Isabelle. Do you not know, Columbine, that prose is the very offal of wit, and that a single madrigal can infuse more tenderness into a heart than thirty of the best-balanced periods? It is only the very base who do not love poets to the point of folly. Ah, Columbine! how charming is a man when he offers us his vows after having passed them through the sieve of the Muses. How is one to resist the declaration when it strikes the ear in rhythm, and when its imagery forces sensibility into the wildest and most rebellious soul? What joy, Columbine, to rejoice the heart with these ingenious novelties that enclose a deal of passion in very little space. Oh, the happy talent to be able to restrict your movements and thoughts to the feet and measures prescribed by poetry!
Columbine. Do you realise, mademoiselle, that such feet might lead you straight to the Petites-Maisons! Wit is all very well, but something else is needed in marriage. Waiting-woman though I be, I would not take a poet either to lover or to husband. What profit is there in being the wife of a rhymer? Is a room to be furnished with epigrams? Is a butcher to be paid with sonnets? My faith! if I were in your place I should throw myself at some good financier, who would cause my merit to roll in a coach, and who——
Isabelle. A financier! Horror!
Françoise Biancolelli, although not endowed with great beauty, had a “gift of pleasing spread over all her person.” She was full of grace, very well made and had a physiognomy that was sweet and charming. M. de Turgis, an officer in the Gardes-Françaises, fell madly in love with her and married her in 1691. She was twenty-seven years of age and her husband was twenty-one. The father and mother of M. de Turgis entered in 1693 a plaint against their daughter-in-law, accusing her of the subornation of their son. The mother of Françoise Biancolelli, in her ignorance of the laws of France and to defeat the parents of her daughter’s husband in their plaint, announced to them that between her daughter and their son there existed no convention, treaty or celebration of marriage. In 1694, the father and mother of M. de Turgis made a will disinheriting their son “to punish him for his shameful alliance with Françoise-Marie-Apolline Biancolelli, protesting, for the rest, to declare null the marriage which he might have contracted with her did they come to discover it.”
Coming into possession of proofs of the marriage, they had their son removed to Angers, and they enjoined upon him to declare that he had been abused and suborned. Of a weak character, he gave way and signed this declaration. Nevertheless he repaired immediately to a notary to protest against the step he had just taken.
The Parliament gave judgment on the 11th February 1695, declaring the marriage null, and forbidding the Sieur de Turgis and Mademoiselle Françoise Biancolelli “to cohabit, under pain of corporal punishment, or to enter into a fresh contract of marriage, under pain of its nullity.” And this “whether during the lifetime or after the death of his father and mother.” Against this Constantin de Turgis lodged a yearly protest with his notary—there are seven of them in existence.
Françoise Biancolelli had left the theatre in 1695. The father of M. de Turgis died in the same year, but the fate of the young couple was not ameliorated until 1701. They were then remarried under a dispensation from the Cardinal of Noailles, and they declared that “there had been born of them under faith of marriage two children then living, namely: Charles-Dominique de Turgis des Chaises, born in 1692, and a daughter who later on became Madame Millin de Tressolles.”
“From that time onwards, M. de Turgis went publicly to visit his wife, and even appeared with her in public places.” Although he continued to make use of rooms at his mother’s house, he lived with his wife in the Rue des Petits-Pères, received there, and spent there most of his time, whilst Françoise Biancolelli publicly bore his name.
The mother of M. de Turgis died on the 2nd February 1704, and renewed in her will the two acts of disinheritance should her son remarry Mademoiselle Biancolelli, as if she were in ignorance of the fact that they were already remarried, an ignorance hardly possible considering that they lived in the same parish.
M. de Turgis died on the 29th April 1706. Perceiving that his end was approaching, he sent for his nephew, de Turgis de Canteleu, then in his fourteenth year. He represented to him in a touching manner the sad position of his wife and children, caused him to embrace them and recommended them to him. Young Canteleu promised that he would never abandon his aunt and cousins. He kept his word for, dying at the age of twenty-one, he left to Charles-Dominique, his cousin, an income of eight thousand livres to sustain his name, and an income of four thousand to the sister.
After the death of her husband, who left nothing but debts, seeing that he died disinherited, Françoise Biancolelli was reduced to seek assistance, having spent her own possessions to support her husband in military service. The courts pronounced a judgment in 1709, granting her a pension of a thousand livres for herself and her children, and in 1713 the king, desiring to recompense the services of Constantin de Turgis in the person of his widow, awarded her a further pension of three hundred livres.
Madame de Turgis left two children, Charles-Dominique de Turgis, chevalier of Saint-Louis and an officer in the royal navy, and Marie-Anne-Reine de Turgis, the wife of the Sieur Millin de Tressolles.
