[B] “No, the entire universe can behold nothing equal to the superb exterior of the Palais-Cardinal. The whole town, splendidly built, seems to have sprung by a miracle out of an old ditch, making one fancy from its magnificent roofs that all its inhabitants must be gods or kings.”
In spite of Corneille’s praise, Louis XIII. seems to have thought but little of his minister’s gift. Nor could he in any case have turned it to much account, for he did not survive the astute counsellor for more than a year.
Louis XIV. passed some years of his childhood at the Palais-Cardinal, to which the name of Palais Royal was now given. Here the minister Mazarini, or Mazarin, resided during the troubles of the Fronde, and here it was that he heard the populace sing couplets about the Facchino Italiano. “They sing; they shall pay!” murmured the minister. But he was obliged all the same to take flight; and with the queen regent and the infant king he sought refuge at Saint-Germain. Never afterwards would the proud monarch inhabit the Palais Royal, which he assigned as a place of residence to Henrietta of France, Queen of England, and widow of Charles I. Afterwards, in 1692, Louis XIV. gave the Palais Royal as an absolute gift to his nephew, Philip of Orleans, Duke of Chartres, on the occasion of that prince’s marriage. The Palace had now been increased by the addition of the Hôtel Dauville in the adjacent Rue Richelieu, and of a gallery constructed by the celebrated architect Mansard.
The Regent of Orleans turned the theatre of Richelieu into an opera house, where he gave a number of masked balls which are remembered in history. Nor is the profligate life of which the Palais Royal now became the scene by any means forgotten. The theatre having been burnt down, the regent insisted on its being restored at the expense of the town; which was accordingly done. But the theatre was again destroyed by fire in 1781; and the Duke of Chartres, afterwards known during the Revolution as Philippe Égalité, the father of King Louis Philippe, instead of rebuilding it, constructed the three galleries surrounding the garden which still exist. The idea of three such galleries, {167} communicating with the body of the palace, is said to have been entertained by Richelieu himself.
As prodigal as his grandfather, the regent, the Duke of Orleans, was obliged to have recourse to various expedients for replenishing his exhausted exchequer. It occurred to him to turn the galleries of the Palais Royal into long lines of shops. This involved the expenditure of a considerable sum of money, but the result was most remunerative. The new Palais Royal became a centre of attraction to all Paris. Around the garden the three galleries, together with the one still known as the Galerie d’Orléans, formed a sort of bazaar, where jewellery, fans, and ornaments of all kinds were offered for sale. The shops were varied by cafés and restaurants. In the garden the Café de la Régence was established, and the Richelieu Theatre being once more rebuilt, now formed the home of the Comédie Française. Towards the end of the Monarchical period the Palais Royal became a recognised place of dissipation. In contrast with the loose morality of the locality was the rigid exactitude with which, every day at noon, a cannon in the centre of the garden, fired by the rays of the sun through a powerful lens, announced the hour; and crowds of people used to assemble round it, watch in hand, towards twelve o’clock. Walking through the Palais Royal one day with the Duke of Orleans, the Abbé Delille was requested by the Prince to sum up in a few words his ideas of the place, and did so in the following quatrain:—
[C] “In this garden one may meet with everything, except shade and flowers. In it, if one’s morals go wrong, at least one’s watch may be set right.”
After the execution of the Duke of Orleans, who, having had the infamy to vote for the death of his blameless relative Louis XVI., was himself, by a mild retribution, to perish on the scaffold, the Palais Royal was appropriated by the State, and the place was now invaded by all the ruffians and reprobates of Paris. Let us on this subject hear Mercier in his “Tableau de Paris.” “The Athenians,” he writes, “raised temples to their Phrynes; curs find them in this enclosure already built. Speculators and their correlatives go three times a day to the Palais Royal, the centre of political and every other kind of debauchery. Some are occupied with the rise and fall of the funds. Gaming-tables are kept in every café, and it is a sight to see the sudden change in the expression of the players’ faces as they lose or win. The Palais Royal is an elegant box of Pandora, beautifully carved, delicately worked, but containing what everyone knows it contains. All these followers of Sardanapalus or of Lucullus inhabit the Palais Royal, in apartments which the King of Assyria and the Roman Emperors would have envied.” Under the Directory the number of gambling houses was limited, first to four, afterwards to eight; and it was not until the reign of Louis Philippe that they were finally suppressed. The gambling house at Number 113 figures in the “Peau de Chagrin” of Balzac; also in Dumas’ “Femme au Collier de Velours.”
