The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth-Century France

This is the first book to explore the history of French theatre in the nineteenth century through its special role as an organized popular amusement. In this fascinating study, F. W. J. Hemmings examines the transition of the theatre from an elite art form to its new role in post-revolutionary France as an industry like any other. During this period theatre became one of the few areas of employment where women were in demand as much as men, and a school of dramatic art, supported by generous government grants, was founded in Paris a century or more before similar training centres were established in London and elsewhere. Through an examination of contemporary documents and records, Hemmings reveals the social and cultural environment surrounding the theatre in this period. The book is divided into three sections: audiences, actors, and playwrights, and covers such topics as the attempt of the claque to dictate audience reaction, the social ostracism suffered by actors and even more by actresses throughout the century, and the increasing stranglehold the powerful playwrights' union established over commercial managers. Written in a lively style, it will be of interest to students and scholars of theatre history, French history and culture, and social history.

THE THEATRE INDUSTRY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

THE THEATRE INDUSTRY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE F. W. J. HEMMINGS Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Leicester

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521441421 © Cambridge University Press 1993 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1993 Reprinted 1995 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Hemmings, F. W. J. (Frederic William John), 1920The theatre industry in nineteenth-century France / F. W. J. Hemmings. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 44142 0 1. Theater - France - History - 19th century. 2. Theater and society — France. I. Title. II. Title: Theatre industry in 19th century France. PN2634.H39 1993 792'.0944'09034 - dc20 92-35031 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-44142-1 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-44142-0 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-03501-9 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-03501-5 paperback

Contents

Chronology

page

Introduction

ix

i

PART I THE AUDIENCES

1

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century

9

2 The auditorium

28

3

Performance times - intervals — annual closures

47

4

First nights and previews

66

5

Order and disorder in the theatres

77

6

Applause and censure

91

7

The claque

101

8

Working-class audiences

117

PART II THE ACTING PROFESSION

9

A pariah profession

135

10 Social origins

149

11 Training for the stage

172

12

183

Salaries and contracts

13 The difficult life of the actress

199

14 Acting standards

210 vii

viii

Contents

PART III THE PROFESSION OF PLAYWRIGHT

15 The profession is organized

229

16 The closed shop

241

17

257

From acceptance to performance

Notes Bibliography Guide to further reading Index

275 294 306 309

Chronology

1

799

1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1809 1810

1812 1814

1815

1817 1819

Consulate replaces Directory Reconstitution of the Comedie-Frangaise Dramatic censorship re-established Pixerecourt, Coelina, at the Theatre du Marais Picard, La Petite Ville, at the Odeon Duval, Edouard en Ecosse, at the Theatre-Frangais Birth of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas Pixerecourt, Tekeli and Les Mines de Pologne, at the Ambigu-Comique Carrion-Nisas, Pierre le Grand, at the Theatre-Fran^ais Napoleon crowned Emperor Raynouard, Les Templiers, at the Theatre-Francjais Ribie and Martainville, Le Pied de mouton, at the Gaite Closure of all but four of the commercial theatres in Paris Pixerecourt, La Citerne, at the Gaite Aignan, Brunehaut, at the Theatre-Frangais Desaugiers, La Chatte merveilleuse, at the Varietes Birth of Alfred de Musset Napoleon signs Moscow Decree reorganizing the Comedie-Fran^aise Abdication of Napoleon and restoration to the throne of Louis XVIII Raynouard, Les Etats de Blois, at the Theatre-Frangais Pixerecourt, Le Chien de Montargis, at the Gaite Return of Napoleon, followed by defeat at Waterloo and exile to St Helena Lemercier, Christophe Colomb, at the Gaite Birth of Labiche Arnault, Germanicus, at the Theatre-Fran^ais Delavigne, Les Vepres siciliennes, at the Odeon

x 1820

1821

1822

1823 1824 1825 1826 1827

1828 1829 1830

1831

1832

Chronology Inauguration of the Gymnase-Dramatique Assassination of Due dc Berry, heir to the throne, on the steps of the Opera. Nodier, Le Vampire, at the Porte-Saint-Martin Birth of Augier and Rachel Death of Napoleon Talma takes lead part in Jouy's Sylla at the Theatro Frangais Opera introduces gas-lighting on the stage for the first time Inauguration of the Panorama-Dramatique Visiting British actors booed and assaulted at the PorteSaint-Martin Birth of Edmond de Goncourt Birth of Theodore Barriere Charles X succeeds his brother Louis XVIII Birth of Dumas fils Boieldieu, La Dame blanche, with libretto by Scribe, at the Opera-Comique Death of Talma Scribe, Le Manage d'argent, at the Theatre-Frangais Ducange, Trente ans ou la Vie d'unjoueur, at the Porte-SaintMartin Start of the 'Shakespearian season' at the Odeon by a visiting company including Kean, Kemble, and Harriet Smithson Birth of Ibsen and Tolstoy. Death of Picard Dumas, Henri HI et sa cour at the Theatre-Frangais, with Mile Mars and Joanny Hugo, Hernani, at the Theatre-Frangais July Revolution results in Louis-Philippe replacing Charles X on the throne. Suspension of dramatic censorship (until 1835) Musset's first play, La JVuit venitienne, fails at Odeon Dumas, Antony and Richard Darlington, Hugo, Marion de Lorme, all at the Porte-Saint-Martin Meyerbeer, Robert le Diable, with libretto by Scribe, at the Opera Dumas, La Tour de Nesle, at the Porte-Saint-Martin Hugo, Le Roi s'amuse, at the Theatre-Frangais Death of Goethe

Chronology 1833 1834 1835

1836 1837 1838

1839 1842 1843

1844 1845 1847

1848

1849 1850

1851

xi

Hugo, Lucrece Borgia, at the Porte-Saint-Martin Scribe, Berlrand el Raton, at the Theatre-Fran^ais Frederick Lemaitre, Robert Macaire, at the Folies-Dramatiques Attempted assassination of Louis-Philippe leads to reestablishment of dramatic censorship Vigny, Chatterton, and Hugo, Angelo, both at the TheatreFran^ais Frederick takes lead part in Dumas's Kean at the Varietes Dumas, Caligula, at the Theatre-Fran^ais Sensational debut of Rachel as tragedienne at the TheatreFran^ais Inauguration of the Theatre de la Renaissance with Hugo's Ruy Bias Dumas, Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, at the Theatre-Fran^ais Scribe, Le Verre d'eau, at the Theatre-Frangais Failure of Hugo, Les Bur graves, and success of Ponsard, Lucrece, both at the Theatre-Framjais, mark the end of the vogue for Romantic drama Death of Pixerecourt Birth of Sarah Bernhardt Death of Mile Mars Dumas, Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge, at the TheatreHistorique Pyat, Le Chiffonnier de Paris, at the Porte-Saint-Martin Musset's Un caprice (written in 1837) has a first successful performance at the Theatre-Fran^ais, which is followed by the staging of several earlier plays by Musset, all produced between 1848 and 1850 at the same theatre February Revolution. Abdication of Louis-Philippe. LouisNapoleon elected President of the (Second) Republic Clairville and Cordier, La Propriete c'est le vol, at the Vaudeville Death of Marie Dorval French expedition to crush republican rising in Rome Dramatic censorship (suspended at February Revolution) reintroduced Ponsard, Charlotte Corday, at the Theatre-Francjais Labiche, Un chapeau de paille d'ltalie, at the Palais-Royal

xii

1852

1853 1854

1855 1857 1858

1860

1861 1862

1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869

1870

Chronology Louis-Napoleon effects coup d'etat to prolong his presidency. Hugo goes into exile Dumas/fa, La Dame aux camelias, at the Vaudeville Proclamation of the (Second) Empire, with Napoleon III Emperor Haussmann begins reconstruction of Paris Barriere, Les Filles de marbre, at the Vaudeville Crimean War (lasting till 1856) Augier and Sandeau, Le Gendre de M. Poirier, at the Gymnase Dumas fils, Le Demi-Monde, at the Gymnase Death of A. de Musset Death of Rachel. Birth of Brieux and Courteline Offenbach, Orphee aux enfers (libretto by Cremieux and Ludovic Halevy), at the Bouffes-Parisiens Labiche, Le Voyage de M. Perrichon, at the Gymnase By the Peace of Villafranca, Austria cedes Nice and Savoy to France Sardou, Les Pattes de mouche, at the Gymnase Death of Scribe Debut of Sarah Bernhardt at the Comedie-Fran^aise About, Gaetana, at the Odeon Birth of Georges Feydeau and Maurice Maeterlinck Death of A. de Vigny All government controls over theatres (except censoring of plays) removed E. and J. de Goncourt, Henriette Marechal, at the TheatreFran^ais Offenbach, La Vie parisienne (libretto by Meilhac and Halevy), at the Palais-Royal International Exhibition at Paris Pailleron, Le Monde oil I3on sy amuse, at the Gymnase Birth of Edmond Rostand Coppee, Le Passant, at the Odeon Claretie, La Famille des Gueux, at the Ambigu-Comique Meilhac and Halevy, Froufrou, at the Gymnase France declares war on Prussia Abdication of Napoleon III, proclamation of (Third) Republic.

Chronology

1871 1873 1875 1876

1877 1878 1879 1880

1881

1882 1884 1885 1887

1888 1889 1890 1891 1892

xiii

Hugo returns from exile in Guernsey Siege of Paris Death of Dumas pere Armistice with Prussia Paris Commune Zola, Therese Raquiny at the Renaissance Birth of Alfred Jarry Debut in Paris of Rejane Corvin, Les Danicheff, at the Odeon Death of Frederick Lemaitre Birth of Henri Bernstein Feval, Le Bossu, at the Porte-Saint-Martin Death of Theodore Barriere Debut of Lucien Guitry at the Gymnase Paladilhe, Suzanne, at the Opera-Comique Zola and Busnach, UAssommoir, at the Ambigu-Comique Sardou, Divorgons, at the Palais-Royal, and Daniel Rochat, at the Theatre-Fran^ais Death of Offenbach Pailleron, Le Monde ou Von s'ennuie, at the Theatre-Frangais Zola and Busnach, Nona, at the Ambigu-Comique Dumas fils, La Princesse de Bagdad, at the Theatre-Frangais Becque, Les Corbeaux, at the Theatre-Frangais Sardou, Fedora, at the Vaudeville Legalization of trades unions and divorce in France Becque, La Parisienne, at the Renaissance Death of Victor Hugo Antoine founds the Theatre-Libre Hundreds of spectators lose their lives in a fire at the Opera-Comique Tolstoy's Power of Darkness first shown at the Theatre-Libre Death of Labiche Attempted coup in Paris by Gen. Boulanger fails Death of Augier Ibsen, Ghosts, at the Theatre-Libre Debut of Marguerite Moreno at the Comedie-Fran^aise Sardou, Thermidor, shouted down at the Theatre-Fran5ais Porto-Riche, UAmoureuse, at the Odeon Panama scandal breaks in France Ibsen, The Lady from the Sea, at the Escholiers

xiv 1893

1894 1895 ^96

1897

1898

1899 1900

Chronology Anarchist outrages in Paris Strindberg's Miss Julie and Hauptmann's The Weavers at the Theatre-Libre Sarah Bernhardt takes over management of the Theatre de la Renaissance Antoine abandons management of the Theatre-Libre Rejane in Ibsen's Doll's House at the Vaudeville Arrest and conviction of Dreyfus on treason charge. Death of Dumas jils Jarry, Ubu-Roi, at the Theatre de l'CEuvre Musset, Lorenzaccio (published 1834), given first performance at the Renaissance Death of Edmond de Goncourt Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, with Coquelin in lead part, triumphs at the Porte-Saint-Martin Guiches, Snob, at the Renaissance Death of Alphonse Daudet Zola's JyAccuse reopens the Dreyfus Affair Brieux, Resultat des courses, at the Theatre-Antoine Inauguration of the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt with the actress-manager playing Hamlet After a retrial, Dreyfus pardoned Death of Henri Becque Feydeau, La Dame de chez Maxim's, at the Nouveautes Rostand, UAiglon, at the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt Renard, Poil-de-carotte, at the Theatre-Antoine

Introduction

It will be generally conceded that there are three major preconditions for the successful launch of any modern industry: it needs to have identified an assured market of consumers which can be expected to expand over the years; it has to be able to call on a reliable workforce available for employment; and thirdly, it needs to have access to a body of primary producers. The railway industry, which in France entered its period of rapid expansion in the 1840s, provides as good an instance as any of an enterprise embracing from the start these three essential prerequisites for success. The market here consisted of a potentially large number of customers looking for a more rapid, easier and cheaper means of undertaking long journeys which had previously necessitated travel by horse-drawn coach, river barge or coastal vessel; together with a smaller but equally important group of entrepreneurs able to profit from the fast transport of heavy goods in bulk. The workforce originally consisted of the armies of labourers needed to make the cuttings, bore the tunnels, build the viaducts and lay the tracks; and later, of the more highly trained body of engine-drivers, stokers, signalmen, stationmasters etc. required for the running of the trains. The primary producers, the third essential requirement, were already present in the men who sank the mines and dug the coal which, before the coming of electric power, was the only available fuel for locomotion. The same tripod of necessary preconditions was present to support the nascent theatre industry at about the same period. The market here consisted of all those who in their scant leisure hours crammed the theatres at the time, and for whom they represented the only form of mass entertainment available, particularly if one includes the circus, a permanent feature of the Paris theatre scene throughout the nineteenth century. The workforce consisted primarily of the actors and actresses, but also of the instrumentalists needed for the orches-

2

Introduction

tras which were de rigueur even in theatres specializing in straight drama; they were supported by a host of underlings of both sexes, far outnumbering those that a theatre today needs to engage. The amount of cutting and sewing, sawing and hammering, painting of scenery, manhandling of furniture, the sheer muscular activity of every description that went on behind the scenes presupposed employment of unskilled or semi-skilled labour on a scale barely imaginable at the time outside an industrial complex. As for the primary product, this was the play, whatever form it took: tragedy, comedy, melodrama, vaudeville (which meant something different in France from what it came to mean in England and America), operetta, military pageant, farce, mime, or fairy play. And every play presupposes a playwright, sometimes indeed two or three working in combination. Thus the theatre industry can be conveniently divided for the purpose of study into three parts, in nineteenth-century Gaul as in that of Caesar's time; this division has dictated the tripartite form our examination of the phenomenon has seemed to require. The output of new plays in the nineteenth century, a crude measure of popular demand, amounted to little short of 32,000, the figures rising steadily in each quarter of the century. An account written in 1888 of the social impact of the theatre at that time estimated that 500,000 Parisians visited the theatre once a week and that those who went at least once a month numbered between 1 million and 1,200,000. And those living in provincial towns were just as stagestruck, supporting their local theatre as well as travelling up to the capital in ever-increasing numbers to satisfy their craving for the glitter of the footlights and the excitement of a gala performance. The huge expansion in the number of avid playgoers was what formed the basis of the expanding theatre industry, for it permitted ever-longer runs of plays that happened to catch the popular fancy; this development was particularly marked in the second half of the century. Even at the end of the July Monarchy a play that reached forty successive performances before being taken off was deemed to have had a satisfactory run, and Dumas pere established an equivalence between the age a man might expect to live (60-80 years) and the number of performances a play might achieve before dying of exhaustion, also 60-80. But under the Second Empire and in the first decades of the Third Republic these figures were greatly exceeded, and a play that did not reach its one-

Introduction

3

hundredth performance was considered almost a failure. The record, before the Great War, was held by Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac which, after its Paris opening on 28 December 1897, reached its 1,oooth performance on 3 May 1913, making it a positive Methuselah by Dumas's calculation. Such mammoth runs, tedious though the cast might find them, represented for the managers and the financiers who backed them a steady profit undiminished by the expense of new sets or costumes, and the industry boomed accordingly. The theatres themselves, especially after 1864 when the government abandoned the policy adopted under the First Empire of artificially limiting their numbers, multiplied likewise: by 1882 the eleven theatres operating in Paris in 1828 had grown to twentythree, and the total revenue had risen from 4,789,000 francs to 20,168,000 francs. Nor did this imply any drop of income through keener competition, since the average earnings of each theatre had more than doubled at a time of fairly steady prices. The theatre was a valuable source of external revenue, contributing to the growing prosperity of the country by attracting foreign visitors. Moreover, it was largely a one-way traffic: few Frenchmen were prepared to undergo the discomforts of a Channel crossing for the sake of visiting the Haymarket or Covent Garden, whereas the British, together with Russians, Americans, Germans etc., all made a point, on visits to Paris, of frequenting the Comedie-Fran^aise and sampling the delights on offer at the numerous other famous theatres along the boulevards. The high reputation enjoyed by French acting can be measured by the fact that permanent companies putting on plays in the French language were established at every important centre in the so-called civilized world during the nineteenth century, from Cairo to New Orleans and from Lisbon to St Petersburg; by the midcentury it was reckoned that no fewer than 343 actors and actresses from France were working on secondment abroad. Similarly, the prestige of modern French dramatists was confirmed by the wellattested practice of foreign playwrights who would take their works, 'adapt' them and put them on without reference to their originators and mostly without their permission. Jules Claretie recalled seeing at the Princess's Theatre in the 1860s a play called The Streets oj* London, which he recognized to his astonishment as having been lifted lock, stock, and barrel from Brisebarre and Nus's Les Pauvres de Paris (1856), with an identical plot, identical scenes, only the names of characters and places anglicized. But there was little that could be

4

Introduction

done about such barefaced robbery except to wonder at the evident lack of originality among the degenerate descendants of Shakespeare and Sheridan. Contemporary writers on the French theatre were well aware of its mushrooming growth, and not all saw this as cause for rejoicing; for industry, even in the age of the railway and the Paris World Fairs of 1856 onwards, was considered in France as situated at the opposite pole from art. Already Theophile Gautier, himself a poet as well as a drama critic, observed a little ruefully, a few years after the July Revolution, that the theatre had become 'nothing more today than an industrial enterprise, like a factory for extracting sugar from beetroot or a bitumen company with a registered capital of a million francs'; while under the Second Empire, the Goncourt brothers, entering the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin by the back door to attend a rehearsal, noted their impression of being in the midst of an industrial complex, lost in a 'seething mass of extras, sceneshifters, workmen, all rushing about as in an immense mill, a prodigious factory'. Nor did the similarity end there, for when theatres closed wholesale, as happened in 1848 and 1870-1, literally thousands were suddenly thrown out of work and left to beg, borrow or starve, exactly as were works' employees when a downturn in trade had to be met by massive layoffs. Towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries it was already becoming apparent that the period of industrial expansion in the theatre was tailing off. For various reasons - the demand for shows involving lavish and sometimes extravagant sets, the ever-higher fees exacted by star performers — an evening at the theatre became for reasons of cost more an exceptional indulgence than a weekly habit. Competing forms of amusement or spectacle - the singers and diseurs at the cafes-concerts, screen actors in the early silent films - offered cheaper entertainment, and the stage forfeited its mass appeal. The theatre industry, however, did not so much collapse as shrink from being big business to being what was called 'show business', a more inventive but perhaps a more inverted form. A new generation of major dramatists replaced that of hack writers for the stage not just in France but everywhere in Europe and America; the producer came at last into his own; the acting profession became unionized and its younger members were sometimes tempted away into films; theatres and opera houses everywhere were converted into cinema halls, the

Introduction

5

rowdy audiences of gas-lit auditoriums were replaced by the politer gatherings of our day. New art forms emerged appropriate for a new century, and new conditions had to be created for the drama to continue to flourish.

PART I

The Audiences

CHAPTER I

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century

Before any theatre-goer fixes on where he is to spend his evening, he will probably want to know what play or plays are to constitute the entertainment at the theatre he proposes to visit. From the end of the seventeenth century onwards, the most usual means of informing the public about forthcoming theatre productions was by posters affixed at certain recognized sites throughout the city. In Paris these posters or playbills were of a standard size, printed in black on differently tinted paper: originally green for the Comedie-Fran^aise, pink for the Comedie-Italienne, and yellow for the Opera. Different shades were used by the minor theatres, but white paper was generally prohibited: a decree issued on 22 July 1791 by the National Assembly and still in force reserves black on white for notices issued by the authorities. These theatre posters, at any rate down to the fall of the Empire, had little to do with publicity as the word is understood today. Their discretion and modest dimensions struck a British traveller in 1814 as being 'perhaps the only thing in Paris calculated to make an Englishman blush for the opposite practice of his country. It is a mortifying contrast to the impudent quackeries and lying pretensions which, in all the varieties of a large and small letter, are blazoned on the handbills of our two national theatres.'1 But a change occurred under the July Monarchy, when a master printer named Morris, having achieved a virtual monopoly of the theatre poster business, started the fashion for advertising plays in large print on the size of paper known as columbier, destined for display on a number of cylindrical pillars which the municipality of Paris, in return for a suitable payment, allowed him to erect all over the city; the 'colonnes Morris' are to this day a familiar feature along the streets and in the squares of Paris. Other speculators obtained other concessions: the right to fix frames on the doors of cafes and shops

io

The audiences

displaying gaudy advertisements for the latest hit, to brighten up blank retaining walls with placards, to paste them on the sides of omnibuses, to hire the unemployed as sandwich-men to walk the streets with advertisements fixed to their backs and chests, as was done notably as part of the publicity campaign for the dramatization of Zola's Nana in 1881. Alphonse Lemonnier, writing towards the end of the century,2 reckoned that the manager of any self-respecting theatre needed to set aside at least 50,000 francs a year for publicity purposes. For all that, a certain innate conservatism and pride in the appearance of the capital city kept these developments within bounds. In 1880 a visitor from the United States commented particularly on French restraint. There are no 'mammoth bills' to be seen in Paris; no 'streamers', no 'guttersnipes' [narrow posters for pasting on curbstones]; none of the pictorial printing which is the pride of an enterprising American speculator . . . Instead, the bills of all the theatres, of a given size prescribed by law (about 15 inches broad by 30 inches high) are printed together and displayed on posts in the principal streets and boulevards, as well as on an occasional dead wall.3 But Brander Matthews did not venture outside Paris; in the provinces it was a very different matter, ca luxuriance of multicoloured placards, crude lithographs, of ridiculous and often misleading posters . . . Paper of all the colours of the rainbow is stuck profusely everywhere on monuments and shopfronts, making a nauseating and depressing display.'* And even in Paris, towards the end of the century, posters began to incorporate illustrations of the more important moments in a melodrama. Eye-catching pictorial posters, which first made their appearance midway through the nineteenth century, were sometimes works of art in their own right, destined to become collectors' pieces: Jules Cheret led the way here, followed later in the century by Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen, both of whom worked as much for the cafes-concerts as for the theatres. In the first years of the twentieth century, the 'mammoth bills' that Brander Matthews had thought confined to New York began to make an appearance in Paris. 'Theatre posters have, over the last few years', wrote Adrien Peytel in 1917, taken on an even greater importance. Their dimensions are constantly on the increase; the names of stars in heavy type can be seen a mile off, while

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century

11

the identity of the dramatist is hidden underneath the title of the play, where it has not been omitted entirely. The portraits of fashionable actors adorn the walls everywhere and there are constant troublesome disputes about the size of print used for the name of each player. The theatre, like all commercial enterprises, has fallen victim to an acute publicity crisis and actors are suffering, like so many others, from that incurable disease, self-advertisement.5

Long before Peytel, Alphonse Lemonnier too had argued that the actor's vanity was chiefly to be blamed for excessive promotional displays on theatre bills. He tells the story of Laferriere, who had it written into his contract that his name should be given priority over all others; when Hostein wanted Frederick Lemaitre to star in a revival of Dumas's Henri HI et sa cour, he pleaded with Laferriere to waive for once his legal right. The actor was obdurate. Frederick, amused, told Hostein to let the effeminate matinee idol have his way; after all, he said with a shrug of his shoulders, 'ladies first!'6 Another director, Koning of the Gaite, having been so unwise as to sign contracts with several actors promising each that his name should receive top billing, solved the problem by printing them all in a circle. Yet another, faced with ultimatums from Bocage and Mile George who were acting together in La Tour de JVesle at the PorteSaint-Martin, managed to avoid a damaging dispute by persuading them to take it in turns: one week Bocage's name would be printed first, the next Mile George's. Various more or less ingenious attempts were made to bypass the difficulty: alphabetical order, order of appearance on the stage^ etc., but none was altogether satisfactory. The rule adopted by the Comedie-Frangaise gave rise to least dispute: actors taking part in a given play were listed in order of seniority, the societaires coming first (and, most ungallantly, the men preceding the women) and the pensionnaires after them. This had the occasional odd result, as when a superannuated duenna whose name had been all but forgotten by the public figured on the playbill above the leading comedienne of the day. But it had the advantage that every societaire could look forward to heading the list, if only a year or so before his or her retirement. Having decided, on the basis of posters, newspaper publicity or verbal report, which particular theatre offered attractive entertainment most likely to please them, the majority of theatre-goers would set out on foot to arrive in good time. Ticket offices as a rule opened half an hour before the performance was due to start; but if the show

12

The audiences

was a popular one, it was advisable to present oneself well in advance to join the queue that may have begun to form long before the sale of tickets had started. For the greater part of the eighteenth century, queues were unknown in Paris, while in the provinces they seem not to have started making their appearance until the middle of the nineteenth. Before then, except for the fortunate few who had rented a box in advance, it was a matter of joining in the general scrimmage when the ticket office opened, risking having one's ribs crushed before even reaching it. The first occasion on which an attempt was made to control the crowd occurred apparently in 1787, when the erection of a double line of fences introduced some order among the would-be spectators of Beaumarchais's opera Tarare. Queuing in other contexts, outside bakers' shops for instance, became customary during the Revolution; the earliest use of la queue in this sense was recorded in 1794, and passed into the English language much later (1837, according to the OED): it was a neologism clearly unknown to the American John Sanderson, who published his guidebook to Paris a year later. 'They admit the spectators to a French theatre in files of two between high railings, and under the grim and bearded authority of the police, which prevents crowding and disorder; and whoever wishes to go in, not having a seat provided, "makes tail" as they call it, by entering the file at the rear.'? Queuing may have been originally enforced by the police rather than by theatre managements, less to prevent disorder than as a precaution against the numerous pickpockets that used to prey on the swirling theatre crowds of former days. Most theatres, if not all, had two ticket offices situated not inside the building, as was customary in London, but at openings in the external walls, with a policeman always in attendance, an arrangement of which Francis Blagdon thoroughly approved: 'by this plan, however great may be the crowd, the entrance is always unobstructed, and those violent struggles and pressures, which among us have cost the lives of many, are effectually prevented'. 8 The longer of the two queues was always found at the window where tickets for the cheaper seats were issued; this was as might be expected, but it constituted a social differentiation which aroused occasional bursts of indignation among sympathizers with the working class, who denounced the queue as a barbarous invention without, however, suggesting other means of dealing with the problem it was intended

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century to solve. In an article published in 1859 the Italian immigrant Pier Fiorentino drew a heart-rending picture of these unfortunates, shuffling their feet in the mud, soaked to the skin, or stamping on the icy pavement to stretch their legs or warm themselves. Penned as they are between two palisades like a docileflock,there is no way in which they can move backwards or forwards; they are stuck there two by two or three by three like convicts attached to the same chain. Were it not that the French are so good-humoured, were it not that in this country there is such a passion for going to see plays, who would consent to endure such torments? They haven't eaten, the poor wretches! They haven't had the time after leaving their place of work to swallow their soup, and in order to stave off the pangs of hunger and keep up their strength, they stuff themselves with some cheap, rock-hard product bought off a pastry-cook, along with roasted apples and horribly sour oranges. It is hardly surprising that, when the play fails to amuse them or they don't like the acting, they shower the stage and the auditorium with the left-overs from their meagre supper.9 On the other hand, even in winter the weather was not consistently inclement, and Arthur Meyer, admittedly drawing on memories half a century old, paints a more cheerful picture of the typical workingclass theatre queue under the Second Empire, prepared to wait three hours for the ticket office to open: Very lively, very noisy, they make the slow minutesfly,playing the buffoon, shouting and singing; while the prentice boys, between the wooden fences, dine off a bit of bread and sausage washed down with a pennyworth of beer. What if the menu is monotonous, provided there is no monotony in the theatrical fare they can look forward to? Around these battalions of the stage-struck hovers a picturesque swarm of open-air market men, sellers of coco10 carrying on their backs a brightly coloured zinc barrel, girls offering oranges from the baskets they bear in front of them. If the first resemble philosophers fallen on evil days, all illusions lost, the others are pretty, causing the street arabs to address them compliments rather more crude than delicate.11 Such working-class queues were a regular feature of tl e Boulevard du Temple before the pickaxes of Haussmann's demolition gangs levelled the theatres strung along there in the 1860s. The last to be erected on the Boulevard was the Theatre-Historique, the inauguration of which aroused intense excitement in 1847; here the queue began to take shape a full twenty-four hours before the time the doors opened, on 20 February. Fortunately the weather was rela-

13

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The audiences

tively mild that winter, and the night-long vigil passed cheerfully enough. Women selling bowls of bouillon started peddling their wares along the queue at 10 in the evening, followed at midnight by bakers' boys bringing small loaves fresh from the oven. Bales of straw found ready purchasers among those inclined to snatch an hour or two of sleep, but the majority passed the time chatting gaily to one another or singing in chorus, by the light of hundreds of Chinese lanterns. At dawn they were able to restore themselves with coffee and cakes, and all night long and throughout the following day the air was charged with the pungent scent of garlic sausage.12 Such a queue was a godsend to the local tradesmen, and the fans were clearly in no risk of starving. There is, however, no mention in contemporary accounts of buskers, a not unusual feature of cinema queues the following century; the queuers, if they felt so inclined, gave voice lustily without looking for accompaniment. Queue-jumpers were severely dealt with. 'Watch this worthy citizen: see with what obstinacy he defends his rightful place in the queue. See how his elbows, arching backwards, drive off the audacious fellow who tries to encroach on his bit of ground. I wouldn't advise you to try it on: you would be sharply called to order.'^ But there was one exception: soldiers, or students at the Ecole Polytechnique recognizable by their uniform, had the right to pass to the head of the queue; this is presumably why Coppee's father, as his son records in his memoirs,14 if he wanted to see Talma at the Comedie-Frangaise, would join the queue hobbling on a crutch, hoping to pass as a veteran of Napoleon's army - and it usually worked. And there were some who queued with no intention of entering the theatre: they were plying the mysterious trade of gardeur de place.

