is necessary to be led, we made our grey-headed guide lead us round and about every part of the building while we listened to his string of interesting old stories about Louis Seize, and Marie Antoinette, and Monsieur, and le Comte d’Artois, (for he seemed to have forgotten that they had borne any other titles than those he remembered in his youth,) all of whom seemed to retain exactly the same place in his imagination that they had occupied some fifty years ago, when he was assistant to the keeper of the orangerie. He boasted, with a vanity as fresh as if it had been newly born, of the honours of that near approach to royalty which he had formerly enjoyed; recounted how the Queen called one of the orange-trees her own, because she fancied its blossoms sweeter than all the rest; and how from such a broad-leafed double-blossoming myrtle he had daily gathered a bouquet for her majesty, which was laid upon her toilet exactly at two o’clock. This old man knew every orange-tree, its birth and history, as well as a shepherd knows his flock. The venerable father of the band dates his existence from the reign of François Premier, and truly he enjoys a green old age. The one surnamed Louis le Grand, who was twin brother, as he said, to that mighty monarch, looks like a youth beside it — and you are told that it has not yet attained its full growth.
Collected Works of Frances Trollope Page 521