As for the “Palace”—the mansion inhabited by Mazarin and the infant Louis XIV., afterwards by Henrietta of England, and then by various members of the Orleans family—Napoleon established public offices in it. During the Hundred Days the palace was occupied by Lucien Bonaparte, and on the restoration of the Monarchy the whole place was bought back from the Government by the then Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis Philippe. Some changes were made in the direction of the galleries, the popularity of which remained as great as ever. Nor was this diminished by the foreign occupation, for the Palais Royal was thronged day and night by officers of the Allied Army. It was now that the Café Lemblin became the head-quarters of Bonapartist officers on half-pay, and the Café des Mille Colonnes that of the officers serving in the newly organised Royalist army; and between the two bodies of officers numerous duels were fought. An ingenious rhymed description of the Palais Royal in its best and worst days has been left by Désaugiers, the celebrated songwriter of the period before Béranger, of which we may quote the concluding lines, telling how the resort, from being the scene of political storms, came to be the general rendez-vous of pleasure-seekers of every kind and every nationality, from the Fleming to the Turk, and from the genius to the fool:—{168}
GARDENS OF THE PALAIS ROYAL.
GARDENS OF THE PALAIS ROYAL.
Reformed in so many respects under the reign of Louis Philippe, the Palais Royal was destined at the same time to be overshadowed by the increasing importance of the Boulevards.
After the Revolution of 1848 the Palais Royal, now styled Palais National, was once more treated as State property. Under the Second Empire it became the residence of Prince Jerome, succeeded by his son, Prince Napoleon. On the ornamentation of the portico, some fleurs de lis dating from the time of Richelieu, which the Revolutionists of 1789 and of 1848 had forgotten to scrape off, were erased and replaced by Imperial eagles, themselves destined to disappear in the revolution of the 4th of September, 1871, when, at the same time, the Republican motto, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” was restored. Meanwhile, on the 23rd of May, 1871, while the expiring Commune was still struggling against the army of Versailles, the palace was invaded by the Communards and set in flames. The whole of the left wing, with part of the central pavilion, was burnt down. In the midst of the general incendiarism, the Théâtre Français, which may be regarded as an annexe of the Palais Royal, though it is entered from the Rue Richelieu, had itself a narrow escape from fire.
The Palais Royal was destined to be the birthplace of more than one revolution. It was here that the great movement of 1789, and the minor one of July, 1830, began. The revolution of July seems, in the first instance, to have been intended simply as a protest, an act of resistance against arbitrary measures—and in particular against the {169} muzzling of the Press to such an extent as to render it impossible under modern conditions to publish a newspaper. The celebrated ordonnances had the immediate effect of throwing a multitude of journeyman printers out of work, and it was by these men that in one part of the city the insurrection was commenced. With them the question was not a political one in theory alone; it was a question whether they should get the hateful ordonnances repealed or remain without work: that is to say, starve.
THE PALAIS ROYAL AFTER THE SIEGE.
THE PALAIS ROYAL AFTER THE SIEGE.
The 26th of July passed off very calmly in Paris as a whole. At the Palais Royal, however, some young men were seen mounting chairs, as formerly Camille Desmoulins had done. “They read the Moniteur aloud,” says a witness of the scene, “appealed to the people against the infraction of the charter, and endeavoured by violent gesticulation and inflammatory harangues to excite in their hearers and in themselves a vague appetite for agitation. But dancing was going on in the environs of the capital; the people were engaged in labour or amusement. The bourgeoisie alone gave evidence of consternation. The ordonnances had dealt it a twofold blow: they had struck at its political power in the persons of its legislators, and at its moral power in those of its writers.”
At first there was nothing to be seen throughout the whole bourgeois portion of the population but one dull, uniform stupor. Bankers, traders, manufacturers, printers, lawyers, and journalists accosted each other with scared and astounded looks. There was in this sudden muzzling of the Press a sort of arrogant challenge that stunned men’s faculties. So much daring inferred proportionate strength.
The most active section of the bourgeoisie went to work on the 27th, {170} and nothing was left undone to stir up the people. The Gazette, the Quotidienne, and the Universel had submitted to the ordonnances from conviction or from party spirit; the Journal des Débats and the Constitutionnel from fear and mercantile policy. The Globe, the National, and the Temps, which defiantly continued to appear, were profusely circulated. The police order of the preceding day, forbidding their publication, only served to stimulate curiosity. Copies were disposed of by hundreds in the cafés, the reading-rooms, and the restaurants. Journalists hurried from manufactory to manufactory, and from shop to shop, to read the articles aloud and comment upon them. Individuals in the dress, and with the manners and appearance of men of fashion, were seen mounting on stone posts and holding forth as professors of insurrection; whilst students paraded the streets, armed with canes, waving their hats and crying “Vive la Charte!”
The ordinary demagogues, cast into the midst of a movement they could not comprehend, looked on with surprise at all these things; but, gradually yielding to the contagion of the hour, they imitated the bourgeoisie, and running about with bewildered countenances, shouted like others for the charter.