Do you arrive at the door of a playhouse? Is it a day when the crowd is great? Do you find, in short, one of those ranks of people formed into what is here called a queue, which the police causes the public to make for the purpose of preventing persons from stifling each other round the offices where the tickets of admission are distributed? Are you put out of patience at waiting? Survey this rank, and it seldom happens that you will not see some man, decently dressed, who will say to you: 'Sir, an unforeseen affair calls me away; do you wish for my place?' He will not ask you any money for this place; but he will add: 'I gave 24 sous to a Savoyard [a chimneysweep] who kept it for me.' You understand what that means. If he is near the head of the rank, it is three livres he has given to the Savoyard, the whole in proportion to the distance, more or less, from the offices. You pay, and he

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century goes away. Keep your eye on him, you will see him place himself at the further end of the rank till a second customer presents himself; and this part he will repeat twice or thrice in the course of the same evening. ^ Dumas the elder, in his memoirs, recalls how on his first visit to Paris he decided to go and see the revival of an old melodrama, Le Vampire, in a production much talked about. He found an interminable queue stationed between barricades, and walked along it despairingly until he was hailed by a man who offered him his place for 20 sous. Dumas accepted gratefully and in due course the queue moved up and he found himself at the opening of the ticket office. With great difficulty it was explained to this greenhorn that he had not paid 20 sous for his seat in the theatre but only for his place in the queue. The fact that it was only in France that theatre queues were to be found in the nineteenth century was not entirely due to its more efficient policing. An additional factor was that theatre managers favoured long queues as proof of the popularity of their theatres and repertoires; partly in consequence, they discouraged as best they could advance booking of seats which in other countries rendered queuing unnecessary. Most seats were unnumbered, especially the cheaper ones in the pit and the galleries, and so could not be reserved; here their more impecunious patrons sat on benches which had the advantage, from the managers' point of view, that they could be packed in like sardines in the space available. Furthermore, for the seats that were bookable, a hefty extra charge was made if the facility was used; the surcharge for reserving a seat was anything up to 30 per cent or even 50 per cent on top of the normal price for admission. The difference was objected to as totally illogical by numerous complainants, who argued that if one paid in advance one ought to be allowed a discount rather than be skinned alive in this fashion; but the system was stubbornly maintained by the managers who claimed that the additional charge was necessary to cover the cost of setting up and manning an advance booking office {bureau de location). This was open from 11.0 a.m. to 4.0 or 5.0 p.m. and was staffed by a young woman with a plan of the seating before her, much as is done today, or else a three-dimensional cardboard model of the inside of the theatre. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, advance booking was possible only for those prepared to rent an entire box; later the facility was extended to other classes of seats which were then

15

16

The audiences

numbered. The extent to which it was used depended obviously on the popularity of the play; if highly successful, thtfeuilles de location (register of advance bookings) could be filled two, three, or four weeks in advance. Another possibility, open however only to wealthy clients, was to take out an annual subscription (abonnement) to a box or an orchestra stall; this was a recognized practice at the Opera and the Theatre-Italien in Paris and at every important provincial house. Subscriptions were valid for one particular day of the week, excluding the two popular nights, Saturdays and Sundays. A box rented in this way became the lessee's personal property for that night: no one else was allowed to occupy it even if it remained empty throughout the performance, and the lessee might introduce whom he chose, always provided the total number did not exceed the box's stated capacity. In his absence, he had the right to dispose of his box to friends. Under the First Empire, Fouche subscribed to boxes both at the Comedie-Fran£aise and the Opera, but neither he nor his wife ever used them, and their children were under age; on the evenings when none of his close friends had bespoken the box, it remained quite empty, however great the press outside. Mme de Chastenay relates that she often had occasion to ask him to loan her his box, 'and I may say', she adds, 'that his obligingness in this respect procured me and members of my family the greater part of the amusements we enjoyed in Paris'.16 These rented boxes came to be considered as hereditary properties by certain aristocratic families; documents conserved at the Opera show that some of them, bequeathed by father to son, remained under the same name for upwards of 200 years. Men of affairs would rent a seat in the stalls, rather than an entire box, and tended to drop their subscriptions if business slumped; but 'if a subscriber has remained constant for three years running, it would take a miracle for him not to conserve it to the end of his days. He has fixed habits, he sees the same faces there, his friends, people he has known for years; it is part of his life; the opera simply gives the evening an extra charm.'17 In such cases the theatre came to be treated as a sort of club, though livelier, one hopes, than those all-male establishments. Men of riper years would sit stolidly all through the performance; the younger abonnes, armed with powerful opera-glasses, came simply for the ballet, leaving the theatre noisily once the 'leg show' was over. For those who, for one reason or another, found it inconvenient or

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century

17

too expensive to make reservations and who quailed at the idea of joining the end of a queue with the risk that after a long wait they would be told there was no room anywhere, there was always the possibility of discovering someone in possession of a ticket who would be prepared to part with i t - a t a price. Ticket touts {marchands de billets) made their first appearance under the ancien regime'. Brenner, in his study of the Theatre-Italien in the eighteenth century, mentions a letter addressed to the lieutenant de police in January 1784 complaining that tickets for the pit were being bought up by speculators who were reselling them surreptitiously, at inflated prices, to spectators disappointed at finding the show was sold out when they arrived at the theatre. A few years later the Opera found its habitues were being similarly fleeced, and warned the public by means of a special notice on its playbill against the rascals who 'bought tickets at the office when it opened in order to sell them at a profit to people arriving late'. 18 Visitors from abroad, who had limited time at their disposal and who did not know the ropes, were particularly sought out by the touts, as the Reading schoolmaster Richard Valpy discovered during his stay in Paris in the autumn of 1788. When a new or favourite piece is given out, a set of speculators purchase a considerable proportion of the whole number of tickets. The public arrive at the usual time, offer their money at the wicket, and are told that 'all the tickets are sold*. The man, whose expectations are high, vents his rage in loud complaints. He is soon accosted by a person who tells him 'he may possibly procure a ticket, but at an advanced price'. The glow of success flushes in his looks; his eagerness to seize the lucky opportunity makes him overlook the imposition, he pays his money and rushes into the house, which he finds not half full's - the other half having been bought up by the speculators who are hoping to ransom other innocents like himself. Ticket touts continued to flourish throughout most of the nineteenth century, though under the First Empire and the Restoration the police were probably able to keep their activities in check, if not entirely to suppress them. They seem to have been mainly in evidence when a new play was announced: having prior warning of this, they used various subterfuges to get hold of batches of tickets which they would sell on the day at inflated prices in the vicinity of the theatre. This is what can be deduced from Etienne de Jouy's sketch entitled 'A first night of today' which is dated 8 May 1813.

18

The audiences

The ticket offices are open; but how is it that tickets for only the twentieth part of the seats the theatre contains are for sale? How is it that the ticket clerk is besieged in his little office, and is the target for many an insult through his windows in payment for the tickets he fails to deliver, while these tickets are being sold outside for three or four times what they are worth?'20 Jouy, tongue in cheek, can suggest no explanation of this mystery. Reflecting the business ethos that came to dominate the July Monarchy, the touts grew bolder in the 1830s. Veron, director of the Opera at this time, observed them at work when Meyerbeer's amazingly successful Robert le Diable had its first performance on 22 November 1831. A few young men, unemployed and without a trade, having scraped together a small sum of money, had the idea of spending part of the night at the doors of the opera-house so as to be the first to obtain from the ticket office a few boxes or orchestra stalls; they never failed, in the course of the following day or evening, to resell at a huge profit whatever they had bought in the morning. They developed a taste for this fatiguing but lucrative trade; they ploughed back their profits in securing the greatest possible number of boxes and stalls; the profits were assured. When the management realized what was happening, and refused to have dealings with them, they resorted to all kinds of ingenious subterfuges, bribing liveried servants from great houses to buy the tickets for them, supposedly on behalf of their masters who had given them the commission; or else well-dressed women posing as great ladies would arrive in a hired coach and buy up a whole row of seats, pretending it was for a family treat at the Opera. Perhaps their cleverest trick was to accost a respectable gentleman who had been unable to procure a seat, and offer to let him have the orchestra stall he wanted at cost price, provided he went and bought tickets for an entire box. ' "They will let you reserve a box against payment, whereas they would refuse it to me." The compact was sealed; the money was handed over to the gentleman to pay for the box; when he returned with the vouchers he was handed his ticket for his stall without paying anything extra.'21 A few years later, it was the turn of the Italian Opera (the Bouffes) to suffer the same plague: this provoked a letter from the director to the Prefet de police (2 November 1836) asking him to send a detachment to put a stop to the 'scandalous scenes which take place every day in the approaches to the theatre and in the neighbourhood

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century of the Rue Favart. The daring insolence of these ticket touts is such that they intercept pedestrians and carriage folk visiting the advance booking office and pursue them into the very precincts of the office to sell them tickets they have managed to procure.'22 Regulations already in existence forbade the sale of tickets on public thoroughfares, and it was part of the normal duties of the police to be present outside the theatres an hour before the opening of the ticket offices in order to send the touts about their business;23 but on the whole they tended to turn a blind eye, and a manager who complained about the nuisance would be told: 'I let them be, my dear director, because those same fellows cause a lot less trouble in the vicinity of your theatre than they would in the slums.'24 In any case the police were powerless to act unless they caught the men actually conducting their business on the pavement; but the touts soon grew wise to this, and thereafter operated in threes. One would accost a likely purchaser, the second would conduct him to an office, usually a room in a wine-shop, a tobacconist's or a hairdresser's, in which the third member of the gang sat at a table with a plan of the theatre seating spread out before him; there he would welcome the customer and offer to supply his requirements for up to three times the regular price. There was nothing illegal in this; it was a business, like any other, and subject to losses when the likely market for tickets was overestimated; though the touts were credited with considerable flair in predicting a theatrical success, 'they excel at divining the play that will make money, even though it has been treated witheringly by the critics, and that which will inevitably be a flop even though covered with flowers by the same critics'.25 Around 1870 such hole-and-corner activities became regularized, even respectable: the scruffy street operators became fewer, their business having been taken from them by a number of recognized agencies, adding a reasonable premium to the buying price which permitted them to pay shareholders a dividend varying between 15 per cent and 20 per cent. They were patronized particularly by travellers arriving in Paris for a short visit, who could in this way get tickets for whichever theatre they chose. The agencies maintained good relations with managers, advancing them capital and in return receiving a certain number of tickets over an agreed period at a reduced price.26 For a number of years they operated undisturbed, though in 1901 Antoine tried to undercut them by keeping his theatre open all day for the advance sale of tickets, a system which

19

20

The audiences

worked well until he discovered his sales-girl had been selling off the best tickets to the agencies behind his back. Eventually a more concerted effort to take part of the agencies' business from them was made by a group of hotels, using the very latest technology: they worked by telephoning their clients' requirements to the advance booking offices and charging a nominal fixed fee for collecting the tickets. Up to now we have been considering only those prepared to pay, in one way or another, for the privilege of spending an entertaining evening at the theatre. But there was another possibility, open to the well connected, which was to gain admittance without the disagreeable necessity of putting one's hand in one's pocket at any point When Suze Rueff, the young Dutch girl who had had the good fortune to strike up a friendship with Sarah Bernhardt, came to Paris for the first time in 1904, she made it her business to call on the great actress and theatre director at the earliest opportunity. Mme Sarah began by asking her young protegee whether she was intending to see any of the current shows in town; then, seating herself at her desk, she took out a visiting card and wrote on it the words: Priere de placer deux personnes, and signed it. This card, says Rueff, 'proved the open sesame to most of the theatres for the duration of my visit'. When she protested that she could well afford to pay for seats for herself and her companion, Sarah Bernhardt replied patronizingly that 'in Paris no one is expected to pay for theatre seats so long as one knew someone from among the artists or the management. . . . In Paris it suffices to know "the cousin of the aunt of a friend of one of the theatre attendants" to have a right to free seats, was how she put it.'2? It had been understood from time immemorial that a dramatist whose works had been accepted by a particular house should be admitted to all performances of his or other men's works without payment. This was called the entree gratuite; it was assumed that his future plays would be produced at the same theatre, and that he would want to pay frequent visits when other works were being produced in order to study the reactions of the audience and get to know the strengths and weaknesses of the various actors on the payroll. His name would be entered on the free-list, and all he needed to do was to make himself known to the staff. He did not have the right to any particular seat, and if the house was full he might have to stand in some inconspicuous spot. A number of clauses in the reglement for the Comedie-Frangaise of 1757 bore on the

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century question,28 differentiating between those who were granted free entry for life and those who were allowed the privilege for one, two, or three years, depending on the number and length of the plays they had produced. But already in the eighteenth century all kinds of people, other than dramatists, were making efforts to smuggle their names on to the free-list, as is evident from the various attempts made to prohibit the practice, culminating in an edict issued by Louis XVI in 1780 forbidding all attempts to avoid paying on the part of 'officers of the Royal Household, guards, soldiers of the foot and cavalry regiments, pages of His Majesty, of the Queen, of the princes and princesses of the blood royal'. 29 The same trouble recurred under the Consulate. In December 1802 Bonaparte asked to see the free-list at the Opera. He found the names of the three consuls, of the ministers of the Interior and of the Police, of General Junot, the Secretary of State Maris, of Roederer and Coulon. In all, seventeen boxes, representing ninety-four seats. At the bottom of the sheet the First Consul wrote in his own hand: 'As from 1 nivose [21 December] all these boxes will be paid for by those who occupy them.' And Bonaparte set the example himself, paying 15,000 francs as subscription to his own box.3° The abuse surfaced again under the Empire, as one can see from a provision in the decree on the theatres of 1 November 1807 abolishing 'all reserved boxes, free entries, complimentary tickets and like facilities at all four of the major theatres'; and it is to be supposed that it recurred under the Restoration, since it was reckoned that 'there was no man with a title who did not use all possible means to avoid paying for his box at the Opera' - which added according to one estimate nearly 400,000 francs to the deficit of that theatre over 1828 and 1829.31 No doubt it was common enough too under the Second Empire: a clause in the finance bill of 21 March 1872 enacted the suppression of all free boxes allowed to 'ministers, ministries, general secretaries, to the personnel of the Fine Arts department, to architects, to the prefecture of police, and to members of the Academie Fran$aise', which suggests strongly that all these notables had been enjoying the freedom of the theatres under the previous regime. If this pampering of men of power and position was widespread in the capital, it was just as marked in the smaller centres of population in the provinces. To have one's free box was a kind of natural

21

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The audiences

tribute, expected as of right, by local administrators from the mayor down to quite minor officials. The manager 'is obliged to admit without charge the secretary of the prefet, the city architect, the city librarian, the chief engineer, the officers of the fire brigade, police officers, customs officers - not to mention of course the families of these worthy citizens'.32 Little wonder that so many provincial managers went bankrupt. 'It is impossible', wrote the author of a brochure on the unprofitability of these enterprises, 'to imagine the number of free passes a director is obliged to grant: to the uncle, the cousin, the aunt of Monsieur or Madame So-and-so. Moreover, it is noteworthy that these free passes are almost always allocated to those who are best in a position to pay for their seats.'33 The free-list was susceptible not just of almost indefinite expansion, but in addition of exploitation verging on fraud. Someone who quite legitimately figured on it, not intending to go to the theatre on one particular evening, would pass the word to friend or relative who would present himself, throw out the other man's name in passing, and walk briskly towards the staircase. Or, with enough nerve, you could simply saunter in imperturbably with the air of owning the theatre. Some found, assured Nerval, 'a special delight in bluffing their way in, something many people bring off without any difficulty . . . It suffices to have a certain aplomb, and above all one of those vague faces that everyone imagines they recognize.'34 Even if you are challenged, all you have to do is to give a name at random, boldly, and you will be admitted without query, added Nerval, especially if there is a big press and bustle at the doors. As well as figuring on the free-list, authors of plays were also allowed a certain number of complimentary tickets, particularly on the first night. These were originally intended for distribution to members of their immediate family circle. Clause 57 of the reglement of 1757 stipulated that dramatists were to be allowed complimentary tickets for six balcony seats in the Theatre-Fran^ais for a five-act play and a smaller number for shorter plays over the duration of the first run. But this niggardly allowance was officially extended in 1774 to sixty free tickets for the first three performances and twenty for those that followed: friends and supporters were clearly being added to the playwrights' near relatives. As part of his effort to enhance the number of paying spectators, Napoleon tried to reduce the quantity of complimentary tickets distributed by the ComedieFrangaise; but under the Restoration and later, the rules were

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century relaxed: 'we could cite such-and-such a tragedy', wrote the compilers of a guide to the theatres published in 1824, 'which on its first appearance before a substantial audience was not judged by more than thirty spectators who had paid for their seats'.35 The contract drawn up in 1835 between Hugo and the Comedie-Fran9aise for his new drama Angelo included the clause: 'M. Victor Hugo will have the right to assign to whom he will, fifteen seats at each performance after the first three; for the first three he may sign as many passes as he may see fit.'36 The royal ordinance on the theatres of 1826 left it to managers and dramatists to make what mutually satisfactory arrangements they wished on the matter, and thereafter it became customary to consider the allowance of free tickets as part of the author's payment for his work; towards the end of the century the theory gained semiofficial sanction by being enshrined in the contracts approved and enforced by the writers' union, the Societe des auteurs dramatiques.37 Once they became considered as payment in kind, there could be no objection in law to a playwright disposing of his tickets to the highest bidder instead of distributing them gratis to his friends and relations. Thus the way was open for a new kind of trafficking: whereas the street touts, as we have seen, bought blocks of tickets at a high price at the advance ticket offices controlled by the theatre managers, trusting to resell them at even higher prices to spectators unable otherwise to get into a popular show, the intermediaries on whom the playwrights offloaded their surplus 'authors' tickets* bought them from him at a considerable discount and sold them at a somewhat lower discount, the margin between the two prices constituting their profit. At a time when Dumas pere, newly settled in Paris, started writing vaudevilles, one of the few friends he had who knew his way about the theatre world put him in touch with a certain Porcher, who offered him a welcome 50 francs for the totality of his 'author's tickets' on condition Dumas promised he would deal with no other purchaser from then on. Jean-Baptiste Porcher, born in 1793, had begun life as a hairdresser's assistant; one of his customers was a certain A. H. J. Duveyrier who, under the pseudonym Melesville, was a prolific playwright and used to make his barber a present of his free tickets in lieu of a tip. 'He wrote so many plays and gave me so many tickets that one day an idea came to me: this was that, instead of accepting them and handing them round to my clients, I should

23

24

The audiences

buy them from him for resale. I suggested the deal one day. "You're out of your mind, Porcher," he replied. "What in God's name will you do with them?" "At least let me try." "Why, certainly, my dear fellow, you try."' This, according to Dumas who relates the anecdote in chapter 105 of his memoirs, was the start of the modest business Porcher gradually built up. Melesville spread the word, other playwrights who had not known what to do with their spare tickets entrusted them to him; they were printed on yellow paper, signifying they were complimentary tickets, but could hardly be queried at the theatre, since there was no telling whether the bearer was a genuine friend of the playwright or merely someone who had bought them from one of the numerous street vendors that Porcher engaged to walk about in front of each theatre, offering seats 'moins chers qu'au bureau', cheaper than what you have to pay at the ticket office. The purchaser obtained his ticket at a discount, and it gave him admittance to a theatre he would perhaps not normally have entered; but the idea of having made a bargain was enough. Porcher never made a fortune in this way, but his agency, and that of his chief rivals, Fournier and Havez, became well known and widely patronized. He seems to have dealt honestly with his suppliers; at any rate the playwrights never appear to have had the least complaint in this respect. Their autographed portraits were proudly displayed to visitors by Mme Porcher, and Nicole Felkay has discovered in the archives of the municipality of Paris a register of no fewer than 167 dramatists who signed agreements with Porcher between 1830 and 1850.38 The sale of authors' complimentary tickets to agencies of the type he founded continued to be standard procedure down to the beginning of the twentieth century. Actors too found it possible to get hold of free tickets, ostensibly to pass them on to members of their family or neighbours who were following their career with interest, but in fact used them quite often to settle their bills with the butcher, the baker, or the winemerchant; a certain tailor, whose special delight it was to be present at the first night of a new play, was said to have counted among his clients members of every important theatre company in Paris, for whom he would run up a waistcoat or a pair of trousers in exchange for tickets enabling him to attend on these interesting occasions. In a comparative study, published in 1903, of theatre practices in England and France, the writer commented that in Paris the so-called billet defaveur 'has achieved something like an exchange value, as if it

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century were a postal order passed from hand to hand, and is used to pay for all sorts of services. It can keep a creditor quiet, close a difficult deal, convince a hesitant client, overcome the scruples of a pretty woman, express thanks for a service rendered; it is a recognized mark of politeness in a bachelor.'^ Like the present of a case of wine or a bunch of flowers, it was never thought to have anything so sordid as a monetary value, since after all it was a Tree ticket' and supposedly cost the donor nothing. Into a different category fell the tickets sent by the theatre administration, usually via the director's secretary, to drama critics attached to one or other of the numerous newspapers that invariably reported on the opening nights of new plays. This so-called service de presse was not confined to major critics, but could include a number of journalists known to be on the staff of the paper: towards the end of the century certain theatres allocated no fewer than twenty-two seats to the influential Figaro on every first night. It was thought more flattering to send such tickets not to the office of the newspaper concerned, but directly to the journalist's private address. And woe betide any theatre that overlooked a newspaper or periodical, however small its circulation: a snide remark could be none the less hurtful if dropped from the pen of an obscure scribbler whose vanity was offended when he was forgotten in the distribution of complimentary tickets. It was vanity rather than poverty or meanness that caused so many Parisians to set their sights on the billet defaveur. During the latter part of the nineteenth century the prestige attached to theatre directors, dramatists, actors and actresses was such that people in the swim regarded it as a point of honour not to need to put their hand in their pocket to pay for a ticket: to do so would imply that they lacked the right connections. In the words of a current bon mot: 'there are two kinds of people who go to the theatre, those who pay for their seats and are never seen anywhere, and those who are seen everywhere and never need to pay'.4° Whereas a man might protest loudly if a friend wanted to pay the conductor for both their seats on the top deck of a bus, if the same friend was in some way connected with the theatre, and if instead of being a matter of a penny ha'penny fare it was a question of a theatre ticket costing 5 or 10 francs, all embarrassment ceases, all scruples disappear. Such people don't beg you, they order you; it isn't a service they ask, it's a tax they levy. If you fail to produce the ticket within the

25

26

The audiences

prescribed time, your friendship is at an end and you will be cut from that time on.*1 It was by no means unusual for purchasers at the advance ticket office to ask the clerk to make out the voucher in the form of a complimentary ticket for which they had not needed to pay;*2 presumably the customer had in mind his lady friend who would be impressed if she thought he was well enough known in theatrical circles to get his tickets for nothing. This is why estimates of the proportion of non-paying spectators in a given audience are necessarily approximate, since it was impossible to distinguish between the fortunate possessors of complimentary tickets and those who had paid the proper price but preferred to make out that their tickets had come to them as a present from the author of the play or a leading actor. A figure of around 1,200,000 persons who got into the Paris theatres without paying was generally quoted for most years between 1830 and 1869; but the proportion of payers to nonpayers - of suckers to wise guys, as a cynic might say - varied greatly from one theatre to another. In the more fashionable houses, half the audience apparently got in without payment; in the minor theatres, catering for a lower social class, the proportion fell to one in fourteen.43 At first nights, as one might expect, the non-paying element predominated. Alarmists denounced the proliferation of complimentary tickets as the 'cancer' or the 'phylloxera' of Parisian theatres, and in 1893 an attempt was made by a number of directors acting in concert to do away with them entirely except for the first three performances; but this energetic initiative petered out and the status quo was shortly afterwards restored. The practice was, as everyone admitted, inequitable, since some of the funds that should by right have entered the coffers of the theatres were dissipated among a variety of sharks and shabby hangers-on; it amounted to a kind of black market from which the well connected or the shameless profited. But it is not so clear - as was sometimes argued at the time - that it contributed in any great degree to the 'crise des theatres' of the latter part of the century by driving managers to the wall. What no company liked was playing to a half-empty hall; a full house was essential, especially at the beginning of a run, in order to excite and prolong interest, and if it was impossible to obtain it by any other means, it was arguably in the interests of managers, both in Paris and in the provinces,4* to

Going to the theatre in the nineteenth century fill up the empty seats by allowing in non-paying spectators. It could happen that a manager miscalculated, and distributed so many complimentary tickets that he had to turn away would-be paying spectators at the end of the queue. But even then, it was not necessarily bad business practice; as Hostein replied, when taxed with this inconsequentiality: 'a crowd attracts a crowd, and the money one has to refuse at the ticket office creates the best possible publicity for one's theatre'. 45

