Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

64

Naturally this was one of the burning questions of the period, and a subject for royal ordinances. Of pages, lackeys, and broken soldiers there was always a sufficiency; a playhouse porter's best qualification was his swordsmanship; and La Grange notes more than once the payment of surgical expenses for doorkeepers wounded in the discharge of their duty. For riots were frequent: Molière and Du Croisy took part in one that was fatal to some of the rioters; and in M. Campardon's last publication* are documents relating to a disturbance that took place as late as 1691. As a rule, the scenery and decorations were simple almost to absurdity. For "The Cid" they had but "a room with four doors-an armchair for the King"; for "Hérculius," une salle de palais à volonté" and "three papers"; for "Bajazet," a "saloon à la Turque" and "two daggers"; for "Pourceaugnac," which by comparison was richly equipped, the necessaries were "two houses in front and a town behind; three chairs or stools; two musketoons," and seven or eight specimens, "en fer blanc," of an implement which those who have had the good luck to see M. Got as the excellent gentleman from the Limousin know for a fear-inspiring implement indeed. Disdaining the employment of supernumeraries, they seem, ere now, to have improvised a battle by letting down a painted cloth figured over with warring legions. The musical arrangements were of a kindred type: Molière began with three fiddles at the wings, or in a box in the front of the house, and, as Chappuzeau benevolently explains, if these fiddles did not know their cues, it was necessary to shout at them from the stage. Add to all this the fact that you could, while listening to the high-pitched, stately, rhythmic chant of the Champmeslé as Camille, or admiring Poisson in the typical boots of Crispin, provide yourself quite easily with occasion for a duel or two, and it is not difficult to conclude that a theatrical performance must, at that time, have had for one of its main attractions a lively tendency toward the unforeseen and unexpected.

It was after a stroll some twelve years long in the provinces of the west and south that Jean Baptiste Poquelin came back to Paris to settle and become world-famous as Molière. He had put forth the "Etourdi" at Lyons, in 1655, and the "Dépit Amoureux" at Béziers, in 1656, and in these and lesser works had approved himself an intelligent and able student of the Italian drama; he had played tragedy until he had come to believe himself a tragedian; he had made of the poor little Illustre Théâtre, of which, since 1645, he had been manager, a company that was

"Les Comédiens du Roi," Paris, 1879.

to found a comic tradition and to be a chief element in the composition of a national stage; above all, he had in him stuff that would presently take shape as "Tartufe," "The Misanthrope," "Scapin," " Pourceaugnac," the “Médecin," "George Dandin," the "Festin de Pierre." After winning the regard of Louis XIV. and his brother Philippe, called Monsieur, at a performance in the Louvre, he and his fellows were taken into Monsieur's service, and were settled in the theatre contrived in the great hall of the Hôtel de Petit-Bourbon. They shared it with Tiberio Fiurelli and his Italians, who had for some time the Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays for their own, and received from Molière the sum of fifteen hundred livres for the use of their theatre on the four off days of the week, when audiences could but be thin and receipts not very satisfying. The production at the Petit-Bourbon of the "Précieuses" and the "Cocu Imaginaire" (1659-'60) approved their author a competitor of no mean force; the Hôtel de Bourgogne took fire at the discovery; and in the latter of the two years, by an intrigue that reminds you strangely of the machinations in Balzac's novels, he and his following were turned neck and crop out of their holding and left without a stage. Fortunately, Monsieur was at their elbow to demonstrate the shameful injustice of the proceeding; fortunately, they had succeeded in pleasing the King; and three weeks after their expulsion they started afresh on the stage within the Palais-Royal. The theatre was a good one; it had been built and furnished by Richelieu for his own “Mirame," and for the five-handed plays he used to have of the staff of poets he kept at piece-work. It was out of repair; but it had a pit nine fathoms wide by eleven deep; there were two gilded galleries running round the three sides of it; it would hold on a pinch between two and three thousand people; it was a royal property, and as long as it liked his Majesty the actors were safe from any kind of interruption. In 1665, after the production of the two "Ecoles," the "Impromptu," and the "Mariage," the company was taken into the King's service, and received, with an annual grant of six thousand livres (increased to seven thousand in 1670), the official title of the King's Company. That there was a good deal of ill-feeling between the two troupes, the Royal and the King's, is sufficiently proved by the two "Impromptus "—of Versailles and of the Hôtel de Condé-the "Critique," the "Portrait du Peintre," and the "Vengeance des Marquis," with the journalism attached to them. But Molière was in good odor at court. Louis made less of him than his enthusiasts will confess; but he amused: he was ingenious as a maker of ballets and diversions; while he lived he was almost as important a person as Lulli and