Begun in the Palais Royal, this revolution was continued and virtually concluded at the neighbouring Tuileries, where the Swiss Guard, fighting as faithfully for the restored monarchy as they had fought for the monarchy of Louis XVI., perished at the hands of the insurgents. The great Danish sculptor, Thorvaldsen, had already commemorated the heroism of Louis the Sixteenth’s Swiss Guard in a magnificent figure of a wounded, expiring, but still undaunted lion, carved on a cliff or mountainside close to the town of Lucerne. The loyal mercenaries of Charles X. showed the same lionlike courage that those of Louis XVI. had displayed.
THE MONTPENSIER GALLERY, PALAIS ROYAL.
THE MONTPENSIER GALLERY, PALAIS ROYAL.
There can be no doubt that the sight of the Swiss uniforms—scarlet, like that of the Household troops of most sovereigns—irritated greatly the people of Paris, who looked upon the revolution now taking place as a national movement under the tricolour flag against the monarchy, restored by foreign power after the defeat of Napoleon, with the white flag as its emblem. “The sight of those red uniforms,” wrote an eye-witness of many of the scenes that took place during the three days of July, “redoubled the fury of the insurgents; fresh combatants rushed forth from every alley, and a barricade was manned and seized by the people. The Swiss sustained this attack with vigour; the guards advanced to support them, and the Parisians were beginning to give way, when a young man advanced to rally and cheer them on, waving a tricolour flag at the end of a lance, and shouting, ‘I will show you how to die!’ He fell, pierced with balls, within ten paces of the guards. This engagement was terrible; the Swiss left many of their numbers stretched on the pavement.”
The fighting, all over Paris, abounded in scenes which were either fantastic, heroic, or lamentable. The Marquis d’Antichamp had taken up his post, seated on a chair under the colonnade of the Louvre, opposite Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. Bent under the burden of his years, and hardly able to sustain his tottering frame, he encouraged the Swiss to the fight by his presence, and sat with folded arms gazing on the terrible spectacle before him with stoical insensibility. A band of insurgents attacked the powder magazine at Ivry on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, broke the gate in with hatchets and pole-axes, rushed into the courtyard, and obliged the people of the place to throw them packages of powder out of the windows. The insurgents, with all the hot-headed recklessness of the moment, continued with their pipes in their mouths to catch the packages as they fell, and carried them off in their arms. The debtors confined in Sainte-Pélagie, using a beam for a battering-ram, burst the gates, and then went and joined the guards on duty outside to prevent the escape of the criminal prisoners. A {171} sanguinary encounter took place in the Rue de Prouvaires, and exhibited the spectacle, common enough in civil wars, of brothers fighting in opposite ranks. Throughout the whole city a sort of moral intoxication beyond all description had seized upon the inhabitants. Amidst the noise of musketry, the rolling of the drums, the cries and groans of the combatants, a thousand strange reports prevailed and added to the universal bewilderment. A hat and feathers were carried about in some parts of the town, said to be those of the Duke of Ragusa, whose death was reported. The audacity of some of the combatants was incredible. A workman, seeing a company of the 5th regiment of the line advancing upon the Place de la Bourse, ran straight up to the captain and struck him a blow on the head with an iron bar. He reeled, and his face was bathed in blood; but he had still strength enough left to throw up his soldiers’ bayonets with his sword as they were about to fire on the aggressor. The leaders of the people added the most perfect self-denial to their intrepidity; and they ranged themselves by preference under the orders of those combatants whose dress proclaimed that they belonged to the more favoured classes of society. Furthermore, the young men found at every step guides for their inexperience in the persons of old soldiers who had survived the battles of the Empire—a warlike generation whom the Bourbons had for ever incensed in 1815.
ENTRANCE TO THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE.
ENTRANCE TO THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE.
Its History—The Roman Comique—Under Louis XV.—During the Revolution—Hernani.
LET us now return to the Palais Royal, and to the theatre which adjoins it. The Comédie Française, or Théâtre Français, as it is also called, was never, as the first of these names might suggest, devoted exclusively to comedy. The word “comedy” was used in France in the early days of its stage to denote any kind of theatrical entertainment. The famous “Ballet Comique de la Reine,” produced towards the end of the 16th century, was, in fact, a dramatic entertainment with singing and dancing, strongly resembling what would now be called an opera; and the author of the work explains, in his preface, that he calls it “ballet comique,” instead of “ballet” alone, because it possesses a dramatic character. Volumes innumerable have been written on the origin of the French theatre, which had as humble a beginning as the theatre in all other European countries; with the exception, however, of opera, which in the earliest days of the musical drama enjoyed the special patronage of kings, princes, cardinals, and great noblemen.