27

CHAPTER 2

The auditorium

Our theatre-goer, clutching the ticket of admission he had acquired either by favour or purchase, would stumble through the doors and find himself confronting three men in black sitting behind an imposing desk who, as Baudelaire said, strike a timid nature as being 'invested with the majesty of Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus' the three judges of the underworld.1 These were the controleurs, the check-takers or ticket inspectors, a trinity of solemn dignitaries with whom it was advisable not to tangle. The presiding functionary, enthroned in the middle, represented the theatre administration; the other two were delegates respectively of the assistance publique and the authors' union, making sure that the bodies they represented were not defrauded of their dues. The theatre-goer would hand over his ticket for verification by the controleur who, if it was a numbered ticket obtained from the booking office, would check it off on the sheets sent in beforehand by the advance ticket office clerk; if it was unnumbered, he would note it on a list, to ensure that no part of the theatre became overcrowded. But if it was a complimentary ticket, presented by someone whose face was unfamiliar, then he would examine it suspiciously, whisper something to his fellow controleur, stare hard at the spectator for a minute or two, and finally hand over grudgingly the square of cardboard which he also gave, but rather more graciously, to the spectators he regarded as bona fide. Armed with this card, the theatre-goer would then press on to that part of the theatre to which it entitled him; he would hand it to a fussy, middle-aged or elderly lady known as the ouvreuse, who would direct him to a seat or a box, retaining the card which would eventually be returned to the controle. Strangers found all this a hopelessly complicated system, but it was rendered necessary by the numerous unnumbered seats in most theatres. In the pit, where seating, if provided at all, was on benches, the ouvreuses were replaced 28

The auditorium

29

by male placeurs, adept at spotting where a thin man could be squeezed in. Controleurs usually spent their days working as trusted employees in a bank or government office; their job at the theatre would be only a second string. Their pay, accordingly, was low - rarely more than 2 francs an evening — but the functions with which they were invested ministered to their self-esteem and clothed them in a certain authority which they were not afraid to exercise. Henri Lavedan, in the first volume of his memoirs, relates how on 21 May 1871, at the height of the civil war, a breathless messenger tore into the vestibule of one of the theatres. The controleur, always vigilant, barred his way. 'Where are you going?' 'To announce the news: the Versailles troops have broken through, haven't you heard?' 'Very well, but you'll have to wait till the interval.' In the ordinary course of events, he was full of deference towards the ladies and gentlemen heading for the pricier boxes; those whose orchestra stall cost a mere 6 francs were handed their square of cardboard with a paternal smile; as for those bound for the cheaper seats, they were disdainfully directed to the appropriate staircase with a wave of the hand. The ouvreuse was known to Victorians as the box-keeper or boxopener. Becky Sharp, when she came to Paris, discovered there, as we read in chapter 64 of Vanity Fair, 'a relation of her own, no less a person than her maternal grandmother . . . a hideous old box-opener at a theatre on the boulevards' - a description which suggests that Thackeray may have had one or two unfortunate brushes with others of her profession. Originally the function of the ouvreuse, which gave her her name, was to unlock the boxes reserved by the gentry. Down to about the middle of the nineteenth century they were paid a small salary by the management: 'earning 300 francs a year from the administration to perform their duties, and collecting 1500 francs from the public to neglect them'. 2 Needless to say, these supplementary profits came from tips. Where the majority of the seats were unnumbered, it depended entirely on the goodwill of the ouvreuse whether the spectator, having paid for an orchestra stall, was directed to a seat in the third or the eleventh row back; and the goodwill could always be purchased. Or again, she would pretend that all the boxes on the second floor had been reserved; the new arrival, having paid for one, had then the choice of taking his party up to the third floor, from where one had a poorer view of the stage, or going downstairs to the expensive boxes for which one would have to pay

30

The audiences

an additional charge. The gentleman, with perhaps his wife and mother-in-law in tow, rarely hesitated, knowing that the boxopener, once he had crossed her palm with silver, would miraculously discover that one of the second tier of boxes was not reserved after all. In time the management realized what was happening and stopped paying them even the meagre salary they had been in receipt of formerly; like waiters in cafes, they were henceforth expected to manage on their tips. Not only that, but they were obliged to pay heavily for the privilege of fleecing the customer: 40, 50, up to 60 francs a month, and in addition to deposit a large sum in caution-money as guarantee of good behaviour: 2,000 francs at the Theatre-Fran^ais, non-returnable, though the theatre promised to pay them interest on it - at the rate of 3 per cent per annum.3 Yet there was never any shortage of applicants. Commonly these women had served their turn, when young and pretty, in walk-on parts, and still clung to the theatre when old and wrinkled; sometimes they were the aunts or sisters of actors who secured them the job. It was in any case, like the controleurs\ a part-time occupation: during the day they might work as charwomen or pick up small sums mending stockings or even hiring out chairs at certain churches.* Their earnings varied from theatre to theatre; at a small house catering for a working-class audience they would be lucky to pick up 30 sous an evening, while at the Porte-Saint-Martin or the Vaudeville they could hope to net between 3 and 4 francs. The fashionable theatres were reserved for the aristocrats of the profession; it was alleged to be 'more difficult to obtain the position of box-opener at the Opera or the Theatre-Frangais than for a colonel to obtain promotion to the rank of general'.5 Even within a theatre, their take-home pay depended very much on whether they were posted to the dress circle or the top gallery; accordingly, to avoid disputes, they were shifted around from place to place each evening; it was part of the controleur's duties to arrange this. Given the precariousness of their remuneration, it is hardly surprising that they exacted payment for every extra service they rendered: for supplying footstools (essential for ladies in the days of crinolines) and cushions to help small children to a better view; they charged for taking overcoats and umbrellas to the cloakrooms and for taking care of babies to whom the long-suffering ouvreuse was expected to give the bottle. The tips were seldom generous, but even so complaints about their avidity on the part of theatre-goers who, it

The auditorium

31

is to be hoped, had no idea of the conditions of their employment, were incessant: not merely did they extract sous from your pocket at every turn, but they insisted on sticking wet umbrellas up the sleeve of your overcoat in the cloakroom, and in particular, to the annoyance of spectators trying to concentrate on what was being said on stage, they chattered incessantly throughout the performance. Having nowhere else to go, they sat in the corridors behind the boxes, some knitting, others doing nothing at all, and there, for as long as the curtain was raised, they gossiped away intolerably. Nothing helped, not the shushing of spectators opening the door of the box to plead for quiet, nor serious remonstrances, nor threats. The cackling went on from the beginning of the performance to the end and the occupants of the boxes had no help for it but to devour their irritation.6 It is perhaps significant of the period (the above was written in March 1876) that the complainant's only suggestion is that theatre managers should forbid conversations in the corridors once the curtain had gone up; not that the good women should be provided with a room in a quiet corner where they could while away the hours of waiting as they chose. They were, after all, merely employees. One of the reasons why each theatre needed to engage so many box-openers was quite simply that, compared to English or American playhouses, a great multitude of boxes were to be found on every tier except the topmost. It is clear that in France as in Italy an audience, particularly a mixed audience, preferred not to feel itself merged into a collective, but rather to look out from the privacy of a diminutive salon on to the varied scene opening up above, below, and in front of them. Attempts made during the Revolution, in the interests of equality and fraternity, to replace the boxes by vast galleries where everyone sat side by side with no divisions, were short-lived: the boxes were reinstalled and remained throughout the nineteenth century the principal feature distinguishing theatres on the continent of Europe from those of the Anglo-Saxon world. They did not afford complete privacy, for unless one booked the entire box, something only the very rich could afford, one usually found oneself having to share it with one or more complete strangers. In addition, at the Opera and possibly elsewhere, the door opening on to the corridor behind contained a round hole, known as the lorgnette, for the benefit of those spectators who had not been able to

32

The audiences

find a seat elsewhere and who were allowed to peep through it at the stage performance. The lorgnette also admitted draughts, and one of the minor reforms attempted by De Vismes in 1777 was to have it glassed over; but this improvement, though it prevented the promenaders overhearing the conversation of the occupants of the box, also made it impossible for them to hear the music and singing, and the panes of glass had to be taken out again. Before and after the Revolution, the premieres loges (those nearest to the stage) were considered to be the most desirable vantage points, were priced accordingly and were the preserve of upper-class parties, attending in full regalia, the ladies in low-cut gowns, with diamonds in their hair and pearls round their necks. They were part of the show and were very conscious of so being, paying often more attention to the compliments and conversation of their escorts than to the play or opera which was the ostensible reason for their presence. On this account such boxes were kept well lit throughout the performance. Any failure in the illumination was considered disastrous and strongly resented. In the course of a complete refurbishment of the interior of the Grand-Theatre at Nantes in 1879, * n e front row of boxes was modified in such a way that they could no longer be so brilliantly illuminated: 'the boxes which in all other theatres are the most brilliant and most visible, were at Nantes, by contrast, the most obscure, apart from the baignoires of course'.7 But the defect was not properly remedied until eleven years later when, with the belated installation of electric current, it became possible to fit the boxes with luminous globes and so restore the desired brilliance. The baignoires referred to here by Destranges were small boxes intended for those ladies who, for one reason or another, preferred not to advertise their presence at the theatre. They were widely used in the nineteenth century, but had forerunners before the Revolution in the so-called petites loges installed at the Theatre-Frangais from 1756 onwards in increasing numbers. The baignoires were erected behind the pit and below the first gallery, and were so called because only the heads of the occupants were seen to emerge, as in a bath. A good deal of fondling and kissing went on in these 'obscure cages in which love takes refuge. The comedies that can be seen from the baignoires are as nothing compared to the comedies enacted in them'; 8 they served much the same purpose as the back row of a cinema a couple of generations ago. The occupants paid little

The auditorium

33

attention, if any, to the play; all they asked for was peace and seclusion, darkness and mystery, something that courting couples could find with difficulty in the middle of a large city. The seats most sought after were those in the stage boxes, situated on the same level as the other boxes of the first, second, third or fourth rows, but behind the proscenium arch, which meant that during a performance they could be observed clearly only from the opposite side of the auditorium; when the curtain fell at an interval they were entirely hidden from view. It is true that genuine lovers of the dramatic art never chose to sit there, since they afforded a sideways perspective on the stage instead of the frontal view which was ideal; but it was thought chic to occupy one even — or perhaps particularly - under the Third Republic, since the monarch, in the days when there was a monarchy, had traditionally sat there. G. A. Sala was invited, during his stay in Paris, to share a stage box at the newly opened and very splendid opera-house built by Gamier. He demurred at first but agreed when he was informed that it was 'the coolest box in the house'. A drawback he had not been warned about was 'the well-nigh blinding glare from the rampe or footlights; but this was obviated by means of large Japanese fans, thoughtfully placed by our distinguished hostess at the disposal of her guests'. Sala seems to have paid little attention to the business on stage, being more absorbed by what he could see of the auditorium, 'the several tiers of boxes so radiant with brand-new gilding and so bespangled with lustres that, as a short-sighted spectator, I could only liken the vista to that of a huge screen of cloth of gold powdered with diamonds'.9 Another, earlier spectator, Heinrich Heine, declared that the stage boxes were his favourites, partly because in them one was largely hidden from the rest of the audience, but also because it was possible there to watch simultaneously what was happening on the stage and off it; the contrast between the tragedy that was being enacted for the audience and the unscripted comedies that could be observed in progress behind the wings appealed, it seems, to the sense of irony and paradox in the great German Romantic. In point of fact, there was not a great deal of difference between the situation of a spectator in a stage box and that of one sitting on the stage itself, as certain noblemen were wont to do before Voltaire and the Comte de Lauraguais persuaded the Comedie-Fran^aise, in 1759, to do away with the practice, and re-establish what was thought to be the proper line of demarcation between the actors on

34

The audiences

the stage and the audience in the hall. The question whether these particular boxes should be similarly eliminated was raised, in connection with the Opera, shortly after Sala visited it. The main argument pressed by those who wanted them abolished was that they weakened the optical illusion for the remainder of the audience, whose attention was too often distracted by the sight of these men and women in evening dress alongside the costumed singers, one of whom, waiting his or her cue, could sometimes be observed leaning up against the box on ground level and exchanging a few words with the occupants. On the other hand stage boxes, which unlike all others could not be booked by the general public, were traditionally at the disposal of the director, who on occasion might offer one to a composer or a critic to whom he had obligations; it was also useful for him to occupy one of them personally from time to time, so as to be able to keep an eye on the cast and on the orchestra and to observe the reactions of the audience at various moments during the performance. The advantages and disadvantages of retaining stage boxes at the Opera were thus fairly evenly balanced, and it was not until 1915 that they were finally dispensed with. Needless to say, the cheapest seats were those furthest from the stage; their occupants needed the keenest eyesight to discover what was going on and, unless the acoustics were unusually good, the acutest hearing to make out what was being said. Variations in prices of seats could be enormous and, contrary to what happens today, were greater at commercial theatres than at state-supported ones: thus, in 1852 one paid 8 francs for the most expensive seats at the Theatre-Frangais and 2 francs for the cheapest, whereas at the Porte-Saint-Martin, the Ambigu and the Gaite prices ranged from 5 francs to 50 centimes.10 In the specifically working-class theatres along the Boulevard du Temple prices could go even lower: 1 franc for seats in the best boxes down to 4 sous (20 centimes) in the top gallery; it was not for nothing that the Funambules, where Deburau worked, was widely known, long before Janin published his hagiographic Histoire du theatre a quatre sous, as the 'tuppenny theatre'. Officially, and on the posters, seats at the top of the house, in the 'gods', were known as the third (sometimes fourth) amphitheatre; colloquially, as the hen house (poulailler), because of the way spectators were cooped up there; and more generally, as le paradis, whence the title of Marcel Carne's classic film, Les Enfants duparadis, re-evoking the vanished world of Deburau, Frederick, and their

The auditorium

35

adolescent working-class fans. It is from these heights, wrote Bouchard, 'that apple cores, orange peel, plum stones, walnut shells and bits of saveloy rain down on the pit, the orchestra stalls and the orchestra itself, like manna not exactly from heaven'.11 Bouchard goes on to offer an explanation of how the word came to be applied to these lofty galleries; he traces it back to the medieval mysteries, for which the stage was always divided into three parts, the lowermost being hell, the middle one earth, and the highest heaven, le paradis. Another semanticist, a shade more convincingly, drew attention to the fact that the old theatres always had blue, star-spangled ceilings, so that anyone sitting near the ceiling was naturally referred to as inhabiting paradise. During the ancien regime, the pit or parterre in the royal theatres though not, apparently, in the commercial theatres on the Boulevard - was for a long time without seating of any kind: the reason usually given was that a standing spectator occupied less space and could in consequence be charged less. On the other hand, to require a body of young men, as they mostly were, to remain on their feet for two or three hours at a stretch was to ask for trouble; noisy, quarrelsome, apt to imagine insults and retort in kind, occasionally, if seriously affronted, invading the stage and offering violence to the actors, they had to be overawed by armed police stationed inside the theatre. Analogies with the terraces at football clubs in this country would not be very fanciful. Seating accommodation was eventually introduced towards the end of the century: at the Theatre-Frangais in 1782, at the Italiens in 1788, and at the Opera in 1794 when it was transferred to Mile Montansier's theatre in the Rue Richelieu. Outside Paris, in spite of an order dated 1 August 1788 and signed by the Lieutenant-General of Police, requiring all provincial managers who had not already done so to fit up their parterres with benches in the interests of public order, many theatres continued for a long time to offer standing room only to their groundlings. When BoufFe accepted an invitation to give a series of performances at Rouen in June 1837, he was disconcerted on his first appearance to find himself confronting a compact crowd of Normans standing up and awaiting him. He includes in his account a few savoury details. It sometimes happened that on days when the house was full, latecomers, hopeful of finding room despite the crush, were lifted up over the heads or shoulders of spectators and passed from hand to hand until a gap presented itself which allowed them to fall on their feet. I frequently witnessed these

36

The audiences

gymnastics, and the manager's satisfaction too as he watched them; he far preferred a standing parterre to the bench system, since it allowed him to introduce a hundred or more paying spectators.12 They were by no means all young men: Gustave Claudin, who spent six years in Rouen between 1851 and 1857, recalls that during the intervals prosperous merchants could be observed in the pit conducting their negotiations. 'It could happen that cotton-wool, which had been dropping in the market at Le Havre and Liverpool, rose as the result of bargains struck between the second and third acts of [Boieldieu's] White Lady'1* Similarly at Rheims, at about the same period, Louis Paris recalled seeing 'mingled with the lower orders, respectable middle-class men, reputable members of the business community, scattered here and there in the crowd, content, for 75 centimes, to stand without turning a hair, propping each other up all the way through performances lasting four or five hours'.14 In the 1783 edition of Sebastien Mercier's Tableau de Paris, published shortly after the Comedie-Fran^aise did away with the old system of standing spectators, the author broke into loud laments at the innovation. With the provision of seating [the parterre] has lapsed into lethargy; the circulation of thoughts and emotions is no longer apparent; the electric current has been broken, for benches impede that instant mental communication and exchange of impressions. Formerly, an incredible enthusiasm animated the pit, and the universal effervescence gave theatrical occasions an interest which they have now lost. Today, calm and silence and frigid disapproval have replaced the excitement of yore.15 But Mercier was exaggerating: the reputation of the pit for rowdiness was to persist for many years yet, and a poor play or bad acting could still on occasion exasperate the groundlings to the point where they would start breaking up the benches and flinging the pieces on to the stage. Nor did they relinquish easily the special privileges they had come to regard as their own by right. If a play displeased them for any reason, they could insist on another being substituted; if an actor interpreted a well-known part otherwise than they wished, they made their disapproval known in no uncertain way. It used to be the custom, at the Comedie-Fran^aise and elsewhere, for the most junior male member of the company to open a new season or close the old one by delivering a little speech from the stage; this speech was addressed, invariably, to the parterre, tacitly

The auditorium

37

regarded as the repository of good taste and the only section of the audience it was necessary to conciliate. The pit was an all-male assembly; the inflexible rule that barred women was continued even after spectators were seated; as late as 1880, women were not admitted to the parterre at the Theatre-Franc,ais, the Odeon, the Opera-Comique and the Palais-Royal. Consequently, in haranguing the pit the actor always began his speech with the word: 'Messieurs'. At Easter 1789, when Saint-Prix was chosen to deliver the so-called compliment d'usage, he began as usual, 'Messieurs', whereupon a voice from the pit added: 'et Mesdames'. Saint-Prix, disconcerted, began again: 'Messieurs', and the same speaker in the pit interrupted again, requiring Saint-Prix, in the name of politeness, to address the ladies as well as the gentlemen; that is, the entire audience and not just the pit. Saint-Prix complied with the demand, using the formula 'Messieurs et Mesdames' throughout the remainder of his speech, and at its conclusion a lady in one of the boxes stood up and called out: 'Well done, bravo, M.Saint-Prix', for which the entire audience gave her a tremendous ovation. Pericaud, who relates this anecdote,16 adds that this was the first time that women were acknowledged to be an integral part of the audience at the Comedie-Frangaise; it could also be regarded as marking the parterre^ abdication of its central position and authority in the audience. Certainly, from the time of the Revolution onwards the former pretensions of the pit were increasingly contested, both in Paris and in the provinces. A letter published in a Rouen newspaper in 1795 testifies to the change; it was supposedly addressed to the editor by a female correspondent, though it may well have been the work of a facetious journalist. 'Why should the pit', the writer asked, which is only a fraction of the audience, have become so despotic that it demands that the doors at the rear of boxes be opened or closed at its whim? It disapproves noisily of our finery, it makes a fuss if we turn our back on it, it raises the roof if a cloak is draped over the edge of a box, it insists we should applaud whatever pleases it, in short it is a capricious tyrant ruling with a rod of iron a portion of the audience more numerous and which has as much taste as it, is often as well educated and whose purse is considerably heavier.17 In the 1820s, at Caen, the sovereignty of the pit was called into question by another section of the audience, seated in the balcony above it, which had its own ideas about the merits of various

38

The audiences

actresses and noisily contested the contrary views expressed by the groundlings whom it would sometimes bombard with assorted missiles.18 The front part of the pit had always, over the period we are concerned with, been equipped with seats (stalls) and separated by a stout barrier from the remainder; this was the portion of the ground floor between where the musicians sat, immediately below the stage, and where the pit proper began. This section, fairly insignificant at first and limited, at the Theatre-Fran^ais, to 180 spectators, was known as the parquet or the orchestre. Women were sometimes to be seen here, but it was always accepted that managers were within their rights in refusing them admittance provided they advertised the fact on the posters. In the eighteenth century the major theatres invariably restricted seats in the parquet to men, though the minor theatres made no difficulty about admitting women there, as indeed anywhere else. It was part of the ethos of the aristocracy under the ancien regime that any woman who wished to see a play would be accompanied by a male escort with whom she would share a box; only at the boulevard theatres could women attend alone or in groups of their own gender. During the Revolution, it was partly to signal its rupture with an aristocratic past that the Theatre de la Republique broke with this tradition and abrogated the rule barring women from the parquet. But old customs die hard. As late as 1874 a journalist reported in his theatre column that he had been asked to announce, once and for all to readers whether ladies are or are not admitted to the orchestre at the Varietes. The theatre poster says they are, but at the ticket office they are sometimes told the contrary. Here is the position: yes, ladies are allowed in the three back rows of the orchestra stalls at the Varietes, but in the three back rows only. Except on the occasions when a new play is shown: on those evenings, the orchestre is for men only. Don't ask me why; that's all I can say.19

It seems likely that this unchivalrous relegation of women to the back rows was not unconnected with the growing fashion at the time for hats to become larger and more ornate. At the Vaudeville, where women could sit anywhere in the orchestre, the same journalist reported in 1877 having observed a lady sitting in the front row wearing 'a man's top hat of yellow silk surmounted by a large yellow feather. The luckless spectators sitting behind this hat could see

The auditorium

39

absolutely nothing of what was in progress on the stage.'20 It was no doubt because of the reluctance of the ladies to remove their extravagant headgear, fastened by numerous hatpins, that several theatres started refusing them seats in the orchestra stalls. An ordonnance de police of 16 May 1881 made it an offence to 'prevent spectators from seeing or hearing, by whatever means, the play as announced';21 but this warning appears to have had little effect, and the same trouble stirred up complaints elsewhere in the theatre. Those sitting at the back of boxes might have their view totally blocked by a lady of fashion in front; 'one sees nothing, one hears with difficulty; those who wish to catch a few bits and pieces of the show are constrained to remain standing in a restricted space, overheated and airless, where the least movement will knock over a chair with a noise like thunder'. 22 The campaign waged in the press against these pyramidal creations, involving flowers, feathers, bunches of berries and other masterpieces of the milliner's art, reached such a pitch in the late 1880s that an attempt was made by certain fashion leaders to popularize going to the theatre hatless. But only factory girls in those days went about bare-headed, and the lead was not followed. The monstrous hats continued to be worn inside the theatre and became part of the accepted scene, though some members of the audience refused to take it lying down. In 1897 there was very nearly a cause celebre when a certain Samuel Bernard insisted on wearing his stovepipe hat when seated in the orchestra stalls at the Athenee-Comique; when asked by a theatre official to remove it he refused, saying his action was intended as a demonstration against the presence of ladies 'whose monumental headgear completely blocks my view of the stage'. He left the theatre quietly, wearing his hat defiantly, and the following day took out a summons against the manager for refusing him a seat for which he had paid. The case was settled out of court, the manager agreeing with the complainant in principle and offering him compensation, but pointing out that he was bound to follow the example of other theatres, and that the real culprits were those who had launched this absurd fashion. Astruc, who tells this story,23 adds that the rule prohibiting women wearing hats when occupying certain seats in the theatres, which was general in the United States and Great Britain and had been introduced at the Opera, the Opera-Comique and the Theatre-Frangais, could be enforced without difficulty if all the

40

The audiences

theatre managers in Paris agreed on a common approach to the problem. In the provinces, where there were seldom more than one or two important theatres in a city, the matter could be dealt with by the local authorities, as for instance at Lille in 1898, where the mayor issued an order forbidding the wearing of anything but bonnets {coiffures basses) inside the theatre; ladies arriving with hats were offered shelves placed along the corridors on which to deposit their headgear, with looking-glasses above so that they might adjust them before emerging.2* Quite apart from the occasional need at certain periods to dodge about behind nodding plumes and obtrusive brims, by present-day standards an evening at the theatre, however enthralling, could never have counted as a comfortable experience. The stuffiness of the atmosphere in the auditorium had been bad enough when the interior was lit by oil-lamps; when gas-lighting was introduced in the 1820s the heat could become, especially in summer, a positive torment, while in the winter the chill in the air had to be combated by foot-warmers, hired out by the indispensable box-openers; even so there were occasions when the draughts whistling through the illfitting doors of the boxes and the total inadequacy of the primitive central heating obliged spectators to sit huddled miserably in their overcoats, muffs, and furs. This happened, for instance, at the opening performance of Ruy Bias (8 November 1838), attended by everyone who was anyone in Paris at the time, when it needed all the vigour of Hugo's sonorous verse and dramatic skill to unfreeze the audience. Conditions in every Paris theatre, with the single exception of the Theatre-Italien (the Bouffes) with its thick carpets and well-heated boxes, were barbarous^ the word used repeatedly by Gautier in the i84OS25 was also the word that Zola found appropriate in the 1870s. 'I have never felt more strongly how much we are still in the age of barbarism, as far as the pleasure of going to the theatre is concerned', he wrote. It was bad enough in a crammed hall in the wintertime, when one feels at least one is better indoors than outside in the damp and chilly streets, but in the summer, playgoers must be prepared to endure untold torments. A seat in the front stalls or the balcony becomes an instrument of torture which squeezes and burns you. Great drops of fiery rain fall from the chandelier. Sweat pours from your brow and soaking handkerchiefs no longer suffice to mop your face. You sit there in a steam bath, vapour rises

The auditorium

41

from your clothes, the stench of humanity fills the hall. It is unhygienic to the last degree. The flicking of fans is an additional vexation. Even the women are frightful, their faces streaming. And at the interval, if you risk catching pneumonia by going outside and breathing a few lungfuls of fresh air, you can see the happy folk around the doors of cafes, sipping iced drinks under the cloudless night sky.26 Only when gas, which consumed much of the available oxygen and in the process raised the temperature everywhere, was superseded by electric light in the 1880s and 1890s was this particular source of discomfort abated. Heat and airlessness were not the only penalties awaiting the theatre-goer; even more frequent complaints were made about overcrowding, in spite of Haussmann's efforts in the 1850s to make the numbering of seats compulsory everywhere. Overbooking was common whenever a play attracted a crowd, especially in the pit where a ticket did not guarantee a seat; if none could be found, one either had to pay a supplement to occupy a more expensive one, or leave the theatre after arguing with the controleur, usually in vain, for a refund. The system was denounced as fraudulent;27 but it was in the interest of management to sell as many tickets as possible regardless of the seating capacity of a theatre, and the general reluctance, even at the Theatre-Franc.ais, to replace benches in the pit by stalls, was due entirely to the almost unlimited number of spectators who could be crammed on to a bench. Alexandre Dumas, relating his first visit there with Adolphe de Leuven in 1822, explains how this was done. The play, Jouy's Sylla, was drawing capacity audiences. 'We were desperately at a loss where to sit; our tickets were not numbered. Adolphe, rising to the occasion, tipped the boxopener a generous 2 francs, and she busied herself to such effect that she discovered a space in the middle of the orchestre into which we slid like two wedges, which we roughly resembled in shape and elasticity.'28 If this was the case in the first theatre of the capital, how much worse must it have been in the cheaper seats of the working-class theatres along the Boulevard du Temple before they were demolished in the late 1860s. Tf our prisons had cells as constricted, as stifling, as insanitary, they would be abolished for humanitarian reasons', wrote Fiorentino in 1859. The best of these seats are those from which nothing at all can be seen, for there one doesn't risk spraining one's wrist, breaking a leg or dislocating