Benserade, and stood on what was, perhaps, a higher plane of royal favor than ScaramouchFiurelli himself; and, after expelling him the Petit-Bourbon, the Hôtel de Bourgogne could for the moment prevail against him no more. Things changed briskly enough in 1673. Molière dead, Baron, La Thorilière, and the two Beauvals were tempted over to the opposition at once; and so little account was made of the remainder of his company, that, though it yet included Mademoiselles Molière and de Brie, the epoch's most accomplished actresses of comedy, with Hubert, the original Pernelle, and Madame Jourdain, and La Grange, the creator of all Molière's "young firsts" from Don Juan downward, an attempt at association was contemptuously stayed, and the artists of Molière were left to their own devices without a chance of appeal.

Fortunately for the French stage, La Grange, Molière's orator and acting-manager, was at the head of affairs, and La Grange was an able and an indefatigable man. His business capacity was at least equal to his powers as an actor, and his devices were eminently wise and eminently profitable. Thrust out from the Palais-Royal at the instances of Lulli, who wanted the theatre for his own enterprise, and got the occupants evicted at a moment's notice, the King's Company, deprived of its pension and its stage, remained homeless for several months. Then the Marquis de Sourdéac-of "Toison d'Or" and stage-engineering renown-sold La Grange a playhouse built by him for the performance of opera, but thrown on his hands by the action of Lulli, the all-powerful. It was situate at the Bottle Tennis Court, in the Rue Mazarine, and is known historically as the Théâtre-Guénegaud. Here in 1673 did La Grange and his following set up their rest. A royal order had abolished the playhouse in the Marais and drafted certain of its artists into the broken ranks of the King's Company; the best of them all, poor Claude Roze, called Rozimont, had been engaged by La Grange before the break-up to replace Molière in Molière's own parts. In the society, thus enlarged, there were nineteen members; it had Joseph Béjart, one of the original associates of the Illustre Théâtre, for a pensioner; its estate was one of seventeen and a half shares, two of which were the property of Sourdéac and his partner, while the rest were divided, in various proportions, among the nineteen associates. La Grange, not uninfluenced in all probability by the companionship of the sometime actors of the Marais, turned for profit to the spectacular drama. As the greater part of the Molièresque repertory was as much the property of the Hôtel de Bourgogne as of the Hôtel Guénegaud, he purchased the services and interest of De Visé, the journalist and hack, and of Thomas Corneille, and started

[ocr errors]

on his career as a purveyor of spectacle, with great intelligence and varying fortune. Gaining largely by the production of "Circé," a piece whose mounting cost the sum, unprecedented thitherto, of ten thousand eight hundred and forty-two livres seventeen sous, he appears in 1676 to have been so pinched for means as to have been unable to pay his bill-sticker. He none the less went on with his enterprise, manipulating into verse and inoffensiveness the audacious prose of the "Festin de Pierre," and achieving in 1679 a quite extraordinary success with the 'Devineresse" of Corneille and De Visé, a scandalous melodrama pieced together out of the story of the notorious Madame Voisin. The popularity of the "Devineresse" was certainly gall and wormwood to those of the Hôtel de Bourgogne; but its bitterness could have been as nothing to that of the cup that was brewing for them. La Grange's next stroke of policy was, indeed, a masterstroke. The Sieur de Champmeslé, an actorauthor of some parts, and Mademoiselle, his wife, long the amie intime of Jean Racine, and the original exponent of all the heroines of his second period, from the plaintive Andromaque to the passionate and terrible Phèdre, were persuaded to abandon the Hôtel de Bourgogne for the Hôtel Guénegaud. As this move of the Sieur de La Grange put him in possession of the whole repertory of both the great French tragics, and made his company as well qualified to excel in tragedy as it had always excelled in comedy, and as about the same time there occurred the death of the deserter La Thorilière, an actor trained in Molière's school and actually an exponent of Molière's tradition, it is to be assumed that the Hôtel de Bourgogne was in poorer case at this moment than at any other of its history, and that there was no way for it out of its difficulties but the way it was forced to take.