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Giovanna Rosa Benozzi, celebrated under the name of Silvia, went to Paris with the troupe summoned by the Regent in 1716. She played for forty-two years the parts of leading lady with the same vivacity, the same shrewdness, and always producing the same illusion. The inconstant public never cooled towards her. She enjoyed applause until the hour of her death, and was mourned with the liveliest regrets. She excelled especially in the plays of M. de Marivaux, of whose fine and witty dialogue she had a perfect grasp. A volume would hardly suffice to contain all the praise which she received in prose and verse.
The rôles of Silvia were very diverse. In the plays of Marivaux, like Le Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard, she is at once mistress and soubrette. In other pieces she is just a soubrette, sometimes a simple naïve peasant girl, or an innocent shepherdess, as in Arlequin Poli par l’Amour, the first play which Marivaux produced at the Comédie-Italienne.
Harlequin enters, playing with a battledore and shuttlecock, and in this fashion advances to the feet of Silvia. There, still playing, he lets the shuttlecock fall, and in stooping to pick it up he perceives Silvia; astonished, he remains arrested in his stooping attitude; little by little he comes jerkily erect again; then he looks at her. She, in an access of shyness, attempts to withdraw; he arrests her with the words: “You are in a hurry then?”
Silvia. I withdraw because I do not know you.
Harlequin. You do not know me? So much the worse. Let us make acquaintance, shall we?
Silvia (shyly). Certainly.
Harlequin (approaching her, and signifying his joy in little bursts of laughter). You are very pretty!
Silvia. You are very amiable.
Harlequin. Not at all, I speak the truth.
Silvia (laughing a little in her turn). You are very pretty too.
Harlequin. So much the better. Where do you live? I shall come and see you.
Silvia tells him that she is beloved of a shepherd who might spy upon them, which afflicts Harlequin; but she assures him that she does not love the shepherd, and Harlequin is consoled. He informs her in his turn that he lodges with the Fairy, which arouses jealousy in Silvia because, she says, the fairy is more beautiful than she. Harlequin reassures her. Soon Silvia has no uneasiness other than that occasioned her by her sheep; they are straying and she is obliged to follow them. Harlequin takes her hand and kisses it, saying: “Oh! the pretty little fingers! I never had sweetmeats as good as these!” And thus they separate.
In another scene Silvia returns with a cousin, another shepherdess, whose advice she asks. “Harlequin has already kissed my hand,” she says, “and he will want to kiss it again. Advise me, you who have had so many lovers. Shall I allow him?”
“Beware of doing so,” replies the cousin. “Be very severe, for that ferments the affection of a lover, and beware of telling him that you love him.”
“But how can I help it?” asks Silvia.
Harlequin returns; tendernesses between the two lovers; jealousy of the fairy, who causes the disappearance of Silvia; then ruses of Harlequin, to whom love has given so much spirit that he purloins the magic wand of the fairy, leaving her impotent; he presents it to Silvia, who employs it to evoke spirits and devils, which are beaten by Harlequin.
In L’Amante Romanesque (1718) Silvia confesses to her waiting-woman, Spinette, that she is still in ignorance of what love may mean notwithstanding that she has been married; but, in the solitude in which her husband left her, she spent her time in reading romances which have turned her head. She detests all men, she says, and she is to take into her service a certain Marinette who speaks, perhaps, more ill of the male sex than she does herself. This Marinette is no other than Mario, who, in the disguise of a waiting-woman, seeks to gain the presence of Silvia whom he loves. Spinette opposes herself at first, but, after many promises from Mario, and after he has sworn that he has no design beyond that of seeing Silvia, Spinette presents him to her mistress and he is engaged as a waiting-woman. Wishing, however, to be faithful to his word to Spinette, Marinette (Mario) excuses himself from entering the service of Silvia, saying that he has just come into an inheritance from an aunt, who has left him an income of twelve thousand livres. “That,” he says, “is the wherewithal to seek a husband.”
Silvia. I am charmed by what you tell me, and you are not to doubt that it was my aim to care for your fortune by attaching you to myself.
Marinette (Mario). Madame, I am already more attached to you than you think.
Silvia. But you speak already of seeking a husband, and you hated men so bitterly.
Marinette. Nevertheless one always ends that way. Still, I shall hold back as much as possible and perhaps all my life; I am very difficult to please.
Silvia. What is your taste? Let us hear.
Marinette. I desire one who has the heart of an Italian and the manners of a Frenchman.
Silvia approves these ideas, nevertheless she continues to denounce all men. Spinette and Marinette in an even greater degree follow her example. In the end Marinette says so much ill of them that Silvia embraces him with fervour.