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The audiences

one's neck in order to catch a glimpse, at a great distance, of the profile of the villain or the nose of the comic. These unfortunates perched in the third and fourth galleries are compelled to contort themselves into positions that make you shudder ... I have seen intrepid spectators tie the ends of their kerchiefs round the armpits of their neighbour whom they hold in this way dangling in space, having got his agreement to render him the same service during the following scene.29 But such gymnastics may have been part of the excitement of going to the theatre for these working-class lads who were, no doubt, accustomed to risking their lives every day on insecure scaffolding or slippery roofs. Even at the Opera, when it was still housed in the Rue Richelieu in the 1820s, little attention was given to the comfort of spectators. Benches without backs were universal, even in the boxes: one placed behind the other, with so little room that the back bench had to be raised to allow the ladies to reach the front one which was screwed into the floor, making it necessary for them to step over it before sitting down. In the pit, in spite of police regulations, to which no one paid any attention, the rows of benches were placed far too close to one another, so that women found it embarrassing to move out during intervals, and unless the call of nature proved irresistible preferred to remain where they were throughout the four hours that the performance lasted. Comfortable armchair seats, the so-called fauteuils d'orchestre, did not make their appearance, eyen in the most luxuriously appointed theatres, until the middle of the century, and then possibly only in response to the increasing number of visitors from London who demanded them. Mourier, the eccentric director of the Folies-Dramatiques, hated the idea of the fauteuil or of any seat with a back to it, his maxim being: 'as soon as you have settled a spectator in a seat where he feels comfortable, you have created a critic';^0 on the other hand, crowd them in, crowd them together, and they will never find fault with anything, for the animation that surrounds them dulls their critical faculties, making them oblivious to every defect in production or acting which, sitting at ease, they would infallibly detect. The discomfort of seating arrangements in nineteenth-century theatres would not perhaps have struck a modern theatre-goer, were he to be miraculously whisked back to those times, so much as the simple fact that the auditorium remained brightly lit throughout the performance. Today, the lowering and ultimate extinction of the

The auditorium

43

houselights is the invariable sign that the play is about to begin; in those far-off days, had anything of the sort been attempted, it would have created an outcry and possibly even panic. Even when the best means of illumination was the oil-burning argand lamp patented by Quinquet — a great improvement even so on the earlier tallow or wax candles - the hall in which spectators sat or stood, lit by one or more chandeliers, was often brighter than the stage itself which had to rely almost entirely on the footlights. But they preferred it so: how many tedious moments were there when interest in the drama slackened, and spectators turned their opera-glasses away from the stage to scan the pretty faces in the boxes! And there were other, less frivolous reasons for perpetuating the custom of keeping the auditorium as brightly lit as possible. Many young men, studying to improve their knowledge of the classics, followed the performance with the text of the play on their laps; so too did foreigners, who did not always find it easy to understand the rapid exchanges between the actors. Reichardt was delighted to find, on visiting the ComedieFrangaise, that 'the plays to be enacted are always on sale in the theatre. The indistinct mumbling of old Monval and many another makes it absolutely essential to have the text to hand during the performance. Several lines would be quite incomprehensible unless one had glanced at them beforehand or could follow them as they are spoken.'31 An inadequately lit auditorium was sure to give rise to adverse comment, as at Rouen when in 1813 the local paper reported that 'every day people are heard deploring the darkness of the auditorium, and with reason, for there are few theatres in which the lighting is so poor and unflattering to the ladies that constitute its ornament, as ours'.32 The chandelier was the principal, though not the only, source of illumination in the auditorium. After the introduction of gaslighting in the 1820s it became even more magnificent; for Baudelaire, it was the most beautiful object in a theatre,33 and for Charlotte Bronte too, if one can assume the description given in chapter 20 of Villette to be based on the memory of her first visit to the Theatre de la Monnaie during her stay in Brussels in 1842. 'Pendant from the dome flamed a mass that dazzled me - a mass, I thought, of rock-crystal, sparkling with facets, streaming with drops, ablaze with stars, and gorgeously tinted with dews of gems dissolved, or fragments of rainbow shivered. It was only the chandelier, reader, but for me it seemed the work of eastern genii.' Visitors from abroad,

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The audiences

J. F. Reichardt and John Carr, were immensely impressed by the internal lighting at the opera house in Paris even before the introduction of gas. 'This spacious and splendid theatre', wrote the latter, is lighted from above by an immense circular lustre of patent lamps. The form of this brilliant light is in the antique taste, and is said to have cost £2,000 sterling. The effect which it produces in the body of the theatre and upon the scenery is admirable. It prevents the sight from being divided and distracted by a profuse distribution of lights Nevertheless there were drawbacks, the most serious being the presence of this large, partly luminous, partly opaque, object suspended in mid-air in the centre of the auditorium and necessarily interrupting the line of sight of the numerous spectators placed above and behind it. Objections to this inconvenience had been raised before the Revolution by the celebrated French scientist Lavoisier, in a memorandum to the Academy on the question of improving the internal illumination of theatres. He concluded in favour of replacing the chandeliers by ceiling lighting, a reform ultimately attempted, but with disputed success, at the Chatelet and the Theatre-Lyrique, both erected during the latter part of the Second Empire. Theatre-goers, a conservative lot on the whole, continued to prefer the familiar chandeliers. These were not without their dangers, quite apart from the inconveniences. The cables serving to raise and lower the heavy chandelier could break, as happened at the Opera-Comique in 1876 and a few years later at the Theatre du Chateau-d'Eau, crushing the spectators below it. Broken glass and burning oil sprayed from above were other hazards. 'Every time I find myself sitting directly under one or other of the chandeliers', confessed Arnold Mortier, I cannot help feeling a vague anxiety. Every now and then I raise my head, only to lower it again automatically, by a nervous reflex. It is useless to try and banish this disagreeable impression; it seldom happens that the drama, however enthralling, succeeds in making me forget it. The torment, like a sword of Damocles dangling above me, ends only when the curtain is rung down. 35

Others, without sharing Mortier's apprehensions, felt that the abolition of the chandelier was an overdue reform. The reasons for its retention were mostly based on the old theory that, like the matrons of ancient Rome of whom Ovid wrote, women go to the

The auditorium

45

theatre not so much to see the play as to be seen by the audience,^6 which might have been true of the elegant marquises of Louis XV's time, but could hardly apply to the plump parvenues of LouisPhilippe's reign. One simple solution might have been to have the chandelier raised during the play and lowered during the intervals; or else to reduce the gas pressure during the actual performance. In fact, what normally happened was the exact reverse: for reasons of economy, not only were the footlights dimmed during intermissions but the chandelier also. When the curtain is lowered the comedy is no longer taking place on the stage but in the auditorium; and it is difficult to distinguish someone clearly in a box or on the balcony when, for the sake of not wasting gas, the house is plunged into a sort of artificial night. The contrary would be more logical to maintain a half-light in the auditorium when the curtain is up and when the stage, well lit, draws everyone's attention - and to bathe the auditorium in a bright light during the intervals.37 This revolutionary suggestion, made by Hippolyte Hostein in 1878, remained unheeded until the replacement of gas-lighting by electric light during the following decade. To douse the houselights completely during a performance, in order to compel the audience to bring all their attention to bear on the stage, was one of the innovations introduced at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth by Richard Wagner in 1876 and was copied in France a little later by Antoine and his disciple Lugne-Poe, to the disgust of, among others, Francisque Sarcey, who felt cheated at not being able to watch the woman beside him smile at a comic episode or show signs of being moved at a pathetic one; Sarcey, whose dramatic criticism was to a large extent a matter of reporting on, and justifying, the reactions of the audience, was understandably annoyed at being deprived of one of his principal means of collecting information. Another conservative, Adrien Bernheim, complained that a darkened auditorium robbed him of half the pleasure of going to the theatre. Give us back the splendid brightness of former times which allowed us to contemplate our pretty neighbours when we were only half interested in what was happening on the stage! Let us beware of germanizing our theatres; let us not forget that if in Berlin and Vienna they go to the theatre to learn wisdom, we on the contrary go for the sake of amusement!38 Older actors too found it difficult to adjust, 'to move around', as Jenny Thenard wrote in 1909, 'in front of a black hole, dazzled by

46

The audiences

the garish footlights and aware of nothing but, from time to time, a few bursts of applause'. The give-and-take that used to exist between actors and audience, 'this intercommunion of minds called, I believe, telepathy', had been lost.39 Henceforth a chasm was to yawn between the world of the stage and the world the spectator inhabited; there was loss as well as gain, but whatever the balance of advantage might be, going to the theatre was no longer the same experience as it had been.

CHAPTER 3

Performance times - intervals - annual closures

In past times, going to the theatre had always been regarded as an essentially social rite to be performed after the equally important family rite of the dinner hour, and since the latter fell later and later all through the period under discussion here, so the timing of performances had necessarily to move to accommodate the eating habits of spectators. In the eighteenth century, when sunrise signalled the start of the day's business, the main meal was taken in the early afternoon; theatrical performances for the leisured classes therefore started around 4.0 p.m. and finished four hours later; it was customary to partake of a light supper between 9.0 and 10.0 in the evening. During the Revolution, possibly to accommodate the lengthy sessions of the clubs and legislative assemblies whose debates were eagerly followed by the general public, the dinner hour and in consequence the hour fixed for the start of theatrical performances were postponed until the late afternoon. In 1802, an English visitor to France explained that 'no genteel family at Paris dines before four or five o'clock, and some persons not till six or seven . . . The theatres commence at seven, and are generally over between ten and eleven.'1 Combating this tendency for a later start were the requirements of a growing number of lower-class families who, with the rise in wages, were able to make a practice of spending an occasional evening at the theatre; they needed to be at work shortly after daybreak and so expected the curtain to rise at an earlier hour, 6.0 p.m., 5.30 p.m. or even 5.0 p.m., to enable them to be in bed at a reasonable hour. This led under the First Empire to considerable variations in starting time from one theatre to another, those catering for a largely working-class clientele, the Ambigu-Comique and the Varietes, beginning performances at 5.0 p.m. or 6.0 p.m., the remainder at 7.0 p.m.,2 while the Opera often delayed until later still in the evening before raising its curtain. 47

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The audiences

This circumstance may have helped it - and the Italian Opera to become the fashionable theatres they did during the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. In 1835 Mrs Trollope, spending several months in Paris, was told of a widespread decline in theatre attendance among people of the best society which was commonly blamed on the late dinner hour, which renders the going to a play a matter of general family arrangement, and often of general family difficulty. The Opera, which is later, is always full; and were it not that I have lived too long in the world to be surprised at anything that the power of fashion could effect, I should certainly be astonished that so lively a people as the French should throng night after night as they do to witness the exceeding dullness of this heavy spectacle - so much for Auber, Meyerbeer and Halevy! It would require, she goes on to say, 'some new-born theatrical talent of the first class' to persuade people to 'submit to the degradation of dining at five o'clock in order to enjoy it'.3 Twelve years later, Theophile Gautier argued vehemently against the prevalent custom of raising the curtain so early in the evening. Theatre managers need to get it into their heads that social customs have totally changed in the last few years. To start a performance at 7.0 p.m. . . . is to ensure that no one will come. The influence of English customs, the expansion of the city boundaries and the creation of new housing estates, together with the increasing complexities of business life mean that the dinner hour has had to be constantly deferred. The working day is lengthening and encroaching more and more on the evening. In a short while we shall be dining at the hour when our forefathers were sitting down to supper. Parliament, offices, workshops, all the places where the affairs of government, commerce, scholarship and industry are carried on, never close before 6.0 p.m. How can you expect people to be at the theatre by 7.0? They have to get home, change, snatch a bite to eat and set off again to cover an often considerable distance to reach the theatre.4 Eventually, as the century wore on, performances did begin later. In 1840, they started between 5.30 p.m. and 6.30 p.m.; in i860, between 6.30 p.m. and 7.30 p.m.; in 1885, between 8.0 p.m. and 9.0 p.m. Improved street lighting and policing no doubt helped, as too the fact that by the 1880s audiences did not expect programmes to last as long as they used to. When the Comedie-Fran^aise put on Le Demi-Monde in 1874, the curtain rose at 8.0 p.m. and fell a few minutes before midnight; at its revival in 1890, the author (Dumas

Performance times - intervals - annual closures

49

Jils) consented to various cuts, making it possible to begin his play at 8.30 p.m. and still finish before midnight. Midnight was the hour when all theatres were expected to close their doors on the departing audience. This 'barbarous curfew', as Gautier called it, was enforced less and less strictly as time went on. Before the Revolution 9.0 p.m. had been the usual closing time, though this was more a matter of convention than of regulation. Certainly no such rule applied to the south of France where, as Mrs Cradock discovered when visiting Toulouse at the end of May 1785, the theatre waited until the temperature had dropped and did not open till 10.0 p.m. Much the same thing happened at Bordeaux where the performance seldom finished before 12.30 a.m.; it was customary in the provinces for the authorities to prescribe an opening time but rarely a closing time for theatrical .entertainments, which were accordingly free to run on into the small hours. In Paris itself, in the late 1770s, the police made no immediate objection when Nicolet and Audinot both decided to mount a second show in the middle of the night, the first beginning between 5.0 p.m. and 6.0 p.m. and finishing at 9.0 p.m., while the second started at 10.o p.m. and ended well after midnight. It was only when these nocturnal spectacles degenerated into Walpurgis-night revels that the police stepped in and prohibited them. On the whole the police authorities were content to leave it to the good sense of management to see that the audience, not to mention the cast, were released in time to get a good night's sleep. If they broke this unwritten rule, the restless spectators would probably walk out before the end. This very nearly happened at the first performance, in March 1830, of the unabridged version of Dumas's Stockholm, Fontainebleau et Rome, an interminable dramatization of the life of Queen Christina of Sweden, which had been advertised as consisting of a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue. It had already struck 1.0 a.m. before the curtain, which had been raised at 7.0 p.m., fell on the fifth act. The audience was making a fearful fuss, fearing they would not get home at all that night and shouting loudly for the epilogue, when at last the curtain rose again. It was at the moment when Christina, having retired to Rome and sensible that her last hour was come, asked her doctor how much longer she had to live. 'You have,' he answered, 'a quarter of an hour left.' Hearing this, one student stood up on a bench in the pit and, pulling out his watch, shouted: 'It's a quarter past one; if by half past it's not over, we're

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The audiences

off!' A loud burst of laughter greeted this sally, and it proved impossible to finish the epilogue, which was suppressed at the second performance.5 A few years later, on 15 February 1834, the authorities issued an ordinance to the effect that no theatrical performance was to continue later than 11.0 p.m.; this was widely felt to be an intolerable tyranny and was replaced by a fresh order, dated 3 October 1837, which allowed theatres to remain open until midnight; beyond that hour, illicit extensions rendered the manager liable to a fine together with an extra heavy bill for firemen's overtime. This could lead to desperate measures, as when, in October 1842, the playing time of a new drama at the Odeon was underestimated and the director, Lirieux, found it necessary to abridge the final scene and improvise a new denouement: the heroine, in full spate, was interrupted by the captain of the guard who strode on to the stage at two minutes to twelve, arrested her and marched her off, much to her astonishment and indignation; but the curtain fell in the nick of time. In 1864, the 'curfew' was extended to 12.30 a.m. and even then exceptions were granted without difficulty provided good cause was shown. It may appear strange that when theatrical performances were starting later and later in the evening, no director before the fall of the Second Empire had the idea of initiating afternoon performances timed to finish before, instead of after, the dinner hour. Matinees began to make their appearance, cautiously and timidly, in the 1870s, and it was some time before they became generally accepted. The widespread feeling was that the proper function of the theatre should be to round off the day's labour; and even on a Sunday it was associated with the fall of the evening and the lighting up of the streets. To spend any part of the daylight hours, whether they were devoted to business or pleasure, indoors watching actors perform under artificial light seemed unnatural, almost sacrilegious. Alphonse Daudet, writing in the spring of 1876 about the matinees that had been started at the Theatre de la Renaissance, analysed very convincingly the sensation of repulsion it must have given to the average Parisian of the time. When one passes brusquely from the noisy, crowded boulevard down which vehicles of every sort bowl along, omnibuses fully loaded with their warning bells ringing, barrows full of gillyflowers and violets, into the shadow of a theatre corridor lit by gas flaring redly after the sunshine out of doors, one experiences at first an impression of melancholy, as though, breathing in

Performance times — intervals — annual closures

51

the dusty air that floats about the boxes and stalls, one regretted the glorious daylight which breaks through here and there by the chink of an ill-closed door or badly fitting partition.6 Accordingly, for the first few years matinees were not intended to rival with evening performances, nor to attract the same kind of audience. They were instructive rather than entertaining and, as far as production and acting were concerned, made no pretence to compete with the traditional nightly assemblies. They were initially launched by one of those oddballs that the theatre occasionally throws up, a man of large ideas, always ready to experiment and to rush in where angels fear to tread. Hilarion Ballande had had a chequered earlier career. Accepted in the late 1840s as a pensionnaire at the Comedie-Franc^aise, for one reason or another - either in consequence of a quarrel with Rachel whose word, was law at the Comedie at this time, or else because, more simply, he could not rid himself of his strong Gascon accent — he was obliged to leave. With experience only in classical tragedy, he could find no openings in the boulevard theatres; so, rather than accepting a situation in the provinces, he started up a private drama school aimed at youngsters hoping to enter the Paris Conservatoire. Then in 1867 he founded a 'Societe de patronnage des jeunes auteurs inconnus', designed as a charitable organization to help struggling young playwrights to make a name for themselves; Ballande's idea was to perform their works privately, inviting critics to attend the shows - an idea not very different from that of Antoine when he launched his TheatreLibre twenty years later. He hoped to finance it by enlisting the help of twenty-five 'charitable ladies', each of whom would undertake to place a 100 francs worth of tickets; but it proved unexpectedly difficult to recruit these 'dames patronesses'. The society Ballande had founded was on the verge of collapse when a friend of his suggested trying out Sunday matinees; he had seen something of the sort done in London, where they worked quite well. But it was Ballande who had the additional luminous idea which eventually ensured success for the matinees: this was to arrange to have each one preceded by an introductory talk given by a guest speaker. The venture thus became something quite distinct from what the theatres, whether backed by the state or functioning as purely commercial enterprises, were offering: people went to a matinee hoping to learn something, and indeed were rarely disappointed in this. Admittedly, the very first of Ballande's matinees classiques, for

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The audiences

which the Gaite had been booked and which took place on a wet Sunday afternoon in January 1869, had everything against it, including the preliminary lecture, delivered by an authority on Sanskrit who was totally at sea when addressing an audience on the subject of Comeille's Le Cid. But subsequent lecturers were men of letters, authorities on the history of the drama, and often engaging speakers: particularly was this true of Francisque Sarcey, whose name on the poster brought in, it was said, an extra 1,000 francs in box-office receipts whenever he was billed to speak. His fee, incidentally, was 200 francs; Ballande was evidently a man of sound business instincts. The idea of preceding a dramatic performance with a lively and instructive lecture accorded with the thirst for education at this time, particularly among those groups of the population - the middleaged, and women generally — for whom provision of this sort was rarely made and hard to come by. The preliminary talk was often as enlightening and quite as interesting as the play that followed. Ballande's Sunday matinees took off properly after the FrancoPrussian war, and down to 1876 were staged at one of the largest theatres in Paris, the Porte-Saint-Martin, where to everyone's astonishment they were usually booked solid. Performers came to include well-known stars, Coquelin, Mounet-i ly, Sarah Bernhardt, with smaller parts taken by beginners, usually students at the Conservatoire, who were paid a modest fixed fee. The sets were rudimentary, the costumes commonplace, the actors not always word-perfect, the production mediocre; but the matinees were invariably applauded by the totally new audiences that flocked there. It was as though they had never seen Le Cid before and were discovering its beauties for the first time. It was an uneducated but reverential public, wrote Sarcey, composed of schoolboys at home on Sundays whose parents are at a loss what to do with them between two and six in the afternoon, and who bring them along thinking it might help them to pass their exams; of small shopkeepers attracted by the low entrance charges [3 francs for a seat in a box, 2 francs for an orchestra stall, 1 franc everywhere else]; of working-class people looking for a chance to scrape together some low-cost education; of studious young men fired with the love of the theatre; of all the floating population which on Sundays when the sun won't come out can't think how to fill an afternoon which seems interminable.7 Ballande had, perhaps more by good luck than good judgement, uncovered a whole new layer of the population to induct into the

Performance times — intervals — annual closures theatre world, and hit on exactly the right formula, to 'delight and instruct' them in the terms of the Horatian tag so widely quoted by educationists in the nineteenth century. Sarcey was perhaps not an entirely disinterested witness; but another observer, Emile Zola, cannot be suspected of having any but an impartial approach. He attended the last matinee of Ballande's first series, and reported on the occasion in La Cloche, the left-wing newspaper to which he was currently contributing. He noted that the audience was not composed entirely of schoolchildren and shop assistants finding time hang heavy on their one free day. A number of ladies arrived in carriages. The middle class predominated, with women in the majority, mostly accompanying girls and boys. A lot of elderly folk too. The cheap seats in the upper galleries remained mostly empty; the workers were conspicuous by their absence. A certain degree of culture is necessary before coming here; when everyone has learned to read, the proletariat will venture along to confront these forgotten masterpieces, but just now they feel more at ease in the taverns.8

Zola says nothing about the student element in the audience, but Sarcey's remarks on that subject were confirmed by Jules Lemaitre, who dates his own interest in the theatre from his introduction to the Sunday matinees when he was still at the Ecole Normale. That excellent fellow Ballande, who felt he had a public mission and wanted at one and the same time to do us honour and to help us complete our education, would send us every Sunday a score of complimentary tickets for his matinees . . . Since the theatre - the vast auditorium of the Gaite and later the Porte-Saint-Martin - was almost always chock-full, old father Ballande had us stand in the wings. We weren't complaining. Think of it! We could see the actors close to!

They were not, Lemaitre admits, the flower of their profession, but all the same, 'we were secretly tickled pink to be elbowed by those jolly barnstormers and to take away, adhering to our sleeves, a little of the white greasepaint on the bare arms of the actresses as they brushed by us'. 9 For the students of the Ecole Normale, who were still required to be back at a certain hour, matinees were an obvious boon. All the same, numerically they can have formed only an insignificant part of the audience; more important were the aged or infirm who disliked going about the streets at night, office clerks and shop assistants

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The audiences

working long hours during the week, and, most significant of all, the growing numbers of Parisians who had moved to the unspoiled countryside just outside the city, and for whom family visits to the centre were possible only on an afternoon. For all these reasons, Ballande's initiative was eventually copied, in the first instance by the Odeon and the Comedie-Fran^aise, since it arguably had a certain educational value appropriate to their function as statesupported institutions. The Odeon inaugurated its matinees populaires backed by introductory lectures in 1877, and Sunday matinees were started at the Comedie-Fran^aise the following year. Meanwhile, Ballande had moved from the Porte-Saint-Martin to the Theatre Dejazet, boldly baptizing his enterprise the 'Troisieme Theatre Frangais', with an eye to a state subvention which he eventually succeeded in obtaining, though on a more modest scale than he had hoped.10 But in 1880 he was forced into retirement, beaten by the competition, as more and more theatres jumped on to the bandwagon. By 1885 matinees had become generalized all over Paris: they would begin at 1.30 p.m. and continue till 5 p.m., and would be succeeded by the normal Sunday evening programme, so that once a week a sizeable proportion of the actors found they had to tread the boards twice in the same day. In 1886 Porel, director of the Odeon, took the further step of inaugurating a series of matinees du jeudi, angled specifically at schoolchildren, Thursdays being traditionally a half-holiday at state schools; these proved abidingly popular and ran until 1910. Porel's object was, as he expressed it in a letter to the minister,11 to provide pupils at elementary schools with 'as it were a living commentary on what they have learned in class; the stage performances will not overlap with the school lessons but will complement them, enabling the children to study from the scenic point of view the works of which their teachers will have stressed the literary aspect'. It was the first time a theatre built for adults was filled with an entirely underage audience, and the effect was delightful seen from the lectern, 'a swarm of little girls' heads, between ten and fifteen years old, not many roses in their cheeks but looking bright and wide-awake under their hats, their toques, and their bonnets; up in the galleries, the boys with their closely cropped heads; the happy humming of a hive, a joyous hubbub of light-toned voices'.12 Thursday matinees caught on as had the Sunday ones, the Comedie-Fran^aise entering the lists in 1891 and the Vaudeville, under the impulse of Albert Carre,

Performance times — intervals — annual closures starting a series aimed rather at an adult audience, since it included rarely seen plays of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, together with certain early works by playwrights who had still to make their mark: Paul Hervieu, Francois de Curel, Georges de Porto-Riche, etc. By the end of the century matinees were part of the theatrical scene, though tending always to stick to the original tradition of mounting interesting rather than merely entertaining plays. An ordinary evening audience in the earlier part of the nineteenth century expected entertainment rather than instruction, and would certainly never have sat through a preliminary talk, by however eminent a lecturer, setting the play in context. Compared to what it is like today, it tended, before the curtain rose, to be animated, even noisy. People started pouring in as soon as the doors were open, for as we have seen only certain categories of seats could be reserved in advance and it was a matter of making one's way hastily to one's favourite spot; there then ensued a good hour which had to be whiled away before the orchestra struck up as a prelude to the longawaited 'curtain up'. A description by a contemporary writer of a typical scene in the pit in the late 1830s, reserved it will be remembered for male spectators, gives an excellent impression of the hurly-burly, so different from the gentle hum of quiet conversations in the orchestra stalls of today before the houselights are dimmed. The majority, standing up, seem to be giving all their attention to the women as they make their appearance in the boxes and the balconies; the more pacific sit down for greater security; a few open a book or else scan idly the columns of the programme they have bought in the queue. Here, a voice is heard, calling to a friend: 'Over here! I've kept you a seat.' Elsewhere, a lively argument breaks out; people stand on the benches to catch a glimpse of the dispute; sometimes a guffaw greets a ridiculous claim due to ignorance of the laws and customs of the theatre, or to the naivety of some countryman or counter-jumper. This drama has its own actors and spectators; there is laughter, applause, then the usual denouement, the departure of the offender to the sound of clapping in one part of the arena while the other, whether sitting or standing, indifferent to the passions of the participants, seems calm . . . But there's an hour to wait, and the minutes seem an eternity! Excited, noisy, stamping their feet, singing, whistling, the spectators in the pit do what they can to relieve their tedium by every possible means, and sometimes utter satirical remarks or make insulting observations on the occupants of the boxes.13 At last the traditional rumble of knocking, culminating in three loud blows, resounds through the theatre as a signal for the curtain

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The audiences

to rise. The 'trois coups', heard less and less often these days when the dimming of the houselights serves as a warning, is thought to have originated at the Opera in the seventeenth century, when Lully, after the orchestra had tuned up, would thump with the heavy staff or stave that served him as baton to give the musicians 'a bar in advance'. 14 But the auditorium was seldom completely quiet during the opening scenes of a play. There were always the 'late arrivals' who, having reserved a box, made it a point of honour to turn up late and disturb the rest of the audience as much as possible by slamming the doors, scraping their chairs, and conversing in loud voices; those spectators who had arrived in time would shush them, thus contributing to the hubbub, but this was precisely what the latecomers wanted, to show that they had no need to queue, that they were of the class that dined late, that they had not come to see the play but to display themselves in all their finery, heedless of the pleasures of the plebeians in the pit and upper galleries which they were interrupting. Such arrogant behaviour was regularly though quite unavailingly denounced, but such was the deference to wealth and social standing in the nineteenth century that it never seems to have occurred to a single manager to ask latecomers to wait until the interval. Etienne de Jouy, writing under the First Empire, demanded to know why it is thought to be good form to arrive late at the theatre, to talk in loud tones in the corridors, to make oneself as conspicuous as possible as one enters one's box . . . The women spend their time making sure they are seen, greeting friends, examining every corner of the hall through their operaglasses; they lean halfway out of their boxes, nod or wave to each other, and the plot is already well developed before these ladies have even registered the names of the characters.1^ A hundred years later, matters seem scarcely to have mended in this respect. Georges Villard, at the beginning of the twentieth century, reminded his readers ironically that we have the good fortune to live in a country where three-quarters of the population would regard themselves as dishonoured if they were to arrive a few minutes before the curtain went up. To be there on time? Horrors! that's in the worst possible taste. It shows far more breeding to upset the course of the entertainment by making a noisy entry.16 Such fashionable unpunctuality had become so usual that clever playwrights took precautions accordingly. A. P. Dennery, one of the