That way was the work of Louis XIV. He lived to centralize, as he had lived to dance and to dine, and had determined on the centralization of the dramatic art with the others. On August 18, 1680, an order for the fusion of the two companies, the Royal and the King's, was sent from him at Charleville by the Duc de Créqui. It was accompanied by a list of the artists to be retained in the royal service, and was instantly obeyed, the united company playing eight days afterward at the Hôtel de Guénegaud for the first time. The pieces, I should add, that were chosen for this solemn occasion were "Phèdre and “Les Carrosses d'Orléans"; of the latter I confess to knowing absolutely nothing. On October 21st a lettre de cachet, dated from Versailles, and signed "Louis" and "Colbert," and a final list of artists appended to it, gave the new society a monopoly of the French theatre in Paris, and ordered the

Lieutenant-General of Police forthwith to see to the enforcement of its provisions. The institution thus established was the Théâtre-Français.

III.

The artists chosen to represent the histrionic ability of Frence were twenty-seven, fifteen of them men and twelve women. Among them were the two La Granges, the two Raisins, the two Barons, the two Beauvals, the two Guérins (Guérin, it should be remembered, married Molière's widow), and the two Champmeslés; with Mademoiselles de Brie, Dupin, and Dennebaut, and Raymond Poisson, Hauteroche, Hubert, Villiers, and Rozimont. The estate affected to them was divided into twenty-one and threequarters shares, a half-share of which was retained by the King. The twenty-one and a quarter shares remaining were distributed among the associates. A contract between the members of the society (1681) provided for the payment of future pensions and the due recognition, in case of necessity, of heirship in an associate's next of kin. In the same year the King bestowed his half-share on Le Comte, a diligent and useful actor, and a coadjutor of La Grange's till that father of the Français died; in 1682 he ordered the reception of Brécourt, also a half-share holder, and so changed the composition of the estate to one of twenty-two and a quarter shares; and some months afterward he assured to the associates a yearly grant of twelve thousand livres. For a couple of years more the company appear to have been as much their own masters as in the free and easy times of old; but in 1684 they were placed under the control of the First Gentleman of the Chamber. And in 1685 the number of shares was fixed definitely at twenty-three, and at twenty-three their number remained until the Revolution.

A time was at hand, however, when the very being of the institution was in peril. The Louis of Maintenon was not the Louis of Montespan. The devotee in him had mastered the man of pleasure; the devil had turned hermit. Since seventeen years his dancing days were done; his fondness for the theatre had declined; his dietary itself had become (comparatively speaking) austere. In the formal practice of piety, he forgot alike to live and to let live. Thus, when in 1687 the dignitaries of the Sorbonne had scruples about opening their new College of the Four Nations within a furlong of such a villainous haunt as was the Théâtre-Français, they found in the reformed monarch an intelligent, a repentant, and a sympathetic listener. The actors were ordered out of the Hôtel Guénegaud at three months' notice. Argument and expostulation availed them nothing; Maintenon and the Sorbonne had or

dained, and there was naught for it but to obey. La Grange and Le Comte had need of all their courage and their conduct. The associates agreed to buy land and build a theatre of their own, but clerical influences were paramount at Versailles, and the actors were hunted from parish to parish as though their trade were unmentionable, and they themselves fit inmates for Forl'Evêque and the Salpêtrière. Half a dozen sites in succession were chosen and bargained for by La Grange, and were declared improper and impossible by the Court. At last, however, he was permitted to conclude a purchase; and in the Rue Neuve-des-Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the site of the Star Tennis Court, a theatre designed by François d'Aubry was run up, and opened, with "Phèdre" and the "Médecin," to a house of eighteen hundred and seventy livres, in the April of 1689. The price of the ground alone was sixty thousand livres; and in the end the actors found that, in good hard cash, the prudery of the Sorbonne had cost them close on two hundred thousand livres, and was to keep them in debt for many years. The theatre served its turn, of course, and was not abandoned till 1770, when decay had made it unsafe, and it could be used no more.

In 1699 the "Droit des Pauvres" was instituted, and the theatre was ordered to pay a seventh of its gross receipts to the General Hospital. In 1716 a further percentage was demanded of it, ostensibly for the Hôtel-Dieu, but really to provide an official person with cash, which brought the impost up to one of a fourth of its earnings. In evading the payment of this charge, and in doing battle with the lawless petty theatres about them, the associates appear to have shown a great deal of ingenuity, and not less of determination. They cooked their accounts quite faithfully, and they showed no mercy; these were their chief aims of life. The theatre was ordered by the First Gentlemen of the Chamber, with the Duc de Richelieu at their head; and, bad as was the rule of these noble creatures, whose interference, at once vexatious and stupid and immoral, was felt in all its concerns, it was, æsthetically speaking, quite admirably efficient. Among its actors were Grandval, Lekain, Préville, and Molé; among its actresses were Lecouvreur, Dangeville, Gaussin, Dumesnil, Clairon, Dugazon, and Vestris; and its staff of poets included Voltaire, Regnard, Lesage, Marivaux, Piron, Gresset, Marmontel, Diderot, Vadé, Beaumarchais, and Ducis (with an adaptation of "Hamlet"). Financially, however, its position was abominable; Louis XV. had, in the end, to double the royal grant, and to pay the theatre's debts, which amounted to upward of two hundred and forty thousand livres. At Vigarani's playhouse in the Louvre, whither