In Italy, during the Renaissance period, the musical drama was invented by popes, cardinals, and other illustrious personages bent on restoring in modern form the ancient drama of the Greeks. The spoken drama of France, as of other European countries, had humbler beginnings, and the first regular troop of the Comédie Française had its origin in a combination of wandering companies.
At the end of the sixteenth, and during the early part of the seventeenth century, the English stage, with Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other dramatic poets of the Elizabethan period, was far superior to the stage of France, which scarcely indeed existed at the time. But towards the end of the seventeenth century the French theatre enjoyed the supreme advantage of possessing simultaneously the three greatest dramatists that France even to this day has produced: Corneille, Molière, and Racine.
THE PUBLIC FOYER, COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE.
THE PUBLIC FOYER, COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE.
It is a little more than two centuries ago, in the year 1689, that the theatre where “the comedians of the king” habitually performed received the title of Comédie Française; though its constitution dates from 1680, when, by order of Louis XIV., the company of the Hôtel de Bourgogne was united to that of the Théâtre Guénégaud in the Rue Mazarin. The history of the Comédie Française cannot well be separated from that of Corneille and of Molière, its greatest writers; though Molière, who died in 1673, and Corneille, who died in 1684, produced their works long before the Théâtre Français was officially constituted. Perhaps the most interesting account of the origin of the French {173} theatre is to be found in the “Roman Comique” of Scarron, in which one of the leading personages is Madeleine Béjard, elder sister of the charming but unfaithful Armande Béjard, known to everyone as Molière’s wife. Possibly, as in the case of the “Ballet Comique de la Reine,” the adjective in the title of Scarron’s work is used to signify, not “comic,” but “dramatic,” or “theatrical.” Scarron in any case shows us how Molière (introduced under another name) joined a strolling company when he had just finished his studies as a law student. The incident might have been borrowed from Cervantes’ “Gipsy of Madrid,” wherein an infatuated young man throws in his lot with a troop of gipsies. But it {174} is beyond doubt that the youth, “not brought up to the profession,” who becomes a member of a wandering troop involved in the adventures and humours so graphically described by Scarron was no other than Molière himself, or Poquelin, to give him his proper family designation, as distinguished from his more euphonious theatrical name.
One of the most interesting members of this celebrated company was Mdlle. du Parc, for whom is claimed the unique honour of having been passionately beloved by the three greatest dramatists of France: Corneille, Molière, and Racine. Having to choose between three writers, of whom the first was old, the second middle-aged, and the third young, Mdlle. du Parc was eccentric enough to select the last; a preference which left Molière silent, but which provoked from Corneille some verses so admirable that one cannot but forgive the lady who, by her heartless conduct, called forth such lines. Corneille and Molière had at this time separate companies, and Mdlle. du Parc appears to have acted in both. Corneille in any case endeavoured to persuade Mdlle. du Parc to pass from Molière’s company to his own, pointing out to her that the troop of his friend Molière “was very inferior in tragedy, so that she would always be sacrificed, since she excelled above all in the tragic style.” Racine employed the same kind of argument as Corneille, and ultimately succeeded in taking away the much-admired actress from Molière’s company in order to attach her to his theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where tragedies from his pen were habitually produced. Mdlle. du Parc, who had previously caused an estrangement between Corneille and Molière, now brought about a complete rupture between Molière and Racine.
The story of Mdlle. du Parc, with the intrigues of which she was made the object, brings out clearly the fact that in the early days of the French stage there was not one theatre, but three; Corneille, Molière, and Racine having each his separate company. In the present day the Théâtre Français comprises in its repertory all the masterpieces of France’s three greatest dramatists; and many imagine that for this famous establishment may be claimed the honour of having first produced them. But the finest tragedies and comedies that France possesses were written for theatres of little or no standing; and not, as just pointed out, for one, but for three different theatres. An actress celebrated in her time, Mdlle. Beaupré, made some celebrated remarks on the subject of French dramatic literature, which give a good idea of the esteem in which the art of playwriting must have been held in France immediately before the advent of Molière. “M. de Corneille,” she said, “has done the greatest harm to the dramatic profession. Before his time we had very good pieces which were written for us in a night for three crowns. Now M. de Corneille charges large sums for his plays and we earn scarcely anything.”
Even in these early days Louis XIV. took the greatest interest in theatrical representations, especially those given by Molière’s company. Perhaps the very best period of the French stage was between the years 1645, when Molière abandoned the law courts to join a troop of wandering players, and 1680, when the two most important companies of the day were combined; at which time Molière had been dead seven years, while Corneille was on the point of dying.