Silvia. Come, my dear Marinette, let me embrace you. I love you with all my heart. I find in you my own thoughts, my sentiments, my humour. (To Spinette, who attempts to check her.) Stand aside, Spinette. I want to kiss her a thousand times.
Spinette. Madame, spare me the sight of it.
Silvia. Why should you oppose it?
Spinette. I’m jealous.
Silvia. Withdraw, silly. Approach, my heroine, let me stifle you with caresses. (To Spinette.) What does that mean? Why do you tear her from my arms? Release me, I tell you, and stand aside.
Spinette. But, madame, you have read romances; do you not remember Céladon who disguised himself as a girl to approach his mistress Astræ?
Silvia. What then?
Spinette. If perchance Marinette were a boy who had had the same idea, should I be right to allow you to continue as you are doing?
Silvia. Ha, ha! You are still making fun of my romances. If Marinette, with the spirit and the sentiments which are hers, were a boy, that boy to-morrow would be my husband.
Mario goes down upon his knees and declares himself. Silvia forgives, and accepts him for her cavalier pending that he shall become her husband.
In The Portrait (1727), a play by M. Beauchamp, Silvia has assumed the garments of her soubrette Columbine, and passes herself off as Columbine. She gives a very bad reception to Valerius, the future husband destined her by her father. Valerius is not duped; but he pretends to mistake her for her waiting-woman, and thus discloses to her his sentiments in a more delicate manner. But the more Valerius displays his submission to the orders of the beautiful Silvia, the more does she, believing him to be indifferent, attempt to turn him aside. With this aim in view, she herself sketches her portrait for him:
“First of all she is neither tall nor short, neither well made nor ill made. She is fat rather than thin, and notwithstanding all that, a rare thing to-day, she has a figure, and she has a little air of recklessness and youth that is arresting. It is perhaps neither wit nor brilliance, yet it partakes of both. She is white and rosy; she has eyes and teeth; she dances passably; in a word she is like a thousand others. On the subject of her conduct there is nothing to tell you. She lives as all girls live to-day. As for her temper, faith, it is not easy to define it. She is gentle by reflection, sharp by temperament, timid in the things which she knows, decided in those of which she is ignorant, imperious with those who owe her nothing, exigent without friendship, jealous without passion, absent-minded to the point of forgetfulness, and unequal to the point of brusqueness; in short it is so difficult to live with her that I cannot bear to be with her most of the time. Do you know who is the master, the guide, the director of all her actions and of all her sayings? It is Caprice.”
Valerius pretends to attach faith to this portrait, which he knows does not at all resemble her since he has the original under his eyes; to pique her he says that he will renounce Silvia, an announcement which angers her.
Silvia was the subject of many madrigals, sonnets and epistles composed in her honour. She was born in Toulouse, of Italian parents. She was married in Paris, in 1720, to Giuseppe Baletti, known by the name of Mario. Of this marriage was born Antoine-Louis Baletti (Lelio), who entered the Théâtre-Italien in 1742, Louis Baletti, who became a dancer, and Jeanne Baletti, who married Blondel, the royal architect. Silvia died in 1759.
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At the time that the famous Silvia was undertaking rôles which demanded such versatility, Flaminia, the wife of Louis Riccoboni (Lelio), was playing the parts of leading lady.
Elena-Virginia Baletti was born at Ferrara in 1686. She visited in her childhood the various theatres of Italy. Her parents, although poor, gave her an education calculated to place her above the majority of her class. From her most tender youth she passed for one of the best actresses of her country.
Louis Riccoboni, already at the age of twenty-two the director of a company, perceived in the talents of Mademoiselle Baletti a means of reintroducing to the Italian stage the qualities that it had lost. He sought and obtained her in marriage. She went to Paris with her husband in 1716 to contribute with him to the academic reformation of the theatre, after having vainly attempted it in Italy, where the masks had remained masters of the field; but the French public also loved Harlequin and Scaramouche, and the performances of Italian masterpieces could never have sufficed for the success of this new company. It was necessary to give way to the demand for the masks. Flaminia retired with Riccoboni in 1732. Justice was done to her talents, and she was esteemed not only as an excellent actress but also as a very learned woman. She spoke Spanish and French quite as well as her mother tongue, and made considerable progress in a serious study of Latin.
Flaminia drew from the Rudens of Plautus the subject for her comedy Naufrage, which was not a success. Her play Abdilly, Roi de Grenade, a tragi-comedy written in collaboration with Delisle, was also not a success. Out of conceit with the theatre she left it entirely in 1733 and dwelt in retirement until 1771, the epoch of her death.