the associates removed in 1770, they added to their number Dazincourt and Mademoiselles Raucourt and Contat, and produced (1775) the “Barbier" of Beaumarchais, determining by their niggardly treatment of that restless and indomitable adventurer the foundation (1777) of the Société des Auteurs Dramatiques. And in 1782 they shifted their scene to the Odéon, and there, in the "Mariage de Figaro," they put forth, amid squabbles of all sorts (1784), the last of the classic comedies. They played it intelligently enough as artists, for Molé was the Almaviva, and Dazincourt, a very king of Crispins, was the Figaro. But, as politicians, they learned its lesson not at all; they neither heard nor did they understand. Almaviva, befooled and jested and shamed, with his droit de seigneur, a mere conventionality to be mocked at and despised, was, if they could but have known it, a type of themselves. Like him, they had outlived their day; like him, they had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. All about them the Figaros of art were brawling and watching and scheming; their privilege, though never so sound in theory, was in practice dead and decayed; their lordship of things theatrical was on its last legs, they were part of an opposition that was beaten ere it came to a division. The Opéra Comique had been founded in spite of them; Nicolet and Audinot, the famous showmen, had fought and won the battle of theatrical liberty; playhouses suppressed by them were reopened otherwhere and under other names almost ere the ink had dried on their papers; and five years after the production of the "Mariage" the Revolution had split their society itself into two camps, and the old order of circumstances was at an end for them. Headed by Talma, the democrats among them went to play patriotic tragedy-a poor and dull thing it seems from this distance of time-in the Palais-Royal, at what was then the Variétés-Amusantes, and at what is now the Comédie-Française. The Loyalists, under the captaincy of Dazincourt, staid on at the Odéon, and got presently into hot water; they were denounced by Robespierre in civic terms of considerable force, they were arrested in a body, and they were sent to durance. Collot d'Herbois, with all the bad actor's ferocious jealousy of his chief, wanted very much to cut off Dazincourt's head; but Dazincourt succeeded in keeping it on his shoulders, and lived to use it as a professor at the Conservatoire, and as Napoleon's Directeur des Spectacles. Talma received the rebels when the term of their prison-life was past; and at what was called in turn the Theatre of Liberty and Equality, the Theatre of the Nation, and the Theatre of the Republic, the association was for a brief space held together. Then came quarrels, partings, new attempts at a common under

standing; and, in 1799, the company, with its debts paid and a state pension in hand, started once more at the Odéon. It was burned out of that theatre in the same year, and for some time there was no Comédie-Française.

It

Bonaparte, however, was fond of plays and acting-almost as fond of them as Richelieu himself; and, though he did suppress the chair in the Institute set apart by a liberal Convention for the better honoring of histrionic art, he took the fortunes of the broken Comédie into that strong, resolute hand of his, and in 1803 the old Variétés-Amusantes received the associates once more, strong this time in the master's protection, and rich in an annual grant of one hundred thousand francs. Nine years after, he found time, in the stress of his Russian campaign, to think out and dispatch the famous Moscow decree, which is supposed to be the Theatre's Great Charter, and the authority for its present constitution. divided the estate into twenty-four shares, and allotted twenty-two of them to the society; established a complete system of pensions, retirements, and débuts; settled finally the vexed question of the possession of parts; determined a connection between the theatre and the Conservatoire; and, providing, in fine, for every contingency of every kind, set the association on a broader, firmer, and less disputable basis than till then it had occupied. It contains one hundred and one clauses, and, if I do not analyze its provisions at greater length, it is that I am informed that the house is ruled in great measure according to tradition, use, custom, and that the associates consider themselves and their conventionalities to be, in a manner, of superior mold, and so beyond the influence of ordonnance and law.