The Comédie Française was formed in the most arbitrary manner. It has been said that the company which had been in the habit of playing at the Hôtel de Bourgogne was joined to that of the Théâtre Guénégaud in the Rue Mazarin. But there was at that day a third theatre in Paris, the Théâtre du Marais; and in order that everything dramatic might be concentrated at the one establishment, this unhappy house was simply suppressed. By Royal decree the number of actors and actresses connected with the Comédie Française was fixed at twenty-seven. A year later the establishment received for the first time an annual subvention, to the amount of 12,000 livres or francs. At the same time the French comedians were authorised, in lieu of previous arrangements, to deduct the full expenses of the theatre before paying anything to the authors.
The company had scarcely taken possession of the Théâtre de Guénégaud when they were obliged to leave it for another and more commodious building in the Rue des Fossés, Saint-Germain-des-Prés; and it was here that the name of Comédie Française was first adopted. Hence the name of the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, in which street, newly baptised, the Comédie Française was for so many years installed.
The Comédie Française had everything to itself until the year 1699, when much alarm and indignation was caused in the ranks of the company by the establishment of an opposition theatre, the Comédie Italienne. The French comedians were ready to do anything in order to keep their monopoly. In a formal petition they represented to the king that they {175} were twenty-six in number (the principal actress had died) and capable, if necessary, of amusing His Majesty at two different theatres. They thought it hard, however, that after quitting, by His Majesty’s orders, first the Hôtel de Bourgogne, then the Théâtre Guénégaud, they should now be threatened in their new abode, which had cost them 200,000 francs to construct.
The king paid no attention to these representations, and the Comédie Italienne soon became the home of French comic opera, doing a flourishing business according to the tariff of those days, when a place in the pit cost five sous, and a seat in the boxes ten.
The Comédie Française did not in the long run suffer from the popularity of the opposition theatre, and perhaps profited by it. But soon the Comédie Française was to be subjected to a new inconvenience, and in the very year which had witnessed the invasion of the Comédie Italienne a tax was imposed on theatres generally for the benefit of the poor—“taxe des pauvres”—which exists even to the present day. The members of the Comédie Française endeavoured to meet the difficulty by raising the prices on the occasion of first representations.
After the death of Louis XIV. the Comédie Française remained, as before, under the supreme government of the king, his ministers, and the gentlemen of the chamber. The new sovereign showed himself as munificent in the matter of the subvention as his predecessor, and the theatre was once more guaranteed an annual grant of 12,000 francs. A custom was now for the first time introduced, which has since become universal—that of playing a first piece in one act before the principal play of the evening.
Under Louis XV. the Comédie Française was directed, in the matter of engagements and general administration, by the Duc de Richelieu, to whom were submitted the petitions intended for the king. The members of the Comédie Française kept a careful watch over the privileges conferred upon them, and we find them complaining whenever there are any signs of these privileges being interfered with by a rival establishment. Every booth opened at a temporary fair excited the suspicion of the comedians; and they at last succeeded in procuring an order by which the directors of the much-hated Comédie Italienne, now known as the Opéra Comique, were prevented from playing comedies, especially those which had been written expressly for the Comédie Française.
In 1770 the famous company again changed their domicile, and, by the king’s special permission, took possession of the theatre built in 1671 at the palace of the Tuileries. Here they remained twelve years, until 1782, when they left the palace of the kings of France and installed themselves in the house afterwards to become known as the Odéon, on the left bank of the Seine, close to the Luxemburg Palace. According to Fréron, the daring satirist who was in no way afraid to take even Voltaire for his mark, the dramatic literature of France had now fallen to a very low point, by reason of the worldly success of its authors. “The gay life of most of our authors helps,” wrote Fréron, “to keep them within the bounds of mediocrity. Love of pleasure, the attractions of society that luxury which had so long kept them at a respectful distance, now enervate their souls. They are men of society, men of fashion, runners after women, and themselves much run after. They are at every party, every entertainment; no supper is complete without them; they are sumptuously dressed, and have luxuriously furnished rooms. It was not by supping out every night in society that the Corneilles, the Molières, the La Fontaines, and the Boileaus composed those masterpieces which will constitute for ever their glory and the glory of France. They were simply lodged and simply clothed; a large flat cap covered the sublime head of the great Corneille, but all the assembly rose before him when he made his appearance at the play.” Since the days of Fréron the incomes and the luxury of French dramatic authors have greatly increased; a result mainly due to the exertions of Beaumarchais, whose Marriage of Figaro was produced at the Comédie Française two years after its installation at the Odéon in 1784. It was Beaumarchais who secured for French dramatic authors a fixed proportion of the receipts, and caused this equitable arrangement, previously unknown, to be perpetuated.