Performance times - intervals - annual closures most prolific dramatists of the middle of the century, whose works were produced chiefly in the minor theatres along the Boulevard du Temple, realized that he was dealing with two distinct clienteles: his working-class patrons who were there from the start, occupying the upper circle, and his upper-class admirers who, dining later, arrived during the first interval to fill the boxes. Accordingly he took to preceding his more substantial dramas by a prologue concerned with events prior to the action proper but without which the plot would have been incomprehensible. After that he contrived to introduce into subsequent scenes, for the benefit of the latecomers, various retrospective references designed to explain what had already been dramatized in the prologue. Breaks in a performance were of course necessary whenever there was a change of scene, to give the actors a breathing space and allow the scene-shifters to do their work behind the curtain.17 Tragedies and comedies written in imitation of the classics and adhering to the unity of place did not require these breaks and were usually played by the Comedie-Frangaise, as were the works of Corneille and Moliere, straight through without interruption; the only intermission then occurred between the first play and the second, or between the tragedy and the comedy in the sequence normally observed in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, however, in the case of melodramas and particularly when the Romantics did away with the Aristotelian unities, whirling the spectator from Saragossa to Aix-la-Chapelle and back again, intervals within a play became more necessary and more frequent. They normally lasted for not more than ten minutes at commercial theatres, though at the Comedie-Frangaise and the Opera they could stretch to thirty minutes or more; but this was to allow playgoers to visit the foyer and meet their friends there or in the corridors behind the boxes. In the latter part of the century, when almost every theatre of any size boasted a foyer, intervals tended to become tiresomely long. Visiting the Varietes in 1910, and arriving a little after 9.0 p.m., Arnold Bennett discovered that the curtainraiser was still in progress, 'and after it was finished there would be the entr'acte - one of the renowned, interminable entr'actes of the Theatre des Varietes'. An actress, asked why the intervals were so long, 'replied with her air of finding even the most bizarre phenomena quite natural: "There are several reasons: one is, so that the gentlemen may have time to write notes and to receive answers.'" 18

57

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The audiences

A less scabrous reason, not mentioned by the author of The Old Wives3 Tale, was that with the shorter programmes that were becoming customary at the turn of the century, a long interval was necessary between the curtain-raiser and the main play in order not to have to send the spectators home at an unreasonably early hour. At an earlier period, when theatres equipped with foyers were in a minority, the problem for management was how to keep the audiences amused when the curtain was down and the stage was being rearranged. During the Revolution they often amused themselves, joining lustily in the singing of republican songs; while at certain theatres an actor would appear before the curtain to give details of the number of victims the guillotine had claimed that day. At Rouen's Theatre des Arts it seems to have been customary, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to invite amateur musicians to entertain the audience during the intervals; this was, it must be admitted, a more civilized custom than that common at the Odeon at one point, when the student element in the audience would compete in filling the air with imitations of the cries of wild animals. Even at a relatively late date, at the more down-market houses, the groundlings would pass the time making rude comments on incidents occurring elsewhere in the auditorium. 'If a gentleman approached too close to a lady to converse with her, a couple of humorists would engage in noisy wagers: "He's going to kiss her!" "Betcha he won't!" If a babe in arms whom its mother had been unwise enough to bring with her starts to bawl, one hears immediately from every quarter of the hall: "Give him the breast!" "Sit on him!" "Take him to the cloakroom!"' It was, as Bouchard says, 'a little comedy played out in the auditorium, sometimes encouraged and even initiated by the manager to dissimulate the length of the intervals'.19 All kinds of other devices were used to distract impatient spectators. The Panorama-Dramatique, in 1821, replaced the curtain dropped during intervals with one composed of a multitude of mirrors, reflecting the audience in fragmentary fashion; but it was judged, after the first season, to be more bizarre than diverting, and was removed during August 1822. Curtains made up of pictorial advertisements, the so-called rideaux de reclame, were more successful. They began to make their appearance shortly before the 1848 revolution, and in spite of a police regulation under the Second Empire prohibiting them as an unwanted intrusion of commercial

Performance times - intervals - annual closures

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values into what should be a purely artistic enterprise,20 they persisted at a number of Parisian theatres and even spread to the provinces. They gave the spectators something to look at and talk about during the intervals, and since the space was rented profitably to an advertising agency, they afforded the management a useful supplementary source of income. At every interval, a proportion of the spectators, instead of remaining in their seats, made their way to the exits; some to breathe fresh air, some heading for the nearest cafe, others needing to relieve themselves against a wall in a quiet street; women, in a like predicament, had no alternative but to apply to an ouvreuse who would unlock an evil-smelling cupboard set aside for the purpose. The pit, seen from above during one of the longer intervals, presented a colourful appearance, since the custom was for absentees wishing to reserve their place to tie a kerchief across the bench. Each member of the audience who intended to return was supplied by the controleur with a piece of cardboard of a special shape or colour which varied from day to day: this was the contremarque, the pass-out ticket or readmittance voucher, without which he was not allowed back into the theatre.21 This system, arising from the passion of theatre administrators for compelling their patrons to surrender a bit of cardboard or paper at every turn, encouraged the growth of yet another parasitic minor industry, for not everyone leaving the theatre during an interval intended to return; if the programme consisted of a series of short plays, he might have been content with having seen the first; or else, disappointed with the acting, he might decide to end his evening elsewhere. In such a case, he was always sure to find some individual hanging about outside the theatre who would make him an offer for his contremarque. Auguste Germain relates how as a boy he could seldom afford to buy a ticket at the counter but used all the same to spend his evenings near the entry. T would wait until the first interval and purchase from some spectator in a hurry to be elsewhere or bored and dissatisfied with the play, the contremarque that had been given him when he left; when I struck the bargain (5 sous for the minor theatres and 10 for the major ones) it gave me the right to see the rest of the programme.'22 This industry flourished particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century, before a single play preceded by a short curtain-raiser was considered sufficient for an evening's performance. In the 1830s almost every theatre was showing what were called spectacles coupes', Charles

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The audiences

Maurice quotes2^ a Comedie-Frangaise playbill for the period advertising, for a single evening: Phedre, followed by Andrieux's oneact comedy Le Manteau, followed by the third act of Lebrun's Marie Stuart, and terminating with the second act of Le Manage de Figaro. An intermission separated each play or act from the next, and this gave the marchands de contremarques their opportunity. Occasionally they were, like Germain, genuine spectators prepared to wait for their chance to get in on the cheap, but for the most part they were members of the large army of the unemployed, hoping to pick up a few coppers by offering to purchase his contremarque from a departing spectator and selling it at a small profit a few minutes later to a new arrival, who would be content to pay below the odds for a seat in the balcony even though he had missed the earlier items in the programme. The marchand de contremarques was easily recognized by his villainous appearance: 'he would be wearing a torn overall or an impossible frock coat, and his get-up might well frighten anyone who was not acquainted with his trade, that of a disguised mendicant'.24 But, like the ticket touts with whom they were not to be confused, they were uncannily perceptive in theatrical matters. The rate for buying and selling contremarques depended on how popular the play turned out to be, something they were adept at forecasting. Leaving the Vaudeville after the first night of the dramatized version of his novel Manette Salomon, Edmond de Goncourt overheard a snatch of conversation between two marchands de contremarques, one of whom predicted that the play would not have the success of Lavedan's Viveurs which had preceded it at the same theatre; his companion concurred. Goncourt had been certain, after its reception on the inaugural evening, that his play would easily run to a hundred performances; but the two ragged prophets were, in the event, shown to be absolutely correct: Manette Salomon, produced for the first time on 29 February 1896, was taken off on 24 March after a disappointingly short run. By the end of the eighteenth century the more important theatres had been fitted out with foyers intended for the use of the public during intervals. Von Halem describes that at the Theatre de la Nation (the ci-devant Theatre-Fran^ais) as 'a place set aside for conversations, and in the winter also to allow visitors to the theatre to warm themselves'.25 At that date (1790) it was probably no more than a lobby with a cheerful fire, but by 1864, when certain internal

Performance times ~ intervals — annual closures improvements were made at the Theatre-Frangais, the foyer had become a magnificent hall, displaying many of the art treasures accumulated by the Comedie-Franc.aise, including Houdon's famous statue of the seated Voltaire. In the latter part of the century there were particularly fine foyers too at the Odeon, the OperaComique, the Chatelet, and in Garnier's new opera house. They were something peculiar to France, as Brander Matthews noted. 'We have not the word, perhaps because we have not the thing. French theatres in general are so badly ventilated, and so soon become unendurably hot, and the waits between the acts are so much longer than is usual with us, that a necessity exists for some airy hall in which we may stretch our legs cramped by close quarters.' 26 An earlier American visitor to Paris, John Sanderson, was particularly impressed by the foyer in the Opera, at that time situated in the Rue Lepeletier, which he describes as 'an immense saloon (200 feet by 50) where a great number of fashionables, to relieve their ears from the noise of the singing, promenade themselves magnificently during the whole evening under the light of brilliant lustres; and where the walls, wainscotted with mirrors, multiply their charms to infinity'.27 At the time Sanderson was writing (1838), the 'fashionables' must have been exclusively of the male sex; ladies were supposed to remain in their boxes, and were only carried into the foyer if they had actually fainted in the overheated and airless auditorium. At a later date, this rule may have been relaxed, at least in the provinces; at Toulouse, before the First World War, the foyer was frequented, so it was said, by ladies of dubious reputation willing to console any moneyed husband whose wife was of a retiring disposition. Every foyer had its bar, serving tea and ices for the more refined clientele of the Opera and the Bouffes, bitter lemon and orgeat (a sweetish non-alcoholic syrup) at the Theatre-Fran^ais, beer, cider, and stronger drinks at other theatres. Under the Consulate, before a bar was installed in the foyer of the Theatre-Fran^ais, one could purchase refreshments (iced drinks in the summer, sherry and liqueurs in the winter) from counters set up near the boxes and the pit, where customers were served by young women belonging to the actors' families. Later in the century it was only in the down-market theatres, not boasting a foyer, that refreshments were sold in the auditorium during the intervals, hawked by two or three sturdy fellows shouting their wares and carrying baskets slung in front of

61

62

The audiences

them with sweetmeats, oranges, and barley sugar, as well as beverages of various kinds. For a long time there was only one period in the year, around Easter, when theatres in Paris were all closed, but the duration of this period varied in proportion to the degree the church was suffered to dictate its rules to lay audiences. Under the ancien regime it lasted, with certain invidious exceptions, from Passion Sunday (the fifth Sunday in Lent) to the first Sunday after Easter, a period of three weeks; but in 1793 these antiquated prohibitions were swept away and for the next six years the theatres remained open all the year round without intermission. However, the tradition of closing the theatres during the week before Easter was resumed at the start of the Consulate, though since the state did not recognize the church's canon until the ratification of the Concordat in 1802, the reason given for the closure was the popularity of the iete a Longchamp', described by Mrs Trollope in the tenth letter of her Paris and the Parisians as 'a splendid promenade in carriages, on horseback and on foot, to a part of the Bois de Boulogne called Lonchamps [sic]\ which by custom extended over the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of Passion Week. Under the Empire, the closure was generally limited to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, but after the fall of Napoleon an attempt was made to restore the earlier rule whereby all theatres were to remain closed during the week before and the week after Easter; this was, however, never strictly enforced and came more and more to be disregarded. Although the church was sufficiently powerful during the Restoration to discourage the faithful from going to the theatre over Lent, causing a notable decline in box-office takings in the three weeks preceding Easter, Easter Monday assured the theatres some of the best receipts of the year, as the devout made up for lost time. As for the provinces, it was unusual for theatres under the ancien regime to remain open all the year round; the periods when the theatre was to function varied from place to place, and were customarily specified in the contracts drawn up between the local authorities and the theatre director. When Mrs Cradock arrived at Aix-en-Provence in November 1784, she was disappointed to discover that theatrical performances lasted only from Christmas to June, the period during which the local parliament was in session. At Toulouse, in the eighteenth century, theatrical activity lasted from January to September, with a closure between March and June; in

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63

effect this amounted to two separate seasons a year, a practice also followed at Rheims and Angers. Elsewhere, at Rouen for instance, it appears that the theatrical season was confined to the winter months. These closures, varying in timing and duration, seem to have had no other raison d'etre than the reluctance of the local populations to provide audiences all the year round to watch the same company of actors. If these annual or biannual closures were less frequent in the provinces during the nineteenth century, the reason can be traced to the increasing availability of Parisian acting companies which had taken to touring the country during the summer months. As early as 1824, August was regarded in Paris as 'the month of leaves of absence, of new actors making their debuts, and of excursions into the country. Theatres either close down or, what comes to the same thing, are staffed by mediocre actors; box-office receipts fall to zero.'28 Summer was already, by this time, a dead season for the Paris theatres; temporary closures (reldckes) were encouraged by the growing tendency among the better-off to leave the capital in order to enjoy the purer air of the seaside and the country. The Odeon, the students' theatre, had for a long while been permitted to put up its shutters during the long vacation;2^ in the middle of the century its example was followed by the Opera. It was not just that the absence of the estivants, the visitors to summer resorts, was making itself felt more and more, but the counter-attractions, open-air balls and concerts in the parks, were competing successfully for the shrunken remainder of the theatre audiences. The Comedie-Frangaise fell back on its old favourites, Le Cid, Le Misanthrope, played to a scattering of schoolboys by pensionnaires in the absence of the seasoned troupers. Even the popular Opera-Comique, which in August 1820 could still launch a new opera-feerie entitled Corisandre or the Magic Rose and play it before large audiences fanning their burning cheeks throughout - to the extent that the musical gave its name to the article and for a short while the word eventail (fan) was supplanted by the neologism corisandre - even the Opera-Comique closed its doors on 1 July 1879 and did not reopen until 1 September. As for the commercial theatres, the few that remained open in the height of summer, like the Folies-Dramatiques, had to rely on a strange audience of seasonal tradesmen whose main business was concentrated in the winter months: umbrella manufacturers, furriers, coal-merchants etc. The one place of entertainment that did

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The audiences

consistently well during the summer months was the Circus, 'the only theatre', as Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote in June 1881, 'that does not suffer at this season in the year. On the contrary, this is its finest moment. When the summer comes, it shines the more, like the sun. A show intended for the eye, which it delights, it remains when the others, that speak to the mind, have fallen silent.'30 The change in Parisians' habits, encouraged by the explosive growth of the railways in the mid-century so that trains, especially to watering places like Vichy, Biarritz, and Baden, were crowded out in the height of summer, meant in effect that most managers were active only for eight months in the year. During their enforced vacations, they were only too happy to sublet their premises to anyone prepared to lease them for part or all of the period: young directors wanting to show what they could do, even with a scratch troupe, foreign companies who found they could hire a hall cheaply at this time of the year (Barrie's Peter Pan was played in English at the Theatre du Vaudeville in June 1908). Failing all this, the Paris company would choose one of their number, promote him to temporary manager, and rather than submit to enforced unemployment or the chances of a provincial tour, reopen the theatre and fill it with audiences attracted by the low prices, orchestra stalls being offered for as little as 1 or 2 francs by means of vouchers sent through the post to the homes of likely patrons.31 All kinds of people would set themselves up as 'summer directors'. A man who had successfully managed for years a theatre in some remote town in the provinces would decide, before he retired, to devote himself for a couple of months to running a vacant theatre in the capital, not in the expectation of making money but in order to earn the right to have inscribed on the bottom of his visiting card the magic words: 'former director of the Paris theatres'. A neglected dramatist, having met with nothing but polite refusals from every theatre to which he had offered his verse comedy, would resign himself to taking over a theatre one summer so that at least the masterpiece would not be totally lost to the world. A third man, more crafty, the manager of a small theatre in a western suburb, would make contact with a colleague on the other side of the city and persuade him, rather than that they should both lose money by closing down, that his usual public might be attracted by the novelty of a new company and vice versa: they and their actors changed places and, surprisingly, the speculation proved moderately successful.32

Performance times — intervals - annual closures The one theatre that never closed even in the height of summer was the Palais-Royal, where the company included all the best comic actors in Paris and had specialized for years in screamingly funny farces. However high the temperature rose, the auditorium remained 'as full as an egg in a bowl of bouillon', as Barbey d'Aurevilly expressed it. '"Every seat taken," exclaimed the controleur proudly as he mopped his forehead, and it was true. They rolled up, splitting with the heat and ready to split their sides laughing. One couldn't breathe, one was bathed in perspiration, sweat pouring everywhere, everyone looking a fright, but - everyone laughing.' And at each interval 'the whole audience, parched and burning, tumbled into the street and made for the theatre cafe where they would stuff themselves with ice cream and swill down as much beer as there was time for and then, when the bell rang for the next part of the programme, they would plunge once more into the furnace and start laughing again with the absurd laughter of men whom only laughter could distract from their discomfort.'33

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GHAPTER4

First nights and previews

The first performance of a new play has always held a special attraction for lovers of the theatre. Whenever one was announced in the eighteenth century audiences tended to be more excited and more partisan than at subsequent performances when the novelty had worn off. This was only to be expected, particularly if rumours about the work had circulated in advance to be bandied about by cafe wits, and curiosity was added to high expectations, the former easily satisfied, the latter usually dashed. With the extreme paucity of original dramatic works produced outside Paris, such events were confined, in practice, to the capital. 'It's a great day', wrote Voltaire to one of his correspondents, Tor the elegant idlers of Paris when a new play is put on; everyone wants a box and at midday footmen are to be seen everywhere in the auditorium' occupying the seats in readiness for their masters. 'The play is judged before it is even seen; wherever there is a gathering of women and fops, it is a major topic of conversation; the coffee-houses are full of people discussing it; there are crowds in the street as there will be by and by in the pit.'1 The pit would manifest its opinion in no uncertain way, particularly if it felt the play could be tightened up; the cries 'cut, cut' would warn the dramatist where he needed to shorten a scene, and the second and subsequent performances were often only a condensed version of the first. Undoubtedly the most sensational 'first night' of pre-revolutionary times was that of Le Manage de Figaro on 27 April 1784, largely on account of the intense speculation aroused by the censorship's hesitations over the previous three years whether or not to authorize its performance. Great ladies did not scruple to beg the use of a corner in an actress's dressing-room where they could spend the morning so as to be able to take their seats in advance of the rush, while outside aristocrats and artisans struggled with one another to 66

First nights and previews

67

reach the doors when they opened; in the subsequent scrimmage, three people were reported to have lost their lives. Not waiting to buy tickets, most of those who succeeded in getting in flung their money to the porters as they stormed past. In no time at all the auditorium was jam-packed; a good half of the crowd which had been waiting since eight in the morning had to return home crestfallen and exhausted.2 No subsequent first night occasioned scenes comparable with this, though the earliest Romantic dramas, put on by the ComedieFran^aise in the last years of the Restoration, aroused something like the same curiosity and excitement, leading to wild stampedes to get in and secure a seat. Paul Foucher relates how he and Merimee, having queued for an hour to witness the first performance of Dumas's Henri HI et sa com (10 February 1829), found the auditorium in an uproar when they finally got inside. In the battle for seats, 'Merimee, who was in front of me, displayed all the qualities of a distinguished strategist, which none the less failed to give us victory'; whereupon he straightened his cravat, covered his crumpled shirt under his dinner jacket and left to call on a society hostess and relate the adventure with his usual verve.'3 By comparison, the first night of Hugo's Hernani the following year, which literary historians regard as the final breakthrough of Romanticism on the French stage, appears to have been a relatively ordered affair, with nothing worse than the usual noise of chairs and benches being moved, doors shutting noisily, and a hum of conversation broken by the occasional loud exclamation. The house was full, admittedly, which was unusual at the Theatre-Frangais at this period; but Hugo had taken the precaution of packing the cheaper seats with his supporters at this inaugural performance, and the real 'battle of Hernani" took place on later nights, when the opposition had rallied and did their best to shout down this revolutionary drama. It was under the July Monarchy that the unique nature and distinctive composition of first-night audiences first started to manifest itself. It became increasingly the done thing to attend on such occasions, though less to applaud the efforts of the dramatist and his interpreters than to sit and watch in disdainful silence, as if the spectators were hardened connoisseurs who had seen it all before and whom nothing could surprise. This was what Nerval called in 1840 'the terrible audience of first performances, so indulgent towards third-rate products, so pitiless cowards forceful works of real literary

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The audiences

merit.' 4 Discussing the opening of Felix Pyat's Le Chiffonnier de Paris (The Paris Ragpicker) at the Porte-Saint-Martin on n May 1847, Gautier took the opportunity to characterize the component elements of such an audience and describe its comportment. Society people and artists, critics and poets, genuine or pseudo-duchesses, all the people who come to opening nights, eager and at the same time blase, enthusiastic and mocking, never to be caught out, with that experience of the stage possessed by a veteran actor turned stage manager who is never to be taken in by a banal effect, who can foresee how the drama will end as soon as the curtain goes up by the way the chairs are set out and the doors disposed on the set and by nuances in the costumes of the characters.5

In 1858, at the same theatre, the Goncourts were present at the opening performance of a play by Victor Sejour, and recorded in their diary their impressions of the people who made up the audience: actresses' mothers, writers of vaudevilles, critics, men one can't put a name to but who have some sort of a name in the theatre, who have a claim on the manager or have lent money to the author or have friends on the staff of some newspaper, who are related to the prompter or to the man who shows you to your seat.6

Clearly, the social level of first-night audiences had fallen under the Second Empire, or else the Goncourts, not for the first or last time, are indulging their penchant for malicious satire. Equally clearly, as is implied by their remarks, a first-night audience was composed at this period almost entirely of spectators who had not paid to see the show. It was essential to have a full house, even if the managers lost money; they would hope to recoup it at later performances, once the first had been acclaimed a success, a treat not to be missed, by these venal judges. At the most, a score of tickets would be made available to the general public so as to maintain the pretence that the theatre was open to all comers. But in the last decade of the Second Empire, as the Goncourts noted once more (1 March 1862), attendance at first-night performances was already becoming de rigueur in the fashionable world; they observed how the corridors during the intervals were 'full of those same pretty fellows wearing foreign decorations who can be seen thronging the balls at the Opera. A young man trying to launch himself in society, someone with a quarter stake in a stockbroker's business, a commis-

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sion agent on the loose and trying to be in the swim cannot afford not to be present at an opening night.'? It was somewhere one simply had to be seen at: a social occasion, for which the pretext, the new play, was the least of the preoccupations of those who attended. 'One could carry out on these first-night audiences', wrote Jules Claretie in 1867, 'which differ very little from one theatre to another, an interesting statistical study or, if you will, a chemical analysis; if one separated out the elements that composed it, if one were to heat up the component atoms, one would find precious little heroism at the bottom of the test tube.' 8 In the first volume of his theatrical studies entitled Entr'actes, Dumas^/j1 included an essay, 'Les Premieres Representations', which was originally written for a guide book intended for visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1867. It is here that he put forward a kind of conspiracy theory to explain why some plays succeed after an opening performance and go on to enjoy lengthy runs while others fail and have to be taken off shortly afterwards. The theory was frequently referred to in subsequent years, though how seriously it was meant to be taken is hard to say: its purpose may have been no more than to mystify the many provincials and foreigners who flocked to Paris that year. The fate of any new play, he asserts, is decided by a secret jury of some two to three hundred individuals 'who spend the entire winter going from one theatre to another, but only when a first performance is announced'. This group is made up of the most heterogeneous elements who, from the point of view of intelligence, life-style and social rank, are utterly incompatible. It includes men of letters, men of the world, artists, foreigners, stockbrokers, clerks, great ladies, shopmen, respectable women and fast women. They all know one another by sight, sometimes by name, and without ever exchanging a word, know in advance that they will all be present without fail at every opening night and will see one another there. What unites these two or three hundred men and women is that each has the necessary flair to know whether the play will succeed or be a flop. It is a gift, says Dumas, that one either has or has not, which owes nothing to education or understanding, but everything to tact and experience. During a performance they sit attentive and impassive, neither applauding nor laughing nor wiping their eyes; they never leave before the end of the play but at certain moments they will communicate with one another by a look, a wink, a half-smile, a

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The audiences

way of rubbing their nose or handling their opera-glasses. But once the curtain has fallen and their verdict, from which there is no appeal, has been reached, they make their way to the hundred spots where reputations are established or demolished, the clubs, the cafes, the drawing rooms of society hostesses, and here each one gives his verdict, which is always identical to that of all the others and is always accepted. Within the hour, a reputation is either made or torn to shreds. Even if this story has to be dismissed as an elaborate spoof, it is a fact that these opening nights were attended by those who, if not by word of mouth then certainly in the public prints, had the power to make or break a new play. This was beginning to be realized in prerevolutionary times, when it was principally the Journal de Paris and the Petites Affiches which reported on new creations at the major theatres; one playwright, La Harpe, smarting under the ridicule heaped only too often on his dramatic efforts by the journalists, actually got up a petition in 1784 for an order to be made prohibiting any mention of new plays until they had been given a certain number of performances. This proposal, in spite of being backed by the Comedie-Francaise, was laughed out of court, but the distrust with which dramatic critics were viewed persisted a long time afterwards and, it must be admitted, with good cause in certain cases.9 Some theatre directors preferred to dispense with all newspaper publicity and made it a point of policy not to send out complimentary tickets to the press for an opening night. Pier Fiorentino, having noticed that in general his fellow scribes concerned themselves solely with what was being shown at the major theatres, thought it might be interesting to report occasionally on the activities of the despised working-class playhouses; accordingly he approached Mourier, the director of the Folies-Dramatiques, and imparted to him his project. Mourier received him with the greatest deference and invited him to take a seat in a front box. In the course of the evening he entered the box to make sure the critic was comfortable; he assured Fiorentino that the management was greatly honoured by his presence and that he would always be made welcome whenever he chose to visit the Folies-Dramatiques. 'But', he added, I have one request to make of you: it is that you should never mention any of our productions in your column. I have my regular public, and I am afraid you might upset them by something you might print. My audiences

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are delighted with what I give them, and it would be just too bad if you were to persuade them that the pleasure they take is all wrong.10 It was understood at all up-market theatres that the management should furnish the press with complimentary tickets whenever a new play was due to have its first performance;11 but if a particular critic was thought to be habitually captious, he might find that this courtesy no longer applied to him personally; it was a long time before theatre directors in France became persuaded of the truth of the adage 'all publicity is good publicity'. In February 1869 the Ambigu-Comique omitted to send Barbey d'Aurevilly, then writing for Le Nainjaune (a satirical sheet founded by Aurelien Scholl), the expected invitation to the opening performance of Claretie's La Famille des Gueux (The Beggar's Family); they even refused to allow him to book a seat when he tried to do this. Barbey had had the same trouble a year earlier when the Gymnase had put him under a similar embargo, and on that occasion he had used his theatre column to denounce the whole system of sending free tickets to dramatic critics, which amounted, he said, to a 'disguised backhander . . . a tacitly understood connivance between the managers who deliver these tickets and the critics who receive them'.12 Did it not amount to a bribe ensuring that reviews based on the opening nights should at least not be too devastating and deter the general public from attending on later occasions? But there were few mavericks of the kidney of Barbey, and journalists continued to pay for their free seats by writing fulsome or at least anodyne accounts of the entertainment offered. The presence of the press added to the interest of first nights. By the time the second interval arrived, the foyer was full of a rumble of voices, 'some laughing, someone venting his ill temper, a humorous sally prepared in advance which misfires, an involuntary one which makes a hit, regrets and comparisons on the part of old-timers, a new actor brought to light, an old one banished to the outer darkness, yesterday's chorus girl promoted to tomorrow's leading lady'.13 If the play in general has passed muster, it is agreed that it will be given favourable reviews. Should there happen to be present representatives from Belgium or the departments of the north, they scribble a few sentences in their notebooks in confirmation of the triumph, tear out the sheets and stuff them in an envelope which they toss down into the street where a man is standing on the look-out with