The Restoration replaced the Comédie, it need hardly be said, under the rule of the Gentlemen of the Chamber; but, after the flight of Charles X., the Moscow decree came into force again, and the associates, nominally under official control, became their own masters. They made but a poor use of their liberty. The literary revolution of 1830 was as unintelligible to them as the political of 1789. They continued faithfully to represent the classic principle in art, and they paid dearly for their fidelity. The multitude flocked to hear Hugo and Dumas, and to see Frédérick Lemaître and Dorval at the Odéon and the Porte-Saint-Martin; and on one occasion in 1831 the Comédie-Française had the honor of playing "Tartufe" and "Le Legs "—Molière at his strongest, and Marivaux at his brightest-to a house of sixty-seven francs. The associates owed a matter of six hundred thousand francs, and though Louis Philippe increased their pension from two hundred thousand francs to two

hundred and forty thousand francs, and lent them some three hundred thousand francs besides, they could not make ends meet for some time. In 1850, after various attempts at self-government under tutelage, the association was given into the charge of the Minister of the Interior and of an Administrator-General in his nomination; and six years afterward its grant was fixed at two hundred and forty thousand francs. There, for the moment, ends its story. Among its administrators have been MM. Arsène Houssaye and Edouard Thierry; and it is on record that the higher officials of the Second Empire were used to abuse its function as that function had been abused under Louis XV., to the profit of ladies not distinguished for the possession of either talent or reputation. Of late, however, under the guidance of M. Emile Perrin, the theatre has succeeded both artistically and financially. The receipts of the last few years have been largely in excess of the million (of francs, of course), and are steadily increasing. And putting tragic art aside-in which, such accidents as the "temperament" called Sarah Bernhardt notwithstanding, the Comédie-Française is not now eminently distinguished—and taking as representative artistic figures so complete and finished as MM. Got, Delaunay, and Coquelin, and Mademoiselles Brohan and Favart, it is lawful to conclude that the theatre's present is such as may challenge comparison with the most brilliant epochs of its past. As we see it, indeed, the Comedie-Française is almost the ideal theatre. Not only has it a library, a museum, a vast collection of archives, a

peculiar literature; not only is its connection with the Société des Auteurs Dramatiques quite special and extraordinary; it has also a style, a tradition, a standard, a position, an authority of its own. Fed yearly from the Conservatoire-which is better able to deal with its scholars than it was when Alexandre Dumas, who knew well enough what he was talking about, could cry out (1849) that he could more easily make an actor of a National Guard or a retired shopkeeper than of a pupil of the Conservatoire-it takes to itself the best of the youngsters sent forth to be tested on its stage, schools and trains them into intelligence and capacity, assigns to each of them his proper walk in art, and by precept, example, practice, encouragement, constraint, makes artists of them at last, and fits them to do for their juniors what it has done for them. A part of its function is the discovery and encouragement of young authors; a play has only to be sent in to its committee to be publicly read and discussed, and accepted or rejected, as the case may be, officially. It has authority to call into its pale any artist of promise or of parts without it, and is thus enabled incessantly to renew its strength and fill up the breaches in its ranks. As its associateship is the Garter or the Golden Fleece of the stage, and entitles its possessor not only to a fitting salary and a share in the profits of the year, but to a pension and consideration in after-times, its staff is always as complete as the quality of the epoch will permit, and it is able of its every performance to make a lesson, authoritative and practical, in histrionic art.

Cornhill Magazine.

A

[blocks in formation]

NOTHER book out of the apparently inexhaustible stores of French memoirs and materials for history lies before us, and one of the best that has appeared for a good while. The anonymous preface which precedes the work the author himself having been recently snatched away by an untimely death-informs us that it was the result of twenty years' research and study on the part of the lamented M. de Loménie. It is not always that such protracted effort is rewarded by corresponding excellence in the result. Not only has a writer oftentimes to spoil good work in such long elaboration, but such tardi

Les Mirabeau. Nouvelles Etudes sur la Société
Par Louis de Loménie.

Française au 18me Siècle.
Paris: Dentu.

ness is apt to imply a certain want of grasp and vigor of mind, a disposition to dwell on trifles, an industry wasted in small things which are by nature incompatible with the higher achievements of authorship. Such an inference would be most erroneous in the present case. M. de Loménie's work is not more distinguished by painstaking industry and accuracy than by the attractive gifts and graces which go to form a really able writer. In the biographical portion of his work M. de Loménie shows himself a master of narrative, telling his story not only with spirit and effect, but with much insight into character and fine moral discrimination. In the speculative portion, he discusses economical and political questions with insight and real weight; while all through the book are diffused an impression of candor, a

« AnkstesnisTęsti »