Under the Revolution, precisely five years after the production of The Marriage of Figaro, the spirit and tone of which seemed to the king himself prophetic of the approaching catastrophe, the Comédie Française assumed the title of “Théâtre de la Nation, Comédiens ordinaires du Roi,” a compromise between loyalty to the old state of things and adhesion to the new of which the members of the company were afterwards bitterly to repent. Dissensions now sprang up between the different members of the company, some royalists, others republicans. On the whole, however, the actors and actresses showed a certain aptitude for {176} placing themselves on good terms with the executive power of the moment. In 1792, on the eve of the Reign of Terror, the players were formally obliged to replace such words as “Seigneur” and “Monsieur” by “Citoyen,” even when the piece was written in verse. In the classical tragedies of Racine the word “Seigneur” constantly occurs, as, for instance, where Agamemnon addresses Achilles, or Achilles Agamemnon. The heroes of the Iliad and of the history of Rome had now to be “Citoyens;” which, apart from the intrinsic absurdity of the thing, could not but spoil the metre.
THE GREEN ROOM OF THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS.
THE GREEN ROOM OF THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS.
One effect of the Revolution was to deprive the Comédie Française of the privilege it had so long and so unjustly enjoyed of incorporating in its company any actor or actress whom it might choose to detach from some other troop, not only at Paris, but in any other part of France. It at the same time also lost its monopoly. A split having taken place in the company, a second Comédie Française was started in the Palais Royal with the celebrated Talma, and with Grandmesnil, Dugazon, and Mme. Vestris among its artists. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the loss of Talma, the Comédie Française kept up against all disadvantages. There was, however, too much sense of art, of dramatic propriety among the members to permit the replacement of the word “Seigneur” by “Citoyen,” and as a punishment for neglecting the Governmental order on the subject the whole of the company of the Comédie Française was arrested one night and thrown into prison, with the exception only of Molé, who was apparently looked upon as a good Republican, and some other actor who was away from the capital. The piece performed on the night of the arrest had {177} been a dramatic version of Richardson’s Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, which, according to the judgment of the Republican Censors, was “full of reactionary feeling.” Possibly the nameless hero, Mr. B——, was addressed from time to time not as “Citoyen,” but as “Monsieur.”
MOLIÈRE. (From the bust by Houdon in the Comédie Française)
MOLIÈRE.
(From the bust by Houdon in the Comédie Française)
Not only were the actors and actresses of the Comédie Française imprisoned, but also the dramatists in the habit of writing for the theatre, with Alexander Duval, author of Les Héritiers and other amusing comedies, and Laya, who had dramatised “Pamela,” among them. One of the members of the Committee of Public Safety, the ferocious Collot d’Herbois, is reported to have said that “the head of the Comédie Française should be guillotined, and the rest sent out of the country.” The famous actor, Fleury, sets forth in his “Memoirs” that on the margin of the depositions in the case of Mdlle. Raucourt, who had been arrested with the other members of the company, the said Collot d’Herbois had written with his own hand, in red, an enormous G. {178} This was a death sentence without appeal, G standing for guillotine. “Arrested in 1793 with most of the principal actors and actresses, she was,” says Fleury, “as a first step, imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie; but already she was marked down for the scaffold. The Queen had protected her; she had received numerous benefits from the Royal Family; and she was suspected of gratitude for so many favours.” In common with all her colleagues of the Comédie Française, who like herself had been arrested, Fleury among the number, Mdlle. Raucourt owed her life to the courage and ingenuity of a clerk in the employment of the Committee of Public Safety, who destroyed the Acts of Accusation drawn up by Collot d’Herbois for presentation to Fouquier-Tinville. Considerable delay was thus caused, during which the anger entertained against the theatrical troop gradually evaporated, though some of the players remained in prison until the fall of Robespierre. It was understood meanwhile that no such words as “king” or “queen,” “lord” or “lady,” were to be used on the stage, and the members of the Comédie Française had received a sufficiently severe lesson to render them disinclined for the future to set at naught the edict on the subject.
As soon as she had regained her liberty, Mdlle. Raucourt tried to form a company for herself, and, succeeding, took a theatre, which was soon, however, closed by order of the Government, some allusion to its severity having been discovered in one of the pieces represented. Mdlle. Raucourt thenceforward made no secret of her hostility to the Directory, which, now that the Reign of Terror was at an end, could be attacked, indirectly at least, without too much danger. Fleury tells us that Mdlle. Raucourt’s costume was a constant protest against the existing order of things; which, from a feeling of gratitude towards the Royal Family, her constant patrons, and from painful feelings in connection with that guillotine beneath whose shadow she had passed, she could not but hate. “She wore on her spenser,” says Fleury, “eighteen buttons in allusion to Louis XVIII., while her fan was one of those weeping-willow fans, the folds of which formed the face of Marie Antoinette.” Fleury speaks, moreover, of a certain shawl worn by Mdlle. Raucourt, of which the pattern, once explained, traced to the eyes of the initiated the portraits of Louis, the Queen, and the Dauphin. One day he accompanied her to a fortune-teller who had been expected to predict the restoration of the monarchy, but who foretold instead the revival of the Comédie Française. “The woman,” says Fleury, “had read the cards aright, for in 1799 an order from the First Consul re-assembled in a new association the remains of the company dispersed at the time of the Revolution.” But now the theatre was burnt down; and though the Comédie Française existed as an institution, and received in 1802 a special subsidy of 100,000 francs, it was not until 1803 that, in conformity with an order from the First Consul, it took possession of the building in the Rue Richelieu, close to the Palais Royal, where it has ever since remained.