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instructions to take it straight to the railway station; and over the next few days the world will learn that yet another dramatic masterpiece has emerged from the Paris stage. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century the urgent need to inform the public as promptly as possible whether a play was worth seeing or not led to the press being invited not to the first night but to the dress rehearsal the day before. Previously the dress rehearsal, known as the repetition generate, had been held in strict privacy, with at most a few close friends of the author invited to come along and keep an eye open for any slow passages that could be speeded up or any bits of unintentional humour which might provoke untimely mirth in the audience. D u m a s ^ was adamantly opposed even to this practice of admitting trustworthy friends to such previews: they cannot resist the temptation of revealing to their companions, halfway through the opening night, how it's all going to end; and as for the advice they might give, a dress rehearsal, he argued, comes too late for that sort of thing. However, as the actress who had the lead part in Ponsard's Charlotte Corday in 1850 revealed, it became customary about the middle of the century to hold 'one or two preparatory performances in front of a strictly limited audience consisting of a few friends of the author and a few colleagues of the actors'.'4 It was during the first decade of the Third Republic that the close privacy in which dress rehearsals had been held began to be relaxed. Invited audiences came to include gossip columnists taking notes, one or two black-and-white artists, and a sprinkling of men-abouttown. The pressure for invitations grew. Victorien Sardou is credited with being the first to break with the traditional privacy of the generate; not being able to satisfy all the requests he had received for complimentary tickets to the first night of his drama Fedora (12 December 1882), he issued invitations to the dress rehearsal, reckoning on around a hundred turning up; in the event, five times as many came. But even before this, on 25 May 1881, Zola had warned his readers of the grave danger threatening first-night audiences: that of being dispossessed. Formerly new plays came to them directly, and the first night was a solemn occasion, when a judgement against which there was often no appeal was pronounced. But with the modern system of holding a dress rehearsal in front of a full audience, there are in reality two opening

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performances, two judgements that sometimes contradict one another, so that one doesn't know which to believe and he instanced the recent dramatization at the Odeon of Daudet's novel Jack, which fell flat before the invited audience who saw the dress rehearsal, as a consequence of which the authors made certain cuts in the fourth act which resulted in a very successful first night.15 Other reservations were made by professionals like Albert Lambert, who was strongly of the opinion that the general public should be excluded from dress rehearsals. To allow in strangers anticipates the necessary excitement of an opening night, and lessens the possibility of the actors giving an inspired performance. A dress rehearsal before a full house means that the real public is given only a second performance, and everyone with any experience of the theatre knows that second performances are execrable - it's become proverbial on the stage. Everyone is relaxed, the fire has died down, and the audience is served up with the left-overs from last night's banquet.' 6

But in spite of these protests, by the end of the century dress rehearsals, often attracting capacity audiences, came to replace in the social calendar the first nights of former times. Gustave Guiches gave a circumstantial account17 of one of these typically Parisian occasions of the belle epoque - the preview of his own play Snob on 4 April 1897. Outside the Theatre de la Renaissance a crowd had gathered to point out and name the various celebrities as they arrived in their carriages: dramatists like Victorien Sardou, statesmen — Henri Rochefort, Georges Clemenceau, Waldeck-Rousseau — old army war-horses like the Due d'Aumale, one of the sons of LouisPhilippe who had distinguished himself in Algeria, and of course that most devoted of British francophiles, Edward Prince of Wales, the eternal heir-apparent. The arrival of Sarah Bernhardt in the director's box, flanked by her son Maurice and by Edmond Rostand, was the signal for the three hammer blows that announced the start of the evening's entertainment. The dress rehearsal of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac later that same year was an occasion remembered all their lives by those who witnessed it. 'The curtain had long since fallen on the final words, but an indescribable ovation kept the audience on its feet, quivering with excitement. It was practically an apotheosis. At two in the morning the spectators were still laughing, weeping, clapping and

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would not leave. People totally unacquainted with one another were embracing in the corridors. It was total delirium.' 18 A later drama by Edmond Rostand, Chantecler (1910) had to be given two 'dress rehearsals', such was the fury to attend; on the first of these, traffic was brought to a halt along the boulevard at 5.0 p.m. and no cars or carriages were allowed through unless their occupants could produce tickets to the show. To be able to say that one had attended this or that generate and to comment on it in public was proof one was 'in the swim' and had the right connections, since admission was, theoretically at least, by invitation only. Attempts to suppress this privilege reserved for the swells could result in a bad press, as Antoine discovered when he agreed with Brieux in 1898 that the dress rehearsal of his latest work, an attack on the evils of betting called Resultat des courses (Racing Results), should be given not, as was customary, to a select audience but to the general public, admitted without charge; the same experiment was tried at the Varietes in 1901 with Henri Lavedan's Les Medicis, a play roundly hissed at its first performance by the smart set as a protest at having been cheated of their exclusive right to attend the dress rehearsal. In 1902 a certain number of theatre managers, alarmed at the financial losses these crowds of non-paying invited guests represented for them, launched a campaign to discontinue the system of having dress rehearsals taking place before an audience, and to revert to the earlier custom of holding them behind closed doors. They obtained backing from the playwrights' union, whose members similarly saw themselves defrauded of a portion of their royalties which were always calculated as a percentage of the box-office takings, and it was accordingly decided that in future the author of a new work and the manager of the theatre where it was to be produced should each be allowed to issue no more than twelve tickets of admission to the generate, on pain of a fine of 3,000 francs if this limit was exceeded. But dramatists soon discovered that their plays were invariably barracked at the opening performance by spectators who, by this time, had come to regard it as their unequivocal right to be the first to see them at the dress rehearsal. The former practice was tacitly reinstated before the year was out: Henri Bataille's adaptation of Tolstoy's Resurrection had its dress rehearsal before a full audience and not a squeak was heard from the Societe des auteurs dramatiques. For a long time now, dress rehearsals had been in practice

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previews of a forthcoming production and were in part intended, as are previews of television series today, to allow journalists to inform their readers in advance what they might expect to see in the near future. The two things were, however, only broadly analogous. A preview today, being on film, differs not a jot from what the viewer will see in due course; whereas a dress rehearsal will often differ considerably from a first performance. Mistakes are sometimes made even at this stage, there may be a call for a scene or part of a scene to be run through again. There are always hitches of one sort or another: the whole purpose of a dress rehearsal is to 'iron out the bugs', and the fact that the audience, large or small, is non-paying means that the performance is never taken quite so seriously by the cast. But reviews, in the last two or three decades before the First World War, came to be based on these late rehearsals rather than on a first performance. Auguste Vitu is said to have been the first theatre critic to be invited to watch a dress rehearsal; later, other influential writers were admitted; only Sarcey stoutly refused to avail himself of the privilege, saying that to invite critics to a dress rehearsal was equivalent to inviting one's dinner guests two hours in advance with the promise they shall be taken down to the kitchen and invited to taste the sauces. Moreover, to base a judgement on a dress rehearsal was patently unfair, since a dress rehearsal can be a disaster. The prevalent superstition is that it has to be a disaster, so that 'it'll all come right on the night'. But in the meantime the reviews will have been written; some of them will even have appeared in print: Sardou, a year before his death, sued the newspaper Le Matin for publishing a review of his last play, U Affaire des poisons, in advance of the first performance. Coming away from the dress rehearsal, one can hear, wrote Sarcey, the derogatory remarks passed by the journalists: 'God, how awful, it'll never go to the end'; comments that are bandied about the same evening in clubs and cafes. The following day, when the curtain goes up on the opening performance, half the seats downstairs and in the balcony are empty. The atmosphere is lugubrious, you wonder where they've put the coffin. It's hardly surprising the house is only half full: the first-night audience is composed of pretty well exactly the same invited guests who figured at the dress rehearsal. The critics are in no hurry, they are quietly finishing their dinner. They turn up, all warm and flushed, towards the start of the second act. They whisper casually to their neighbour: 'Well, how goes it? Tedious, isn't it? You'll see:

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we were bored to tears yesterday.' How can you expect any audience to resist such insinuations? A deathly chill descends everywhere. The critics mostly leave before the end, to glance over the review they drafted earlier, sometimes changing a word here and there to take account of any new impressions left by the opening performance.19 Dramatic criticism had expanded and developed in unforeseen ways over the last quarter of a century. Previously, a^mall group of intelligent men, a dozen at most, used to compose every Sunday a long, carefully considered article on the new plays that had been launched the previous week: these review articles came out on the Monday - hence the name, les lundistes, given to these respected spokesmen. They continued to function, providing authoritative judgements, but under the Third Republic they were supplemented by a new breed of less experienced newsmen whose job was to provide their readers with a rapid impression of a new play the day after its opening performance: they were known as soiristes. Readers of newspapers, who numbered at this time a growing proportion of the population, required an almost instantaneous account of any new dramatic production in Paris. If an opening performance did not finish until midnight, the report — hardly a review — had to be scribbled out hastily by a blurry-eyed hack on the corner of a table in the newspaper office, since the presses started rolling half an hour later. In such circumstances a reporter, using his connections, would do all he could to wangle an invitation to a dress rehearsal, treating it as a preview; at least he would then be able to sketch out his preliminary draft at leisure and would still have time to modify it here and there in the light of the first public performance. Thus the soiriste, with his rapid, lively bulletins, performed an important function in the complex development of the theatre industry at this time: he was the indispensable channel of communication, informing the huge army of consumers what was on offer, what particular tastes were being catered for, what was likely to satisfy them and what could be safely ignored. Sainte-Beuve's definition of a critic, as a man who can read and teaches others how to read, is no longer applicable, wrote Lhomme in 1887: 'a critic today is a man who warns the public that at such-and-such a place they will be bored while elsewhere they will be amused'.20 The soiriste was the trusted guide as to what could be expected at the various places of theatrical entertainment.

CHAPTER 5

Order and disorder in the theatres

There was always a risk, before and during the French Revolution and even occasionally after it, for peaceful citizens visiting the theatre to find themselves embroiled in rough and violent incidents. Audiences were always noisy, apt to interrupt performances and now and then squabbles would lead to fighting, with the possibility of fatal consequences. Disorder was more likely to occur in the provinces than in the capital where, thanks largely to the stern edicts against most forms of misbehaviour, there were fewer instances of trouble-makers causing riots. Thus, a police ordinance of 2 April 1780 made it illegal 'to shout or make any noise before the performance begins, and in the course of the play to blow whistles or boo, to put one's hat on one's head or interrupt the actors in any fashion and no matter on what pretext'.1 To ensure quiet behaviour, an earlier ordinance had established a military guard at the two Comedies, consisting originally of about thirty fusiliers, increased by 1788 to fifty-six at the Comedie-Francaise, sixty at the Opera, and sixty-seven at the Comedie-Italienne.2 They were stationed too at the minor theatres, as is evident from a passage in Mercier's Tableau de Paris: When you arrive in front of a theatre, you perceive a company of guardsmen with shouldered arms. Crispin and Harlequin never appear on the boards until the grenadiers in their high hats have surrounded the building in which mirth and laughter will shortly resound. These soldiers, who are present at a Racine tragedy as well as at one of the vaudevilles of Piis and Barre, perform military manoeuvres on the square as if preparing to do battle with the enemy: such is the prelude to a comedy.

They were employed inside the theatre too: in case of crowding, their orders were to shove together the occupants of benches without regard to complaints. 'You are obliged to listen to Moliere under a grenadier's moustache. If you laugh or weep inordinately, the 77

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grenadier, who neither weeps or laughs, has his eye on you and makes sure your sensibility does not exceed the permitted degree.5 Nevertheless, Mercier sees some good in this military policing of the auditorium which, he adds in parenthesis, would never be tolerated among the freedom-loving English. There is, admittedly, some constraint; but the performance is never disturbed in too unseemly a fashion. The lover of Corneille, who wants to hear him without being distracted by capriciousfitsof bad temper from the crowd, can indulge himself quietly knowing that the pleasure he is taking will not be disturbed by rude mutterings. Insolence and audacity are stamped on immediately. When the officer commanding the guard is a man of sense and honour, all things considered one is bound to approve of our system of policing the audience; it is essential in Paris, as much as it would be superfluous in London. In a theatre, it is necessary to sacrifice a portion of one's liberty in order to enjoy the other portion with greater security.* Once the Revolution was under way, however, the presence of armed troops inside a theatre to control an audience was increasingly felt as tyrannical; the contrast with London, already pointed out by Mercier, was emphasized by Marie-Joseph Chenier in a letter to the press dated 18 September 1790. He claimed to have discussed the question with British tourists staying in Paris, who professed the utmost astonishment at the French custom of 'maintaining order inside the theatre at musket-point; they spoke derisively of the liberty of a nation which allows itself to be surrounded by armed men when they are enjoying a show for which they have paid good money'.^ A few months later, the Constituent Assembly took appropriate action: by clause 7 of the decree of 13 January 1791, the military guard attached to each theatre was forbidden to enter it except when specifically requested to do so by the civil power. This remained the rule throughout the Revolution and under every regime in the nineteenth century. The civil power was represented by a police commissioner in uniform, assigned a particular seat in the auditorium from which he could, as far as possible, oversee all the spectators. A limited number of police officers were also present to carry out his orders; they were of course unarmed, but had at their disposal a room in which they could hold any person apprehended for disturbing the peace, for interrogation pending prosecution. The troops outside the theatre were normally used only for crowd control and for directing traffic; as John Carr was able to observe in 1802, 'horse and foot soldiers are stationed in the avenues, to keep them

Order and disorder in the theatres clear, to prevent depredation, and to quell the first indication of popular commotion'; 5 while another visitor from England, with vivid memories of the savage conditions prevailing in pre-revolutionary days, admitted at the same date that nothing could be better regulated than the present police, both interior and exterior, of the theatres of Paris. The eye is not shocked, as was formerly the case, by the presence of black-whiskered grenadiers, occupying different parts of the house, and by the inflexible sternness of their countenance, awing the spectators into a suppression of their feelings. No fusilier, with a fixed bayonet and piece loaded with ball, now dictates to the auditors in the pit that such a seat must hold so many persons, though several among them might, probably, be as broad-bottomed as Dutchmen. If you find yourself incommoded by heat or pressure, you are at liberty to declare it without fear of giving offence. The criticism of a man of taste is no longer silenced by the arbitrary control of a military despot who, for an exclamation or a gesture not exactly coinciding with his prepossessions, pointed him out to his myrmidons and transferred him at once to prison.6

A different source of discomfiture awaiting theatre-goers in the eighteenth century, both before and after the Revolution, was that of losing their valuables to the cutpurses against whom one needed to be perpetually on one's guard. A theatre crowded with spectators jostling with one another provided an excellent opportunity for pickpockets working individually or sometimes in gangs, using violent methods. But although such incidents were not uncommon under the Directory, the strengthening of the police during the Consulate appears to have put a stop to them. There remained, it is true, another source of scandal which proved impossible to eradicate so easily, either then or later in the century: this was the presence in certain theatres of great numbers of prostitutes, noisy, brazen, and insolent towards the starchier members of the audience. For a generation or more, the gardens of the Palais-Royal had served as their stamping-ground, a circumstance that attracted a particular male clientele to the theatres in the neighbourhood. In 1793 the Commune ordered them all to be rounded up and sent to the Salpetriere, the city Bridewell. The order was, however, rescinded under the Directory and the girls returned in force to the theatres. Already in December 1795 their presence in the auditorium of the Theatre de la Republique was the subject of regular police reports, one of which suggested that 'the closing of public foyers in all the theatres would be an excellent way of suppressing gatherings of

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irresponsible young men and their light-o'-loves'.7 This solution was considered too drastic and the nuisance persisted: a further confidential report in January 1799 drew a lurid picture of the scenes to be observed every evening at the Vaudeville and the Theatre Montansier (the future Theatre du Palais-Royal) where, the writer alleged, 'prostitutes occupy a third of the available space, sitting sometimes in the best seats, defiantly flaunting their extravagant luxury and uninhibited behaviour in the face of respectable women next to whom they place themselves and who can hear them striking shameful bargains of a nature to horrify the chaste ears that are forced to listen'.8 The doubling of the Theatre Montansier as a place of assignation continued for some years after the collapse of the Directory; in 1802, a visitor from London referred to the 'lobbies, or foyers as they are called, in which the ladies of the Palais-Royal roam at large, as at Covent Garden or Drury Lane. On this account, Montansier is not much frequented by women of character; though now and then, it is the fashion even for the first females of the place to make parties and go there.'9 The management must have appreciated the drawing power of the hetaerae, since they were granted free entry to the theatre - up to a maximum of fifty girls provided they sat together in the balcony between the two sets of front boxes. A police commissioner, by name Robillard, presided benignly over this collection of venal beauties: corpulent, bespectacled, with powdered hair and silver earrings, he figured admirably the eunuch in charge of a Turkish harem; his pockets were full of sweets to distribute to the more favoured of his odalisques, while for the less well behaved he had at his disposal a room in which they could be locked during the intervals, a punishment greatly dreaded since it deprived them of the opportunity of meeting clients and making arrangements with them in the foyer. It was no different in the provinces. At Marseilles, before the Revolution, prostitutes were to be seen occupying boxes at the Grand-Theatre, while at Nantes the municipality took cognisance of their activities in a by-law dated 15 March 1796 which conceded that the police had no right to forbid them entry to the theatres, but that in order that they should be subject at least to supervision, they should be required always to occupy 'the six boxes in the second row on the left'. The local historian who recorded this decision of the municipal council was writing in 189310 and admits that even in his own time the same disgraceful scenes could be witnessed, as indeed

Order and disorder in the theatres they could in the capital. Under the heading 'L'Abonnee de ramphitheatre' Pierre Giffard, whose work on theatrical mores dates from 1888, described the subject of his essay as an unaccompanied female who takes her seat in the balcony wearing a provocative dress (an off-the-shoulder frock leaving the arms bare). During the intervals one sees this decollete lady make her way down to the vestibule furnished with mirrors which separates the amphitheatre from the main corridor. And there she and her like transact excellent business with gentlemen in evening dress. Every night one sees ten or twelve nymphs in low-cut gowns in the amphitheatre of the Opera: half a dozen on the left and the same number on the right.11

Contemporary accounts by visitors from abroad of the behaviour of audiences during the Consulate varied according to their country or origin. Those used to the loud conversation during performances at the Haymarket were struck by the quiet that prevailed in the Paris theatres which were, in general, 'more orderly and less subject to riots, indecency, and disturbance' than those in London.12 A German traveller, on the other hand, found sitting in the pit to be quite unbearable, what with the ignorant chatter of his neighbours about the promiscuity of actresses and the foul smell of beer and pipe tobacco they bring with them. If one pays for a better seat, one is plagued by the tittle-tattle of unattached young women, dressed in the height of fashion, who wander around throughout the performance flirting with the male spectators. However, the most intolerable of all, Reichardt concludes, are the English, 'who are present in great numbers and usually occupy half the good seats. Most of the time they pay not the slightest attention to the play but either swap stories about their experiences in Paris or ask everyone within earshot whose pretty face that is in one of the boxes or on the stage.'13 None of this, however, could count as disorderly behaviour, even though it might not measure up to the decorous standards observed in the theatres of Reichardt's native Saxony. The Parisians themselves felt that audiences, particularly those at the Theatre-Francois, were if anything too long-suffering: they endured quietly conditions which, before the Revolution, would have provoked noisy protests. 'An interesting play is announced on the theatre posters; a poor one is substituted; they are silent. Talma is to play; Dupont takes his place; they don't object. The intervals are endless, they wait uncomplainingly. The soldiers of the guard, instead of clearing a passage, block it. They push, they are pushed, and remain patient.'14

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For all that, audiences at the Comedie-Franc.aise were not invariably pacific; they could still, if pushed too far, show their teeth. Behind every serious theatre riot in the nineteenth century there lay some immediate political grievance. It was not always as it had been during the Revolution, a matter of mutually hostile elements within an audience contesting with one another; ^ sometimes the audience was united in damning a particular play, either because its political message was considered offensive or because the author was felt to be too closely associated with those who were working to promote an undesirable political development. Both these factors came into play when the audience at the Theatre-Fran^ais rounded in a frenzy of hostility on Carrion-Nisas's tragedy, Pierre le Grand. The author, a fellow student of Bonaparte at the military academy of Brienne, had been one of his earliest supporters and had openly sided with him at the coup d'etat of 18 brumaire (9 November 1799). Later, as a member of the Tribunate, Carrion-Nisas had spoken in favour of the proposed establishment of the Empire when the question came up for debate in 1804; his Pierre le Grand, which had been accepted by the Comedie-Franc.aise the previous year, was billed for 19 May 1804, a bare month after the execution of the Due d'Enghien and on the very eve of the proclamation of the Empire. No matter what its content, a dramatic work by a known adherent of Bonaparte, performed at such a juncture, was bound to arouse interest and risk a hostile reception. Carrion-Nisas himself fully recognized this; in a letter to the Gazette de France he said he anticipated 'one of the most memorable rackets that has ever been heard at the Theatre-Franc, ais'.16 He was not disappointed: the racket (charivari), organized by students from the law and medical faculties and the Ecole Polytechnique, was ear-splitting, and came from both within the theatre and outside, where those who had been unable to gain admittance stationed themselves in the Rue Richelieu and booed the play quite as heartily as those who were watching it from the pit and galleries. The uproar started as soon as the curtain rose, continued all through the first and second acts, and in the third act rose to a crescendo. Talma, who had faced angry crowds in his time, was visibly shaken; Monval, playing the patriarch of Moscow, broke off in the middle of the fifth act and asked the audience whether it was their wish the play should continue. A thunderous 'no!' was the answer, and the curtain was rung down. The tragedy concerned the rebellion of Peter the Great's son

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Alexis and the death sentence passed on him in consequence; although it had been written some time before the arrest and execution under martial law of the Due d'Enghien, certain passages may have recalled these more recent events, and it is possible that in the tsar himself, republicans and monarchists were united in discerning the new tyrant, Napoleon. Nothing can have been further from Carrion-Nisas's intentions and in fact, as was explained in one of the anonymous letters sent him subsequently, it was his speech to the Tribunate that the students were booing, not his play. Pierre le Grand was given a second performance which turned out just as noisy, and was withdrawn before the statutory third one could take place. The first years of the Bourbon restoration were marked by a bitter feud between the Bonapartists, loyal to the previous regime, and the royalists, adherents of the new one. This quarrel was what lay behind the disturbances attendant on another performance at the Theatre-Frangais, that of A. V. Arnault's Germanicus in 1817, though this time not on account of the theme and content of this neoclassical tragedy, judged inoffensive by the highest authority in the land,17 but because of the earlier career of the author, who had rallied to the support of Napoleon during the Hundred Days and had in consequence been banished from France; at the time Germanicus was produced, he was living with other exiles in Brussels and was regarded by the Bonapartists as a martyr to their cause. The play was by all accounts listened to in a respectful silence broken only by the occasional polite applause against which there were no protests. The final curtain fell and, as was customary whenever a new play satisfied the audience, there were shouts for the author to be named. This started a vociferous outcry, but Talma, a personal friend of Arnault, stepped forward and gave out his name in ringing tones above the hubbub. This was the signal for the battle everyone had been expecting. Viennet, an eye-witness to what ensued, describes in his diary the press to get into the theatre that evening; the queue was composed not of the usual middle-class elements but of high-ranking army officers in mufti, orders having been issued by the War Ministry forbidding them to wear uniform if they were proposing to attend. From the orchestra stall that Viennet had managed to secure, he looked back at the pit and saw a curiously parti-coloured assembly: the royalists were recognizable in black waistcoats and white ties, while the Bonapartists wore white waistcoats and black ties. In

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conversation with one of the former, he learned that they had assembled in force not to boo the play: 'the King himself has read it and approves, but we are not going to permit a regicide to be named'. 18 The rumour that Arnault had been one of those who voted the death of Louis XVI had gained wide credence but had no foundation in fact; he had not even been a member of the Convention when the fatal vote was taken. No sooner had Talma announced the author's name when the two opposing factions turned on each other: sticks were raised and heads broken. Those who had no part in the quarrel took refuge on the stage until the external guard, hurriedly summoned, succeeded in evacuating the pit; the combatants however continued to battle with one another in the neighbouring streets and were with difficulty separated by the police. Amazingly, those members of the audience who had been neutral in the combat resumed their seats and called for the customary closing comedy. Perhaps the only lasting result of this fracas was that measures were taken to oblige spectators arriving with offensive weapons (pistols, walking-sticks, umbrellas) to deposit them at a special cloakroom in the theatre. Arnault himself was allowed to return to France in 1819 and a second performance of his tragedy was given by the Comedie-Fran^aise in 1824; those who saw it were at a loss to understand why the first, seven years earlier, had resulted in a riot, but in politics, if a week is a long time, seven years is an aeon. The Bonapartists, who were prominent in the liberal opposition during the Restoration, were for obvious reasons anglophobes. Except for brief respites, the French had been at war with the British from 1793 to 1815; it was the British who had imprisoned Napoleon on St Helena where, it was widely believed, poison had been used to bring about his early death. This had occurred in 1821; so it was, to say the least, ill-advised on the part of Jean-Toussaint Merle, playwright and manager of the Porte-Saint-Martin, to arrange the following year a series of performances at his theatre by a group of English players. But in the course of several visits to England Merle had made the acquaintance of the manager of the Windsor theatre, who had recently spent a successful season playing at Calais and Boulogne with his company to audiences consisting preponderantly of the numerous English residents who had settled on the French coast at the time, attracted by the lower cost of living in France. The two men concluded an agreement for a programme of plays in

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English to be performed at the Porte-Saint-Martin, beginning on 31 July 1822. The news aroused considerable interest in Paris, and the theatre rapidly filled up in spite of a torrential summer thunderstorm; but it became clear that the occasion would be used by the Bonapartists to manifest their detestation of all things English, Shakespeare included. They occupied the pit while the royalists were in force in the boxes; particularly conspicuous among the latter was the journalist Alphonse Martainville, an ardent reactionary and a thorn in the flesh of the liberals whom he regularly attacked in his paper, Le Drapeau blanc. The pit started vociferously insulting the actors almost as soon as the curtain rose; a little later their fury focussed on Martainville, who was protesting in a loud voice about the discourtesy of refusing the actors a hearing merely because they were foreigners. Othello had to be abandoned after the fourth act; the second item on the programme, a Sheridan comedy, fared scarcely any better and the younger members of the audience started throwing apples and other more dangerous objects at the performers. The curtain was lowered halfway through the play when a copper coin struck one of the actresses on the temple, nearly putting out an eye and causing her to faint away. Believing the disturbances to be the work of the riff-raff, Merle doubled his prices for the second performance and asked for extra police to be posted in the corridors as well as troops within call. But the Bonapartists were undeterred, refused to let the audience hear a word of the play, and then turned on Martainville, pelting him with the missiles with which they had filled their pockets. Standing up in his box, the defiant journalist continued to revile them, and when a stone grazed his cheek, shouted out that they were nothing but a pack of murderers and brigands. This outburst so exasperated the Bonapartists that they tried to make forcible entry into his box to silence him; the police prevented this, but were obliged to take him under their protection and escort him from the theatre. During the interval the rowdies decided to turn their wrath on Merle, having learned that it was he who had had the impertinent notion of sending for English actors to perform in Paris. They forced him to agree to substitute a play in French (an eighteenth-century vaudeville which had recently been revived at the Porte-SaintMartin) for Sheridan's School for Scandal that had been promised on the playbills. This change of programme pacified the audience, but