Marie Laboras de Mézières, born in Paris in 1713, made her first appearance on the 23rd August 1734, in the rôle of Lucile, in La Surprise de l’Amour. She married François Riccoboni the son, and withdrew from the Théâtre-Italien in 1761. She wrote various French scenes to be introduced into the Italian scenarii, but it is as a French novelist that Madame Riccoboni earned the durable celebrity of her name: Lettres de Fanny Butler, Ernestine, Histoire du Marquis de Catesby, were her principal works. She also translated several English pieces: La Façon de se Fixer, La Femme Jalouse, La Fausse Délicatesse and Il Est Possédé. She was one of the greatest wits of her day. She died in 1792.
On the 3rd May 1730, Anna-Elisabeth Constantini, the daughter of Giovanni-Battista Constantini (the Ottavio of the old company), made her début at the Comédie-Italienne to play such characters as Isabelle and Silvia.
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Giacometta-Antonia Veronese, known under the name of Camille, was born in Venice in 1735. She went to France in 1744 with her father Veronese (Pantaloon) and her sister Anna Veronese (Coraline), being then no more than nine years of age. Camille made her début as a dancer on the 21st May 1744, at the same time that her sister and father were making their first appearance in Coraline, Esprit Follet, a piece which enjoyed a great vogue. Subsequently she was seen in the rôles of leading lady, in 1747, at the age of twelve, in a scenario (Les Sœurs Rivales) written expressly for her by her father.
“Camille,” says an author of that time, “had a gesture of an expressiveness such as is not to be learned before a mirror, and an accent of a naturalness such as art can never yield, but such as the heart may prompt when it is moved. Free from ambition and jealousy, she was innocent of those rivalries which nearly always spring up among women of her condition. Her character was in her face, and one saw imprinted there nobility, frankness, wit and gaiety; no woman of her state ever carried disinterestedness further, nor did ingratitude succeed in turning her aside from beneficence. With a beneficent soul it is almost impossible not to have a tender heart; these qualities are nearly always inseparable, and if her sensibility permitted her some weaknesses she knew how to earn pardon for them by the constancy of her attachment.”
“The Sieur Billioni has just produced at the Théâtre-Italien the ballet Pygmalion with success. The subject is so well known that it is unnecessary for me to enter into details of it. I will remark only that the Demoiselle Camille, who plays the part of the statue, renders it with the most singular truth. Nothing can equal the delicacy of her pantomime, particularly in the scene when the statue gradually becomes animate; she depicts her surprise, her curiosity, her nascent love, and all the sudden or graduated movements of her soul, with an expression such as has never yet been equalled. I think that the art of the ancient Greek and Roman mimes could not surpass the talents of Camille in this style of work” (Letter of Favart to M. de Durazzo, 27th December 1760).
“‘Thémire Délivrée, such is the title of the ballet-pantomime performed by Billon,’ says Biglioni, the erstwhile ballet-master of the Opéra-Comique. Thémire (Mademoiselle Camille), amidst a troop of hunters, delivers her orders, departs with them to beat the countryside, and leaves the stage empty (a gross fault). Two woodcutters and the wife of one of them dance a pas de trois. They go off as they came on without explaining the reason of their appearance. Thémire reappears; she has been involuntarily separated from the hunt. She finds herself alone and expresses her fears. A savage perceives her from the height of a hill, comes abruptly down and seizes her; she swoons in terror; the savage binds her with slender branches of willow and drags her into his cave. At this critical moment the hunters arrive and perceive the danger of Thémire; they charge up the hill; savages armed with clubs hurl themselves upon them. Ah! what is happening during this time to poor Thémire? Finally, luckily or unluckily, the savages are routed and Thémire is delivered. Were they in time or were they not in time? That is what remains to be explained. Be it as it may Thémire is brought on in triumph to the sound of cymbals. (Why cymbals?) There are rejoicings on the deliverance of Thémire. The conquered savages also rejoice. (Wherefore?)
“Notwithstanding these absurdities the ballet gives great pleasure. That is because it is perfectly executed. It is because Camille, who represents Thémire, is an excellent comedienne” (Favart, 1st August 1760).
Camille died in 1768 at the age of thirty-three.
Among other actresses of fame who played in Italy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries let us cite those who played under the names of Clarice, Angela, Graziosa, Rosaura, Eleonora, Diana, Beatrice or Isabella, the Signore Alborghezzi, 1600; Armelini, 1600; Andreoletti, 1602; Garziani, 1610; Aspontini, 1630; Pazzighetti, 1661; Teresa-Corona Sabolini, who played in 1688 under the name of Ottavia Diana; Giovanna Amatis, 1695; Anziani, 1715; Malatesta, 1720; Albertini, 1706; Antonia Albani, 1760; Teodora Ricci of Padua, who exercised so great an influence on the talent of Carlo Gozzi, 1760; Felicita and Rosalie Bonami, 1775; Marianna Bassi, 1750; etc.