As under Louis XIV., so under Napoleon, the Comédie Française followed the sovereign to his palatial residence wherever it might be; to Saint-Cloud, to Fontainebleau, to Trianon, to Compiègne, to Malmaison, and even to Erfurt and Dresden, where Talma is known to have performed before a “pit of kings.” Nor did Napoleon forget the Comédie Française when he was at Moscow, during the temporary occupation and just before the fatal retreat; though it may well have been from a feeling of pride, and a desire to show how capable he was at such a critical moment of occupying himself with comparatively unimportant things, that he dated from the Kremlin his celebrated decree regulating the affairs of the principal theatre in France.
It has been the destiny of the Comédie Française during the past hundred years to salute a number of different governments and dynasties. That they conscientiously kicked against the Republic in its most aggravated form has already been shown. They had no reason for being dissatisfied with Napoleon; and after the destruction of the Imperial power it was perfectly natural that they should do homage to that house of Bourbon under which they had first been established, and which for so long a period had kept them beneath its peculiar patronage. They now resumed their ancient title of “Comédiens Ordinaires du Roi,” and the direction of the establishment was handed over to the Intendant of the Royal Theatres.
The Comédie Française has often been charged with too strict an adherence to classical ideas. Yet it was at this theatre that a dramatic work by Victor Hugo, round which rallied the whole of the so-called romantic school, was first placed before the public.
The two most interesting events in the history of the Comédie Française are the first production of The Marriage of Figaro in 1784, of which {179} an account has already been given in connection with Beaumarchais and his residence on the boulevard bearing his name, and the first production of Hernani forty-six years afterwards.
Hernani was the third play that Victor Hugo had written, but the first that was represented. There seems never to have been any intention of bringing out Cromwell, published in 1827, and known to this day chiefly by its preface. Marion Delorme, Victor Hugo’s second dramatic work, was submitted to the Théâtre Français, but rejected, not by the management, but by the Censorship, and, indeed, by Charles X. himself, with whom Victor Hugo had a personal interview on the subject. “The picture of Louis XIII.’s reign,” says a writer on this subject, “was not agreeable to his descendant; and the last of the Bourbon kings is said to have been particularly annoyed at the omnipotent part assigned in Victor Hugo’s drama to the great Cardinal de Richelieu.”
But Victor Hugo had the persistency of genius, and though both his first efforts had miscarried, he was ready soon after the rejection of Marion Delorme with another piece—that spirited, poetical work Hernani, which is usually regarded as his finest dramatic effort. Hernani, like Marion Delorme, was condemned by the Censorship; being objected to not on political, but on literary, moral, and general grounds. The report of the Committee of Censorship, scarcely less ironical than severe, concluded in these remarkable terms: “However much we might extend our analysis, it could only give an imperfect idea of Hernani, of the eccentricity of its conception, and the faults of its execution. It seems to us a tissue of extravagances to which the author has vainly endeavoured to give a character of elevation, but which are always trivial and often vulgar. The piece abounds in unbecoming thoughts of every kind. The king expresses himself like a bandit; the bandit treats the king like a brigand. The daughter of a grandee of Spain is a shameless woman without dignity or modesty. Nevertheless, in spite of so many capital faults, we are of opinion that not only would there be nothing injudicious in authorising the representation of the piece, but that it would be wise policy not to cut out a single word. It is well that the public should see what point of wildness the human mind may reach when it is freed from all rules of propriety.”
When at last the play was produced there was such a scene in the Comédie Française as has never been witnessed before or since. At two o’clock, when the doors were opened, a band of romanticists entered the theatre and forthwith searched it in view of any hostile classicists who might be lying hid in dark corners, ready to rise and hiss as soon as the curtain should go up. No classicists, however, were discovered; the band of romanticists was under the direction of Gérard de Nerval, author of the delightful “Voyage en Orient,” translator of “Faust” in the early days when he called himself simply Gérard, and Heine’s collaborator in the French prose translation of the “Buch der Lieder.” On the eve of the battle, Gérard de Nerval, as Théophile Gautier has told us in one of many accounts he wrote of the famous representation, visited the officers who were to act under him; their number, according to one account, including Balzac, first of French novelists, if not first novelist of the world; that Wagner of the past, Hector Berlioz; Auguste Maquet, the dramatist; and Joseph Bouchardy, the melodramatist, together with Alexander Dumas, historian (in his “Memoirs”) of the rehearsals of Hernani, and Théophile Gautier, chronicler in more than one place of its first representation.