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Merle, who knew that police regulations prohibited the showing of a play that had not been duly announced in advance, sent word to the authorities, and when the curtain rose the groundlings found the stage occupied by a double rank of gendarmes. Confounded at first by this unexpected turn, they recovered quickly and started hurling benches on to the stage; one madcap, having seized a drum in the orchestra, sounded the charge, and the rest of them, electrified, rushed forward to the attack. The police sergeant in command barked the order to come to the ready and take aim; the assailants recoiled, re-formed, returned to the fray, and were worsted only after a furious hand-to-hand tussle; a number of them, one must remember, were veterans of Napoleon's armies. Finally the theatre was cleared, but the fighting continued outside, with shops looted and the entire neighbourhood terrorized until late into the night. In comparison with these bloody riots, the so-called 'battle of Hernani* in 1830 was no more than a noisy exchange of insults between Romantics and classicists, and nothing quite so violent occurred in any theatre for the rest of the century. Political passions, however, caused the sudden collapse of two plays put on in the 1860s, neither of which, dramatically speaking, was any worse than many another that had a reasonable run at the period. In both instances, the audience was apparently motivated by a desire to manifest its hostility to the regime by humiliating its supporters, in this case the two playwrights concerned; as in the case of Pierre le Grand, their works were made to pay for the cause they were thought to have espoused. Edmond About, known chiefly as a forceful columnist, had incurred the displeasure of the progressives by his recent desertion of the liberal Opinion nationale for the establishment newspaper Le Constitutionnel. His play Gaetana was given its first showing at the Odeon on 3 January 1862. 'It was a full house, in a stormy mood, and hardly had the curtain been raised when a horrible clamour was unleashed: shouting and whistling. The police tried to intervene, the noise died down out of respect for law and order, but after all it was midwinter, one surely had the right to have a cold: there was an outbreak of coughing and blowing of noses, the uproar continued as before', and not a word of the play could be heard.19 A few arrests were made, both inside the theatre and outside, and the following day Gaetana was replaced by Polyeucte in consequence of representations from the students. It was at this notable debacle that Georges Cavalier, better known

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as Pipe-en-Bois, came into prominence as ringleader of the students. A student himself at the time, training as a mining engineer, he was violently opposed to the imperial regime; on its collapse in 1870 he was appointed secretary to one of the members of the provisional government which replaced it. Pipe-en-Bois was recognizable everywhere by his extraordinary physique: 'without an ounce of flesh on his bones, as pale as Deburau, his lips contracted into a permanent grin, with a nose like Punch's and a nutcracker chin',20 he organized not just the demonstration against About at the Odeon in 1862 but the much more serious campaign at the Comedie-Frangaise against the Goncourts' Henriette Marechal three years later. Neither play had any detectable political message; but the two brothers Goncourt were known to be regular guests of the Princess Mathilde, a member of the Bonaparte clan, and this was sufficient, apparently, to damn them. The rowdy opposition to their play continued every night for the first six performances (5-18 December 1865); both Got and Delaunay, who were in the cast, left circumstantial accounts of these, as of course did the Goncourts in their celebrated diary. The fourth performance was the most riotous, dominated by a new instrument of torture, what contemporaries called 'sifflets a roulettes', possibly a forerunner of referees' whistles on football pitches today; Pipe-enBois was credited with their invention. The actors did not even try to speak above the noise in the first act, a somewhat controversial scene with a masked ball at the Opera as setting; they contented themselves with miming it, and the prompter did not even trouble to open his copy. What puzzled everyone was that there was no attempt on the part of the police to arrest and expel those responsible for the disturbances. Were they too numerous? Or had the Empress, whose relations with Princess Mathilde were not of the warmest, let it be known that she had no desire to see the work of two of her cousin's friends succeed at the Comedie-Frangaise? This would presuppose an inherently unlikely connivance between the palace and the more rebellious elements in the student body; but according to a story related to the Goncourts by Coquelin after the performance on 9 December, several gentlemen in the first row of boxes had gone that evening to complain to the police commissioner that they had paid good money to see a play which they were prevented from hearing. The commissioner, it seems, shrugged his shoulders and answered: 'I have been given no instructions.'21 Neither About nor the Goncourts were regarded as being in the

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front rank of French playwrights of the nineteenth century. It was otherwise with Victorien Sardou, one of the most highly esteemed in his day though his work is now quite forgotten, who none the less ran into serious trouble with his historical drama Thermidor, produced by the Comedie-Frangaise in 1891. The hero was Charles-Hippolyte Labussiere, the clerk in the Comite de Salut Public whose exploits in saving from the guillotine several thousands of luckless prisoners in 1793-4 had given him a posthumous celebrity in right-wing circles. Sardou's drama was passed by the censorship, and the press notices of its first performance were on the whole favourable, though a few hinted that Thermidor might well be suspected of anti-republican sentiment; and, sure enough, the second performance, given on 26 January, was interrupted by violent demonstrations which included the bombardment of the stage by assorted missiles at one point. It seems that what particularly offended a section of the audience was a tirade delivered by Labussiere denouncing the Terror. Warnings were given that a third performance might cause even more serious disturbances and accordingly, at a cabinet meeting held the following day, it was decided in the interests of public order to suspend further performances. When the announcement was made from the stage there were violent protests from the audience, who refused to listen to the Moliere programme which the Comedie-Fran^aise had perforce to substitute and stormed angrily out of the theatre. The subsequent debate in the Chamber of Deputies concentrated naturally on the political implications of Sardou's drama. Georges Clemenceau made a fiery speech, arguing that the French Revolution had to be accepted en bloc, warts and all, the Terror along with everything else; one could not pick and choose, one was either for the Republic, for the Revolution that had led to its foundation, for the excesses deemed necessary at the time to sustain it, or one was against all these things. In the end, the Chamber voted to support the action of the ministry by 315 votes to 122. It should be noted that the Third Republic had only recently emerged from the threat posed by the Boulangist movement, and that nerves were understandably a little frayed in government circles. In 1896 Sardou was able to present his banned play to a different audience when there was a revival of Thermidor at the Porte-Saint-Martin; this time, no difficulties were encountered. In the same year, however (1896), a startling new play by an unknown young man from Britanny, Alfred Jarry, was greeted by

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howls of execration at its first performance. The extraordinary scenes that Ubu Roi provoked among the fashionable audience at the dress rehearsal are recalled in Marguerite Moreno's memoirs, written admittedly half a century later. She speaks of an arc light being turned on the audience at one point, in the hope that the discomfort of being dazzled might quieten the angry spectators. But the moderating effect lasted only until the light was turned off: then, 'the hostile bellowing, mingled with thunderous roars of applause, started up afresh. I have no idea how many blows were exchanged between spectators during the three hours that the play lasted, but it is certain that no boxing match could ever have competed with the dress rehearsal of Ubu Roi.'22 The more conservative section of the audience was shocked by the grotesqueries in the play and by the offensive language in which they were couched; not, apparently, by its underlying subversiveness. On 2 May 1898, however, a version of Gerhart Hauptmann's Weavers, about which the censorship had had grave doubts, was finally put on at the Theatre-Antoine and there were certain evenings, as the director recalled subsequently, when working-class spectators in the upper galleries shook their fists at the well-fed occupants of the stalls, much to the latter's indignation. Here the German dramatist's revolutionary message was clearly responsible for the disturbances. No such incitement to class conflict was apparent in the stage adaptation of Zola's novel La Terre at the same theatre in January 1902; but it was enough that it was based on one of his works: Zola was still at this date a bugbear or a hero for all Frenchmen with lively memories of his public denunciation four years earlier of the perversion of justice by which the Jewish army officer, Captain Dreyfus, had been sentenced for treason. Feelings ran high in the auditorium, those sitting in the orchestra stalls shouting 'Down with Zola!' to the fury of the Dreyfusards in the galleries. Such incidents recurred regularly every night when La Terre was billed: Antoine noted that on 30 January one man, enraged by his neighbour's vociferations, stood up and struck him in the face; the other retaliated by smashing his cane over his assailant's head.23 Zola died in suspicious circumstances later that year; but antiSemitic propaganda continued long after his death to divide the country. When the news broke in 1911 that a well-known dramatist, Henri Bernstein, had had his latest play accepted by the ComedieFrangaise, a concerted attempt was made by right-wing agitators to

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prevent its performance. In an earlier play, Israel, produced at the Theatre Rejane in 1908, Bernheim had taken anti-Semitism as his subject, treating it, however, in a strictly non-polemical fashion. The new play, Apres mot, was a straightforward drama of sexual jealousy and reconciliation, with no political or anti-racist undertones: but Bernheim was a Jew; it was further rumoured that in his youth he had refused to serve under the colours. The nationalist party, in its newspaper Action Frangaise, affected high indignation that anything written by so 'outrageously anti-French' a playwright should be produced on the stage of the premier theatre of the capital. To its credit, the Comedie-Fran^aise took no notice of the virulent press campaign and duly announced the dress rehearsal. Every conceivable device was pressed into service by the extremists to prevent a hearing: sticks thumping the floor, engine whistles, motor horns, police sirens. 'Overwhelmed and not knowing who to lay hands on, the police grabbed harmless spectators who protested loudly their innocence. There were rights in progress in the corridors, and frightened pigeons were released who perched on the chandelier and let their droppings fall on the elegant ladies and gentlemen in the stalls.'24 The cast, dominated but not intimidated by the racket, sat on the stage waiting for quiet to be restored. On the first night, and in the half-dozen subsequent performances, the same uproar continued, but with the well-defined character now of a militant political riot, orchestrated by the thugs of the Action Franchise both inside the theatre and on the square outside, where mounted police had to be used to scatter them. In the end Bernheim reluctantly withdrew his play, and a protest against this attack on the freedom of art, circulated among the intelligentsia, attracted a couple of thousand signatures - the only consolation vouchsafed to the unfortunate dramatist. The affair was soon forgotten, however, as the far greater crisis that came to a head three years later swept it into oblivion. In retrospect, it can be seen that the disgraceful outbreak had little or nothing to do with the theatre; rather, it was but one manifestation among many of the exacerbated chauvinism that was gripping France at this dangerous juncture. The title Bernheim had given to his play, Apres moi, recalling the remark attributed to Mme de Pompadour, 'apres nous le deluge', may be said to have had a certain sinister applicability: but it was a deluge of blood in this case that was prophesied, one shortly in which all Europe was to drown.

CHAPTER 6

Applause and censure

The tribute of applause awarded to the actors at the end of a play, which today arrives almost automatically to round off a performance, was formerly much more frequently and generously accorded, particularly at theatres which habitually attracted a large proportion of working-class spectators; whether they were more uncritical or more apt to give rein to their enthusiasm than their 'betters', it is hard to say. Writing of the Ambigu-Comique in 1837, Gautier stated that 'every successful performance gives rise in this theatre to unparalleled ovations. All the actors are summoned to take a bow, along with the authors of the play, the scene-shifters, the prompter, and the theatre employees: bouquets are rained on the stage, everyone is crowned, even the box-openers come within an ace of participating in the general triumph.' 1 A generation earlier, under the Consulate, audiences even at the Opera had been used to manifest their pleasure in much the same uninhibited way. Of one of the idols of the day, Mademoiselle Maillard, an observer from Germany noted that 'not a shriek, not a spasm of hers passes without a storm of clapping and cheering. The more she screams and fights the air, the wilder the bravos and the louder the clapping and stamping of feet.'2 Clapping and stamping one's feet, or thumping one's walkingstick on the wooden floor, were the traditional ways of manifesting approval of a performance; the shout bravo! came into French about the middle of the eighteenth century in imitation of Italian usage. But other, more unusual ways of applauding were also occasionally practised. In Rouen, in the 1830s, enthusiasts started a fashion for whirling wooden clappers around, much to the discomfiture of sedater members of the audience. At down-market theatres, like the Delassements-Comiques, it was not unusual even in the 1870s to hear the joyous spectators express their delight by caterwauling: the actress, familiar with these manifestations which might have been 91

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mistaken for something different, would move up to the footlights, curtsey, then resume her place and continue as before. But far more touching than any of these noisy outbreaks was the kind of tribute that Musset records being given to Rachel when she appeared as Roxane in Racine's Bajazet in 1838, a performance which the audience 'interrupted a score of times by those involuntary murmurs which a crowd, when it is really worked up, cannot withhold and which is the truest form of applause';3 though it may be that the very finest mark of appreciation was the dead silence that, on rare occasions, denoted an audience too moved almost to breathe. It is said that this miracle was wrought whenever the younger of the two Sainval sisters pronounced the seemingly simple line from the first act of Andromaque where the heroine, forbidden by her captors to see and speak briefly with her infant son more than once a day, tells Pyrrhus she is on her way to pay this melancholy visit. 'We shall always remember', wrote Pillet of her pre-revolutionary appearances in this part, 'the inexpressible emotion she aroused when she spoke that lovely line: Je ne Fai point encore embrasse d'aujourd'hui. No one applauded at that point; a deep hush reigned everywhere, but everyone's eyes were fixed on her, all hearts were stilled, and when the actress left the stage an outburst of sobs relieved this painful oppression, as tears flowed from every eye.'4 Actors, wrote Charles de Bussy, are less flattered by the most thunderous applause than by occasions such as these, 'when a profound silence falls on the audience, when each spectator, heartbroken and his eyes swimming in tears, has neither the strength nor the least notion of clapping his hands, when, swept away by the all-conquering illusion, he forgets both the art and the actor'.5 But such occasions, even in that sentimental age, were of necessity few and far between. The call for an actor to reappear after the end of a play to receive the plaudits of the audience was a relatively late development: Vanhove is said to have been the first to be honoured in this way in 1777. A curtain call was normally reserved, before the Revolution, for some outstandingly brilliant performance; but the custom was not, at first, greatly appreciated by the actors, who regarded it as tyrannous on the part of the audience, even more so when, as sometimes happened under the Consulate, the entire cast was summoned at the end of the play to acknowledge the applause of the

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audience. The Abbe Geoffroy, the leading critic of the time, denounced this innovation fiercely as 'an extravagant, pointless, onerous and even shameful demand made of good performers, tending to favour mediocrity and to encourage cabals. It is nothing but a humiliating farce for the actor to whose reputation it adds nothing and who is merely made to feel his subjection to the audience.' 6 Under the Restoration an attempt was made to put a stop to such practices. The prefet de la Seine, who had responsibility for policing the theatres in Paris, issued an order on 2 December 1824 forbidding any actor to take a curtain call; but this regulation applied only to theatres in the capital, and a player in the provinces who refused to defer to the wishes of the audience could find that disobedience resulted in angry reprisals: a case in point occurred at Le Havre in 1827 when the prima donna in Boieldieu's La Dame blanche declined to take a curtain call and was chased by a furious crowd all the way back to her lodgings. Even in Paris the police order was sometimes ignored. When in 1826 Samson gave his last performance at the Odeon before joining the Comedie-Franc.aise, the students in the audience insisted on the curtain being raised at the end of the evening so that they might give him a farewell ovation. He was on his way up to his dressing-room when the director called him back, telling him he was wanted on stage. Samson objected that the prefecture had forbidden curtain calls, but the other said he would take full responsibility and ordered the curtain to be raised. T walked on', confessed Samson in his memoirs, 'greatly moved, and my heart was beating just as hard as the palms of those dear youths whom I was leaving behind with genuine regret.' 7 Two years later, when Macready made his final appearance as the Moor of Venice at the end of a highly successful Shakespeare season in Paris, the excitement of the audience showed itself in an unexpected fashion. Silent for a while, frozen in terror, anon they shook off their stupor and, shouting and frantically applauding the actor, they tried to recall him. Abbot [William Abbot, stage-manager to the company] came on to state that the rules did not permit him to reappear. The cries and clapping only started up the louder, but without satisfaction being obtained. Finally a few enterprising young men went behind the wings, dragged the great actor round to the orchestra and hoisted him thence on to the forestage where his presence was saluted by shouts and deafening bravos and where a floral wreath, in touching homage and poetic farewell from a grateful public, was

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thrown to land at his feet. Never had Paris paid such homage to a foreign artist.8 After the July Revolution the injunction against curtain calls fell into abeyance, and they became general everywhere though it was never made obligatory for an actor to comply. One final appearance was not always enough to satisfy an audience. Etienne Arnal, on the occasion of the first night of a new comedy at the Vaudeville (24 November 1834), received a second summons which, after some hesitation, he decided to obey and, 'advancing humbly towards the footlights and putting on a certain air of triumphant modesty, "My word, gentlemen," he said after executing his bow, "I would never have thought you had so much good taste'" - a sally which might have been considered impertinent, but in the event was taken in good part. 9 As is still the case today, when actresses were summoned to receive the noisy congratulations of an audience, it was thought proper that they should be led forward by a male colleague, a convention which, disregarded on one famous occasion, led to a somewhat disgraceful scene reflecting badly on the gallantry of the Comedie-Fran^aise. Having agreed to put on Vigny's Chatterton, the company was not overpleased when the author gave the part of the heroine, Kitty Bell, to his mistress Marie Dorval. All through the rehearsals the societaires had treated her with disdain as a boulevard actress of no account, and when after the first performance of Chatterton, in which she had acquitted herself brilliantly, the audience clamoured for a final sight of her, not one of the men who had had parts in the play was prepared to escort her to the footlights. There was a long pause before the curtain was raised again; the clapping continued, as did the shouting; still no one made a move behind the wings. Then Marie had an inspiration. Her part in Vigny's play had been that of the downtrodden wife of the merchant John Bell, and in several affecting scenes she had been seen in the company of her two infant children. Suddenly she caught sight of the two child actors standing together in a corner, took each by the hand and led them to the footlights. 'Seeing these little children and this courageous woman who, by a natural movement, linked a mother's tenderness to an artist's triumph, the entire audience was moved to a positive frenzy, stamping and weeping. . .'IO This was in 1835; a few years later no such embarrassing hitch could have occurred, since the entire cast would have been expected

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to reappear at the cry 'tous, tous!5 and take a bow. This new fashion, spreading from the boulevard theatres, was at first greatly deplored; there were complaints that it led to a devaluation of the special distinction given to an actor who had notably surpassed himself in the course of the performance. Today, of course, it has become so ingrained a habit that not to be given the opportunity to applaud, however perfunctorily, all the actors, even those with bit parts, who had participated in a play, would be regarded as an unheard-of omission. On the other hand the custom, not uncommon in France in the nineteenth century, of allowing curtain calls at the end of each act has, happily, died out. It seems to have started in the 1830s, and to have become almost normal at the boulevard theatres, though resisted for a long time at the Comedie-Frangaise. Rachel refused to submit to demands from the audience in January 1843 that she should take a curtain call after the end of the fourth act of Phedre. Likewise Delaunay, who had a major part in an 1862 revival of Ponsard's UHonneur et V argent on the boulevard; after the third act he had gone to his dressing-room to change for the fourth and could hear the audience shouting for him to take a bow. 'My obstinate refusal to return to the stage was put down to my modesty. The truth was that I was not aufait with this kind of recall, which was not in common use at the Theatre-Francais.' 11 However, on at least one occasion even the Comedie-Francaise was forced to agree to recalls after each act; this was when Hernani was revived in 1867 after a long period when none of Hugo's dramas had been allowed to be seen in France; but this demonstration of passionate fervour on the part of the audience was altogether exceptional. The objection to such practices was clear: the actors involved were being required to suspend the dramatic illusion and appear as themselves before the play was over. When it had reached its end, the case was different, the actor had ceased to pose as the character he was playing and appeared before the public as himself, even though still wearing his stage costume. Some went to extraordinary lengths to maintain the illusion, when one act had ended and before the next had started, that he was not the actor taking a bow but remained the character he was impersonating. In the stage version of Octave Feuillet's most successful novel, Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre, the chivalrous young hero, stung by the reproaches of the girl he loves, leaps out of the tower chamber where they are both closeted, so risking being dashed to pieces below. In a revival of the

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play at the Vaudeville in 1864 the part of the foolhardy young man was taken by Lafontaine, whom the audience summoned for a special ovation after the curtain had fallen on this scene. He obediently reappeared, but with a great gash painted on his forehead and with mock blood streaming down his face, as though the fall had actually taken place. At a later stage certain players started the practice of breaking off the action in midstream and bowing to the audience whenever a tirade was followed by an unusually loud burst of applause which could be interpreted as an ovation. After a favourable review of Feval's Le Bossu (The Hunchback) at the Porte-Saint-Martin in 1877, Mortier added a reservation concerning one member of the cast who interrupted himself in the middle of a scene and walked down to the footlights to bow to the audience. 'This practice', he commented, 'is unfortunately becoming very common. Nevertheless, every time it occurs I shall object, in the name of good taste, to this deplorable development, unworthy of a French theatre.'12 But his protests, echoed by other critics, proved unavailing; and the advice given to actors in a manual published in 1919 indicates just how widely such bad habits must have spread by the beginning of the twentieth century for such warnings to be thought necessary. After a fine tirade, do not make a pause as though waiting for the applause; it will occur spontaneously. If it reaches the proportions of an ovation, do not bow to the audience: you will interrupt the flow. Similarly, when making an exit, do not return to take a bow, wait for the recall at the end of the act when you will reappear with your fellow actors whom you must associate with your success.13

The impression one gains is that all the way through the period we are dealing with, audiences were becoming more and more indulgent, using every pretext to encourage the players by bursts of clapping. Correspondingly, as we shall see, they were growing less and less critical; or at least, when they found the actors less than satisfactory, they were reluctant to use the means open to them to make their dissatisfaction known. Plays were rarely 'hissed off the stage' and then only if the audience judged them to be tedious, unconvincing, or - as in the case of Becque's Les Corbeaux unpalatable; hardly ever because they judged the acting to be inadequate. To hiss a play normally translates into French as siffler, a verb which however has a variety of other meanings besides that of

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producing a sibilant sound. In particular it can be used of blowing a whistle, as by a referee stopping play, a policeman summoning help, a stationmaster signalling to an engine-driver to pull out. Since both hissing and whistling were used by spectators in French theatres to denote displeasure, it is not always possible to know which noise was heard in a given context, the same word being applied to both actions.14 Originally, according to one authority, a blast on a whistle was a signal to stagehands that they should lower the curtain, the act having reached its end. Humorists in an audience would bring whistles with them and use them whenever they judged a play to be so bad that it was time it was brought to a halt. '5 Joachim Duflot, writing in 1865, defined sifflets as 'small instruments by which one manifests one's opinion touching a play or an actor'.16 These instruments were often the door-keys carried about in their pockets by householders, of which the wards were attached to a thin hollow tube; by blowing over the top it was possible to produce a satisfactorily shrill whistle. In Vacquerie's Profils et grimaces (1856) we are told how the author made friends with a lively young man sitting beside him at the first night of a new play. The production evidently failed to arouse his neighbour's interest: 'in the third act he began to whistle, through his lips at first, then using a key, glancing at me the while with a look of connivance'.17 Sometimes the shaft of the key would have a small hole drilled in it, and instead of blowing over the top one blew through the tube so that the air was expressed through the aperture; such keys were known as clefsforees, perforated keys. Recording a conversation she had with a friend whose debut as a dancer had ended disastrously, Celeste Mogador reports that certain members of the audience had 'brought keys with perforations specially forged, into which they started to blow; the noise was such that it drowned the orchestra'. 18 Keys played a large part in the uproar at the first night of the Goncourts' Henriette Mareckal, and one account shows clearly that the bigger the key, the louder the noise. In the orchestra stalls, one highly excited student was showing his friends a key of magnificent proportions and shouting: In hoc signo vinces. Also noticeable among the rowdies was an elderly man who was executing, by means of a key no less enormous, a solo whistle dominating all the others, and who now and then broke off the strident music to exclaim indignantly: 'They are dishonouring Melpomene! Curtain! curtain! Le Cid, play le CidF19 But besides keys, purpose-made whistles also came into use about this time. At the third performance of Tannhduser in 1867, when the

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aristocratic audience turned up to demonstrate its violent hostility to Wagner's music, Alphonse Royer, director of the Opera at the time, noticed that the occupants of the boxes were all 'armed with whistles of silver or ivory, manufactured specially for the ceremony. One of these gentlemen carried slung across his chest a station whistle whose shrill note was embellished by a formidable trill.' 20 In general, it seems that in Paris these demonstrations were more often aimed at the playwright or composer than at a mediocre actor. In the provinces it was different; quite apart from the piercing whistles that resounded when new players were making their debut, any actor who was less than first class risked facing a frightening concert of hissing from every part of the house. At Rouen in 1825 a n actress in this case was so terrified that she fainted away. At Le Havre the pit, composed predominantly of sailors, not content with whistling, brought in a ship's bell to increase the din. At Marseilles, also in the 1820s, a performance of Le Barbier de Seville was accompanied by outrageous whistling and was finally brought to a halt when a crown made out of tressed hay was thrown on to the stage, together with the jawbone of an ass. The actor, a certain Miller, for whom this anonymous gift was intended, did not lack courage, and for once the tables were turned on the bullies. He advanced to the footlights and addressed the audience as follows: 'I thank the good people of Marseilles for the kindness they have always shown me and more especially the gentleman who, this evening, has forgone his own dinner in order to make me a present of it.' It took a moment or two for this unexpected tit-for-tat to register, and Miller profited by the pause to leave the stage hurriedly and the town too, knowing well that the infuriated spectators would be hot on his heels.21 In the capital, however, actors were seldom subjected to such insults. Rather, it was the dramatists who suffered the indignity of being 'hissed off the stage', a risk against which Boileau had warned them back in 1674;22 it was a chastening experience which few of them at one point or another in their careers managed to avoid and which demanded a fair measure of stoicism to shrug off. Sacha Guitry, whose third play La Clef was killed off by a hostile first-night audience, could never forget the agony this experience caused him. He who has never heard himself hissed can have no idea of the physical pain it causes. I imagine that when one is found out in some misdeed, a dishonest act, a piece of treachery or some felony or other, there is nothing for it but to

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bow the head under the storm and say to oneself, beating one's breast: 'I have deserved this.' But to have written an unsatisfactory third act is not reprehensible in the same way. No, I do not deserve to be chastened thus — that at least is what I told myself as I listened to those horrible, ear-splitting, heart-rending sounds.23 It was a public disgrace; a sensitive writer felt branded for life. Merimee could not believe his ears when his Carrosse was hissed mercilessly at the Theatre-Frangais in 1850; Musset gave up all thought of writing for the stage after the disastrous failure of La JVuit venitienne in 1830 and for many years was content to publish his later comedies in the columns of the Revue des Deux Mondes without even trying to have them produced on the stage. However, after the middle of the nineteenth century such executions by the audience seem to have grown more infrequent, not because the plays themselves were necessarily all that better but because the audiences, as has been suggested already, had grown more indulgent. The change over the years from 1850 to 1880 was noticed by Arsene Houssaye, who did not regard the development in an altogether favourable light. While it has quadrupled in size, the theatre-going public has become less demanding, but this has had deplorable consequences for the dramatic art; today, people accept what they are given. Around 1850, they still adopted a critical attitude; they passed judgement on a play, they had hands to clap and keys to whistle with . . . Today, anything contents them; a play which I would defy you to read through from start to finish will stretch to a hundred performances on the stage; such is the progress of enlightenment!24 Plays still failed, of course; but the acrimonious manifestations of earlier days rarely took place. Instead, if a playwright disappointed an audience's expectations, his work was listened to in silence, or with whispering and the sound of crumpled programmes, while a look of puzzled boredom would steal over the faces of the spectators; many of them would drift away after the interval. At the close there would be ragged, perfunctory applause, what Barbey d'Aurevilly called 'those pitiless handclaps that are crueller than the most piercing whistles; for to whistle is to execute judgement, whereas to offer only ironical applause is to insult'.25 In a public lecture on the subject delivered in 1896, the speaker admitted that hissing or whistling had, by that date, entered into history; 'it is no longer acceptable, now that we bring to the theatre that sovereign indifference, that banal, soft-spoken politeness which

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has superseded the fine tumults of yesteryear'.26 And although, at the beginning of the twentieth century as indeed still at its end, such phrases as la piece a ete sifflee, cet acteur se /era siffler par tout, were still

used, they were to be understood in a purely figurative sense. Today, wrote Alfred Mortier in 1917, the blast of a whistle is no longer heard. People hardly ever make noisy demonstrations. Disapproval is shown by frigidity and silence. The actors complain that 'the public is wooden this evening'. When one of them is really mediocre, he will be 'run in', as they say. In such a case one might hear murmuring, bursts of laughter, the occasional 'oh!' or 'ah!'. But that is rare, even in the provinces.