Victor Hugo had originally intended to call his play Three to One; which to the modern mind would have suggested a sporting drama. Castilian Honour—excellent title!—had also been suggested; but the general opinion of Victor Hugo’s friends was in favour of Hernani, the musical and sonorous name of the hero; and under that title the piece was produced.
It has been said that the supporters of Victor Hugo took possession of a certain portion of the theatre as early as two in the afternoon. They had brought with them hams, tongues, and bottles of wine; and they had what the Americans call a “good time” during the interval that passed before the public was admitted—eating, drinking, singing songs, and discussing the beauties of the piece they had come to applaud. “As soon as the doors of the theatre were opened the band of romanticists,” says Théophile Gautier, “turned their eyes towards the incomers, and if among them a pretty woman appeared her arrival was greeted with a burst of applause. These marks of approbation were not bestowed on rich toilettes and dazzling jewellery, they were reserved for beauty in its simplest manifestations. Thus no one was received with so much enthusiasm as Mdlle. Delphine Gay, afterwards Mme. de Girardin, who, in a white muslin dress relieved by a blue scarf, wore no ornaments whatever. Mdlle. Gay {180} assured the Duke de Montmorency the morning after the representation, that she had not spent on her dress more than twenty-eight francs.”
CORNEILLE. (From the bust in the Comédie Française)
CORNEILLE.
(From the bust in the Comédie Française)
The Hugoites did not form a compact body, but occupied different parts of the pit and stalls in groups. They are said to have been easily recognisable by their sometimes picturesque, sometimes grotesque costumes, and by their defiant air. The combatants on either side applauded and counter-applauded, cried “Bravo!” and hissed without much reference to the merits of the piece, and often in attack or defence of supposed words which the piece did not contain. Thus (to quote once more from Théophile Gautier) in the scene where Ruy Gomez, on the point of marrying Doña Sol, entrusts her to Don Carlos, Hernani exclaims to the former, “Vieillard stupide! il l’aime.” M. Parseval de Grandmaison, a rigid classicist, but rather hard of hearing, thought Hernani had said, “Vieil as de pique! il l’aime.” “This is too much,” groaned M. {181} Parseval de Grandmaison. “What do you say?” replied Lassailly, who was sitting next him in the stalls, and who had only heard his neighbour’s interruption. “I say, sir, that it is not permissible to call a venerable old man like Ruy Gomez de Silva ‘old ace of spades.’” “He has a perfect right to do so,” replied Lassailly. “Cards were invented under Charles VI. Bravo for ‘Vieil as de pique!’ Bravo, Hugo!”
Théophile Gautier declares that Mdlle. Mars could only lend to the proud and passionate Doña Sol a “sober and refined talent,” as she was pre-occupied with considerations of propriety more suited to comedy than to drama. Victor Hugo himself was, on the other hand, delighted with the performance of the principal actress; and one cannot but accept him as the best judge in the case. It would be impossible, in Victor Hugo’s own words, without having seen her, to form an idea of the effect produced by the great actress in the part of Doña Sol, to which she gave “an immense development,” going in a few minutes through the whole gamut of her talent, from the graceful to the pathetic, and from the pathetic to the sublime.
The success of Hernani corresponded closely enough with the triumph of the Revolution of July, which brought Louis Philippe to the throne; and under the new and more liberal form of monarchy it seemed as though the rising poet and dramatist, who was soon to establish an undisputed supremacy, would have his own way at the Comédie Française as elsewhere. But his next work, Le Roi s’amuse, found no more favour in the eyes of M. Thiers than Marion Delorme had done in those of Charles X.’s ministers, and of Charles himself. Le Roi s’amuse (of which the subject is better known in England by Verdi’s opera of Rigoletto than by the drama on which Rigoletto is based) was played but once, and was not revived until some forty years afterwards, when it was produced under the Government of the Third Republic without much success. Victor Hugo’s dramas have not, except to the reading public, displaced the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Rachel as Chimène, Sarah Bernhardt as Phèdre are to this day better remembered by the old habitués of the Comédie Française than any actors in any of Victor Hugo’s parts. That Victor Hugo is one of the greatest poets of the century can scarcely be denied; but his genius is more lyrical than dramatic.