The only exceptions, continues Mortier, are the small avant-garde theatres, where dramatic performances of an unusual nature will still cause a storm in an audience. Tn short, the general public has grown extraordinarily polite and has sobered down enormously. The development may be regretted. Passion is a sign of the interest one takes in things; civility is closely akin to indifference.'2?

CHAPTER 7

The claque

The claque in the nineteenth century was an institution peculiar to France and even there, confined to Paris. Visitors from abroad found it eccentric, annoying, and quite inexplicable: if an audience was allowed, anywhere else in the world, to be sole judge of a play and applaud it or not as it thought fit, why was it that in this city a small body of men, in all the best theatres, were charged with the function of ensuring as best they could that every play and every actor in it should be cheered to the rafters? And why, in spite of complaints and objections from nearly everyone with an interest in the theatre, and in the teeth of every effort to rid the stage of this parasitic growth, did the claque persist and prosper from one end of the century to the other? In eighteenth-century French the verb claquer was in common use in the sense of to clap in an exaggerated fashion. It occurs, for example, in an entry dated 10 April 1763 in Bachaumont's Memories secrets, where he records that the Comedie-Frangaise actress Mile Dubois sang a solo in one of the concerts of spiritual music which, as was customary, took the place of dramatic performances over Easter. She was not a professional singer but, he remarks, 'elle a ete extremement claquee et passablement applaudie', implying that she received the meed of applause to which she was entitled but, in addition, was violently clapped by a section of the audience. It should be added that this particular meaning of the word is obsolete in modern French. The services of semi-professional clappers were sought originally by playwrights rich enough to afford the financial outlay necessary to employ them. It is Bachaumont once more who mentions their presence, specifically on Sundays and Shrove Tuesday, 1775 - days when the Comedie-Frangaise could always count on full houses - at performances of Beaumarchais's Barbier de Seville^ he calls them 'that 101

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varletry of the show business which earns in this way its tickets for the pit by solicited applause and endless handclaps'. 1 It was particularly, however, when a play had been given a lukewarm reception at its first performance that a canny author would make massive purchases of tickets for the second and distribute them among his supporters. Dramatists will lodge an appeal from the verdict of the first-night audience, which is wideawake, attentive, apt to pounce on the slightest defect, to that of the secondnight audience which has no longer the same interest and which they stiffen as they will, all the more easily in that a play known to have been hissed will not attract a large attendance and that people are content to rely on the first judgement; it is soon quashed by hired clappers, and this magnificent triumph will earn it five or six further performances, however thinly attended. 2

The practice of 'rescuing' in this way a first-night flop was widely condemned, but common enough in the 1780s: at the second performance of La Harpe's tragedy Jeanne Premiere de Naples (1781); at the Comedie-Italienne when Sauvigny's Gabrielle d'Estrees was produced in 1783 and where the claque was recruited exceptionally by the company rather than the dramatist; and at the second performance of Ducis's adaptation of Macbeth (1784) where 'the energetic clappers [battoirs] stationed in the pit served the author so well that the sheep-like body of the spectators joined them in shouting for him' at the end of the performance; Ducis obliged them, standing up in his box and bowing.3 The normal procedure on such occasions was for the playwright to buy additional 'author's tickets' from the management and distribute them gratis to those of his friends and acquaintances prepared to come and applaud his new play. It was reported of Cailhava that when his comedy Les Journalistes anglais had its maiden performance in 1782, each free ticket was wittily though somewhat blasphemously inscribed with a text from the Vulgate version of St Luke: 'in manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum'. The practice could prove a severe drain on an author's purse if indulged in too often: ClaudeJoseph Dorat, whose first plays (Regulus, a tragedy, and Feinte par I'amour, a three-act comedy) earned him some success when produced in 1773, became disenchanted by the relative failure of his later dramatic ventures and took to spending money like water on cramming boxes and pit with supporters. However, he lost more than he ever recouped by these dubious manoeuvres: one more

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Pyrrhic victory like this, he was quoted as saying ruefully, and I am ruined. The claque in its later, nineteenth-century guise differed from its forerunners in aims and composition, and should be considered rather as an offshoot of the large fraternity of streetwise spivs and seedy speculators that sprang up under the Directory. They had no interest in the theatre as such, but were alive to the opportunities of lining their pockets by blackmailing dramatists and on occasion actors and actresses too. They came to general notice in the early years of the Empire: at the beginning of 1809 several of them were reported as having each recruited thirty or forty ruffians to sit in the cheaper seats and hiss or clap according to the orders they were given, which depended, obviously, on the success or otherwise their leaders had had in extorting cash payments from the playwright concerned. The police authorities attempted to bar them from the theatres, but with scant success: Etienne Aignan's tragedy Brunehaut was all but hissed off the stage on 24 February 1810, a circumstance attributed by the Abbe Geoffroy to the author's failure to make sure of the backing of the claque. The critic had already drawn attention in the Journal de VEmpire the previous year to this new and unwelcome feature of theatrical mores. Writing of the hired gangs, he asserted that 'they obey blindly the orders they are given; instruments of the passions of others, they do not consult their personal opinion, or rather they have none, only an unquestioning devotion to the party that employs them'.4 And in an essay dated 8 May 1813, Etienne de Jouy warned the apprentice dramatist that he must expect, on the morning preceding the opening performance of his play, to be waited on by a deputation from the company of claqueurs offering their services. Should you express your aversion at employing such measures, they will try and dissipate your scruples by quoting instances where great men have done so; if you show mistrust, they will produce their certificates and show you the list of poor plays they have caused to succeed; and if you persist in rejecting contemptuously their propositions, they will name the fine works for whose failure on the stage they take every credits By this time they had learned not to demand a cash sum for applauding the new play; all they asked was that the author should make over to them a certain proportion of the tickets they knew he had received from the management in part payment for his work.

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Some of these would be used to seat the claque in the pit, others would be sold off at a discount to would-be spectators. But they had other sources of income, just as important. Those who performed on stage the works composed by the dramatists were at least as anxious as they to have their efforts applauded, and at an early stage they discovered that there was only one way to ensure this, namely, to square the claque. Even under the Empire certain actresses at the Comedie-Fran^aise, including quite senior ones like Louise Con tat before her retirement in 1809, were rumoured to be paying this impost; later, it became known that no actor new to the job had any hope of a future unless he, or his family, settled with the leader of the claque. When Got made his debut at the ComedieFran^aise on 18 July 1844, he noted laconically that on the advice of his teacher he had paid the chef de claque the customary fee of 40 francs. At the Opera Auguste Levasseur, in charge of the claque, drew a considerable portion of his income from this source, as Dr Veron discovered when he took over the directorship. He collected tips from the family or from the protector of every new member of the company, the sum varying according to the expectations of the singer making his or her debut. For a ballerina at the start of her career, it was quite customary for any gentleman hoping to win her favours to include, among theflowers,jewels or pieces of lace, a handsome present for Auguste.6 Those who resisted these extortions found that their best efforts met with dead silence on the part of the audience. Joanny, who on principle refused to pay the claque, discovered this to his cost, noting in his diary that at a revival of Ancelot's tragedy Fiesque on 19 September 1827 m s o w n performance was not rewarded by a single burst of applause, and this he realized was not because of any defect in his acting but because he had refused to have any dealings with the claque. But Joanny was an obstinate man and when a couple of years later he took the part of Cinna in Corneille's play of that name, he told himself he must imagine the auditorium to be full of connoisseurs and accustom himself to 'do without the hired services of this riff-raff. This is what I do; so, no claque for me! On the other hand - and there is some consolation in this, shameful though it is - I hear some truly shocking acting wildly applauded.' 7 In his diary, Joanny refers to the claque as the chevaliers du lustre, the knights of the chandelier, since it was in the pit, under this

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brilliant source of illumination, that they grouped themselves at this period, where the acolytes could always be under their leader's eye and able to see his signals. More commonly, in the theatrical slang of the day, they were known as 'the Romans', since it was the Roman Emperor Nero who was credited with the invention of the system in order to ensure that his own musical performances coram populo were properly applauded. 8 By the mid-1820s most theatres had a permanent claque and some indeed, including the Theatre-Frangais, had two, which were more apt to come to blows than to complement each other's efforts; moreover, it made things no easier for the actors, for as Sanderson remarked, where there are two competing companies of claqueurs, 'the player is obliged to bribe both, or the rival pack will rise up and bark against him'. 9 This may have been why, at the state-subsidized theatres in particular where the acting body still retained some say in the ordering of affairs, it was finally decided to incorporate the claque officially, so that the chef de claque became, in Ginisty's words, 'an employee at the disposal of the administration and drawing a monthly salary'.10 At the commercial theatres he remained a freelance, entering into a business arrangement with the manager whereby, in exchange for an agreed number of free tickets, he would pledge the support of his 'Romans' at every performance. In time this difference made itself felt in the behaviour of the claque at the two types of theatre: in state theatres it became more discreet, obtruding itself hardly at all, concentrating on encouraging the indecisive spectators to overcome their hesitation and give a well-merited ripple of applause; elsewhere it still remained, even at the end of the century, 'noisy, intervening frequently, insupportable and of a nature to antagonize the spectators and turn them against the play, the actors, and even the theatre'. 11 In such circumstances the claque became themselves, as Jouslin de la Salle observed, 'actors destined to play their part opposite those playing on the stage; it was a play within a play. Is it not comical to watch a few pairs of hands rhythmically clapping and creating a furore in the midst of an audience whom the dramatic work and its interpreters often leave in the dead calm of complete indifference?'12 It might not be too fanciful to suggest that, whereas today we regard a theatrical production as a matter of the dramatist addressing an audience through the medium of his interpreters, in Paris during at least the first half of the nineteenth century a play was in some ways analogous to a kind of profane mass, in which the priest (the actor)

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was supported by the server (the claque), while the audience corresponded to the congregation, witnessing but not vocally participating in the mystery being enacted. When Alexandre Dumas returned to the Comedie-Fran^aise after the eight-year period separating the first play of his to be produced there {Henri HI et sa cour, in 1829) from the second (Caligula, in 1837), he noticed a number of changes, not least in the claque, though it was still controlled by the same man, Vacher. 'In 1829, I had been able to dispose of part of the pit in favour of my colleagues at the offices of the Due d'Orleans. In 1837 .. . the entire pit was in the hands of the chef de claque'l$ who, at the TheatreFran^ais as everywhere else, had now become a powerful figure to whom everyone deferred. His income, apart from the presents in cash the actors felt obliged in most cases to press into his hands, derived from the free tickets which he was supposed to use to recruit his subordinates. These varied in quantity according to whether it was a new work that was being put on, in which case they could amount to two or three hundred, while a smaller number was allocated for a popular, well-known work which had not the same need for strenuous backing. A chef de claque would always demand more free tickets than he strictly needed; what was over he would sell, through intermediaries, on the streets, pocketing the profits. In addition, at the state theatres, he had his regular salary; so that Hervey may not have been exaggerating when he claimed that Auguste Levasseur, who controlled the claque at the Opera until shortly before the end of the July Monarchy, 'had a house in town and one in the country, and his income nearly equalled that of a marshal of France'. 14 A chef de claque was in a position to make loans to managers short of cash who needed to effect repairs in their theatres or to renew their stock of scenery; and when he retired, he negotiated the sale of his office exactly as might a notary. His was, in short, a lucrative and hence highly respected profession in many people's eyes, though no one saw it as a distinguished one, and those who did best at it were no doubt, on the whole, hard-nosed individuals of no great delicacy and inhibited by no embarrassing scruples. It was, for a start, necessary for them to keep their subordinates on a tight rein inside the theatre, where the discipline exacted was of an almost military nature. One reason for this was that the hard core of the claque consisted of unskilled labourers who accepted the job - an

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unpaid one for the most part - because it took place after working hours and because it was their only chance of seeing the inside of a theatre and sharing in the diversions of the more fortunate members of society. Balzac's novel Lost Illusions includes an account of a fictional chef de claque to whom the hero is introduced by his friend Lousteau; at the conclusion of the interview the two young men encounter, coming up the staircase to take their orders, the smelly squad of the claqueurs and the ticket touts, all wearing caps, filthy trousers, threadbare overcoats, looking like gallows birds, with bluish, greenish, mud-stained, scrawny faces, long beards, and eyes at once ferocious and wheedling; the ruffianly tribe which lives and swarms on the boulevards of Paris, selling by day safety locks and gold trinkets for 25 sous and joining nightly in the claque under the chandeliers; performing, in a word, all the dirty jobs that the city needs to have done. 'Those are the Romans,' laughed Lousteau. 'Those are the fellows who cover actresses and dramatists alike in glory!'^ Balzac has set his story in the 1820s; in the latter part of the century, in certain theatres at least, they were far from being the hornyhanded automata, clapping in obedience to the word of command, that they had been under the Restoration. A long acquaintance with good acting had refined their taste, and Antoine, who made friends with some of them in his youth, admits that it was through them that he got to hear of the great stars of bygone times, Rachel, Samson, Regnier. It was not unusual in the mid-century for penniless students or illpaid clerks like Antoine to enrol in the claque so as to avoid having to waste an hour or more's time in the queue or alternatively to pay the exorbitant fee to reserve a seat in advance. Edmond Bire relates in his memoirs16 how, in 1850, a friend of his, knowing he was stagestruck and at the same time living on a small allowance, took him to one side and offered to introduce him to the chef de claque at the Comedie-Fran^aise. They would need to meet punctually at 7.15 p.m. at the Cafe de Rohan, in the neighbourhood of the theatre, and here he would pay the man exactly what he would have paid at the ticket office after enduring the long tedium of queuing. 'That done, we shall leave with all the honest lads who will have assembled there, young workmen for the most part with a taste for dramatics.' They would enter the theatre by a secret door, in advance of the general public and before the lights were turned up in the auditorium. Bire and he would choose seats some distance away from the

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body of the claque, since they had paid full price while the others had not; they were not obliged to applaud when the claque did: the only condition was that they should not express outright disapproval of the acting or the play. Bire put himself into his friend's hands and everything passed off as he had foretold, not only on that evening when the great attraction was Rachel playing in Dumas's Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, but for the rest of the season, when he was able to be present at all her appearances and at every first night without dipping too deeply into his savings. Nerval's experiences of the claque were similar to Bire's, though his reasons for joining it were different: he was at the time employed as dramatic critic for a review in bad odour with theatre managements and in consequence found himself to his embarrassment refused a seat at an opening night which it was important to cover. A friendly actor at the theatre told him how he could get in touch with the chef de claque in the upstairs room of an obscure bar. Nerval went along, was duly enrolled, and when the time came to leave, a window was opened and we climbed down a ladder into the courtyard, from which the men fanned out into the street as though leaving a meeting and strung themselves out as naturally as possible so as not to call attention to themselves. The little group joined up again as they approached the theatre and entered it as quickly as possible through the stage door, the leaders guiding the others through the maze of corridors backstage where the public are never admitted. In a short space of time we were all inside; the chandelier had not yet been lit, there was nothing to illuminate the dim interior except two or three oil lamps stuck into long planks in front of the stage.17 There they waited an hour or so, whispering, before the doors opened to admit the audience proper. Both Bire and Nerval had been taken on as irregulars [solitaires^ in the theatrical argot of the time), paying the standard price for seats in the pit but obliged to adopt these secretive methods in order to avoid having to queue until the ticket office opened, with the risk of not getting in even so. The regulars were known as intimes; they disbursed nothing but paid for their seats with their broad palms which they could be relied on to bring together with a resounding clap whenever the chefde claque gave the signal. At an earlier period, as we have seen, they were all massed round him under the chandelier, but it was discovered after a while that applause was far more effective if it broke out at various different spots, and accordingly they were

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dispersed throughout the pit and even in the upper galleries. This of course presupposed a claque more attentive to the leader and possibly rehearsed in advance. Something of the sort was certainly practised at the Comedie-Frangaise under Perrin's management (1871—85); the number oiintimes was reduced to eighteen, who took up positions here and there in the pit, never more than two or three together, so that as the theatre filled up it was impossible to distinguish them from the ordinary members of the audience. Knowing in advance, more or less, the passages which it was desirable to applaud - though always very discreetly - they only glanced at their leader to ascertain whether he wanted them to stay silent at such or such a crucial moment. The chefde claque had the right to suppress the customary applause if it seemed to him, for one reason or another, undeserved. In this way he avoided all possible protests from the audience. Clearly the policy of the Comedie-Frangaise under the Third Republic was to make the claque virtually unidentifiable; at the most it would encourage applause but should never be seen to do so. The longest-serving member of the claque at the time, a certain Chapeau, used to relate proudly that his moment of supreme satisfaction occurred one evening when his neighbour in the stalls, a man who had paid for his seat at the ticket office, remarked to him: 'What pleases me most about the Comedie-Frangaise is that they don't employ a claque.' Whereupon Chapeau replied, in tones of great conviction: Tf there were such a thing as a claque at the Comedie-Frangaise, I would never myself set foot inside it.'18 The claque's job was not confined to applauding at appropriate moments. The minor theatres in particular had a number of chatouilleurs (ticklers) whose business, wrote Hervey, was 'to laugh at all the jokes, especially the bad ones, in the different pieces, and to utter sundry exclamations of delight at short intervals, with a view to exciting a similar manifestation of satisfaction on the part of the audience'.19 Heine heard of this breed from his barber, whose brother discharged the functions of chatouilleur at one of the theatres on the boulevard, and the account he gives20 is similar to Hervey's. It was a well-paid job, Heine learned: the barber's brother earned more than the barber himself, partly because, as a sideline, he worked as an undertaker's assistant and was often required to officiate at a funeral in the daytime and spend the evening laughing at stale jokes so as to stimulate a grumpy audience. At theatres

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The audiences

specializing in melodrama women were employed not to laugh but to weep. 'They are taught, one to sob, another to feign to wipe away a tear, and another to scream when a pistol goes off, and they are distributed in different parts of the house. If you see any lady fainting on these occasions', advised Sanderson, 'don't pick her up, she is getting her living by it.'21 Thus what started as a purely mercenary speculation which the police of the First Empire did their best to suppress, finally evolved into a concerted effort in which theatre directors worked hand in glove with the entrepreneurs de succes (as the chefs de claque had taken to

calling themselves) in order to ensure that a poor play should pass as a good evening's entertainment instead of proving an expensive flop. Audiences were being increasingly marginalized. But the process was gradual, and until the claque had learned discretion, their activities met with bitter hostility and were savagely denounced. Viennet, one of the last writers of neoclassical tragedy for the French stage, summed up the common view in a diary entry for 15 September 1825: For a score of years now, theatre audiences have fallen under the dominion of a few dishonourable individuals, devoid of talent, who have assumed the monopoly of applause. Every theatre has its chef de claque to whom authors and actors pay daily tribute of a given quota of tickets. These he distributes to tailors' apprentices and shoemakers'journeymen, who as hired clappers are scattered throughout the pit in such a way as to be constantly under the eyes of their leaders, who give the signal for applause and cheering. It's absurd, it's infamous, it's unworthy of us - but it has become a settled, flourishing institution and that is why respectable people have stopped contributing to the applause.-'2 In the same year a determined effort was made by the student members of the audience at the Odeon to force the director, EricBernard, to abolish the claque at his theatre. In obedience to their demands, he instructed his controleur to issue to all bona fide members of the audience who had paid for their tickets a special card which could be used as a contremarque at the interval. The claque, having made its entry surreptitiously before anyone else, did not need to pass before the controleur and so was not in possession of these cards. On 15 January 1825 Samson was acting in a short piece of his own composition, La Fete de Moliere; just before it was due to begin, he heard an unusual hubbub, and peeping through the curtain he noticed a number of young men standing up on the benches

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who appeared to be upbraiding with some violence the seated spectators. This is what had happened: in order to identify those members of the audience who had not paid for their seats and whom they regarded as belonging to the claque, the students had ordered everyone to stick their cards in their hats, and accordingly nearly everyone wasflauntingin his hat this glorious badge of independence. Anyone however who could not display it was assailed with shouts of 'out with him!' — hence the disturbance, the quarrels, the fearful uproar.2:* What the students were overlooking - but what the astute director had no doubt foreseen - was that apart from the claque who, true enough, had no cards to show, there were others who, quite legitimately, had taken their places without having paid for them: these were the friends and relatives of Samson himself to whom, as was his right as author of the play, he had distributed complimentary tickets. As soon as this was realized, the students calmed down and the performance could proceed, though whether with or without the claque it was impossible for them to determine. A fortnight later, however, they were in no doubt about the continued presence of the hated 'Romans'. A verse tragedy, UOrphelin de Bethleem (The Orphan of Bethlehem) had its one and only performance on i February; whether because of the anti-Semitism of the play or for some other reason,24 it was hissed by the student body who were outraged when the claque defiantly applauded it. The punch-up that ensued was gleefully described by a journalist attached to La Quotidienne: Clenched fists rose and fell with such velocity that the eye could barely follow them; the prostrate bodies of the combatants rolled under the benches and filled up the spaces between them, forming a moving carpet for those advancing to fresh exploits. Meanwhile, the spectators who had remained neutral . . . clambered through the orchestra and took refuge on the stage.25 The melee lasted for half an hour and ended with the expulsion of the claque, so that the students were free to boo the play to their heart's content until the curtain fell. The episode achieved a legendary fame and was known thereafter as 'the battle of Bethlehem' or, by the few who sympathized with the claque, as 'the Massacre of the Innocents'. As a result of this fracas, Eric-Bernard announced firmly that the claque would no longer be allowed at the Odeon; but despite this their presence was betrayed that November by an incautious and

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inapposite burst of clapping; once again the belligerent students fell on the unlucky 'knights of the chandelier' and drove them out after a fresh fight. Whether the director, who clearly valued the services of the claque, accepted the situation finally is impossible to say: the following year he threw up his position. But hostilities between the students and the claque continued at the Odeon after the July Revolution: on 7 October 1830, at a revival of one of Ancelot's tragedies, the leader of the claque was seen to be wearing the uniform of a national guardsman, and was denounced by a grenadier in the gallery who shouted out: 'Any man doing such a filthy trade is unworthy to wear the uniform of the citizens' army!' For this he earned a bigger round of applause than the claque had been able to give to any tirade in the interrupted tragedy. Finally, there is the well-known story of Alfred de Musset's disastrous debut, with a light and airy piece of a delicacy totally at variance with the crude violence of the romantic melodramas that were sweeping the boards at the time. Modern accounts attribute the failure of La Nuit venitienne (One Night in Venice) to an unfortunate accident befalling the actress playing the heroine, who at a crucial point leaned back against a freshly painted piece of stage scenery and, when she turned round, convulsed the audience with the sight of her white dress striped with green. In fact, the role of the claque, insisting on applauding the play despite the obvious impatience of the audience throughout, may have been equally responsible for the failure of La Nuit venitienne at its inaugural performance at the Odeon on 1 December 1830. The following day, a report signed by Charles Maurice appeared in his newspaper, Le Courrier des theatres: Yesterday evening the pit at the Odeon was peopled by a few spectators who had paid their entrance money, having been fooled by the theatre poster; other spectators in much greater numbers had been summoned to support the new production using hands and fists, in accordance with the licence allowed them by the law, of which they took every advantage. They countered the whistling of the young men of taste by uttering threats and insults and making highly offensive gestures. One of these scoundrels who infest our theatres and go under the name of claqueurs had the temerity to stand up on a bench and abuse the public in words too offensive to be reproduced here. In short, blows might well have been exchanged if the play had not come to a sudden end.26 It is not by chance that the Odeon should have been the scene of all these early attempts, under the Restoration and the July

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Monarchy, to get rid of the claque. Quite apart from the fact that the audience in this theatre situated in the Latin Quarter was for the most part composed of quick-tempered young men spoiling for a fight, they regarded themselves as the true heirs of that cultivated parterre of pre-revolutionary days whose word had been law at the Comedie-Fran^aise - and of course the Odeon was, in a sense, its lineal descendant, having been erected on the ruins of the building constructed for the Comedie-Fran^aise and used by that company between 1782 and 1793. So it was understandable that the students sitting on their benches in the Odeon should have regarded the claque as intolerable interlopers, to be silenced whenever they manifested their presence too obviously. But the claque, as we have seen, was quite as provocative and bellicose as its opponents, and not just at the Odeon. Theophile Gautier commented indignantly on their brutality at the Vaudeville in 1839, where at a comedy entitled Les Plus Belles Femmes de Paris,

respectable people, having permitted themselves to hiss a truly deplorable and highly indecent scene, were reviled and insulted, then bruised and beaten up by the ignoble ruffians of the claque on the pretext they were part of a hostile cabal; only a Parisian audience could put up with such an affront. Incidents such as these occur only too often [continued Gautier], shaming spectators and management alike. A theatre auditorium ought not to be turned into a boxing ring; it's not nice at all to return home with a bloody nose and an eye all the colours of the rainbow; no musical is worth incurring such risks.2? Another commentator blamed the police for their insensitive handling of such situations. Their orders were to expel anyone trying to interrupt a performance, so, when fighting breaks out between spectators who are booing and the claque who try to silence them, 'the police turn out those members of the public who are hissing, on the grounds that they are creating a disturbance; and the claque, preening itself on its triumph, continues to applaud all the way along the line'.28 In time theatre audiences in Paris, though despising the claque and resenting the special privileges allowed it by management (such as being smuggled into the auditorium in advance of the general public and left free to occupy whatever seats suited them best29), accepted its presence resignedly and were chiefly concerned not to be thought to have any connection with it; in other words they tended to refrain not only from giving vent to their disapproval when a poor

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play or bad acting deserved it, but equally from expressing satisfaction with a good play or a fine piece of acting. The public, as Hervey put it in 1846, 'have been so long accustomed to applaud by proxy, that they have become cold and indifferent, and seldom manifest any feeling of approbation, lest they themselves should be considered in league with the claque'.30 It required a brilliant actor or an actress of the first rank, like Rachel, to rouse an audience at the TheatreFran^ais to spontaneous applause. Those who had a vested interest in the perpetuation of the institution derived from this apathy of the public an argument in favour of the retention of the claque. When Arsene Houssaye took over the functions of administrator of the Comedie-Fran^aise in 1849, one of the reforms he contemplated was to do away with the claque, but he changed his mind after a conversation with its leader, Vacher, of which he prints a version in his memoirs. Houssaye began the discussion by pointing out that Moliere had managed perfectly well without a claque, an argument which Vacher countered by exclaiming: In those days you had a pit which knew its business. Nowadays there's no such pit. Who are all these sightseers who drift along today? Provincials who have lost their way and would be capable of hissing the finest scenes or clapping at all the wrong places. Whereas I have made a close study of all our dramatists as well as the talents of all our actors here, at the Odeon and on the boulevard. You won't be able to do without us for another fifty years, by which time the public will be properly educated.31 Houssaye, after watching Vacher at work, had to admit the force of his arguments, and the claque continued to operate as before at the Comedie-Fran^aise. Early in 1853 Auguste Romieu, then in charge of the Fine Arts department of the Ministry of the Interior, decided to banish the claque from all the state-supported theatres in Paris. The experiment lasted no more than a week: on 13 January, Napoleon III honoured the Comedie-Fran^aise with his presence, and took his seat in the imperial box without a single huzzah from the audience; the following day the claque was reinstalled. But all that week, as Fiorentino recalled in 1861, 'performances were dismal, the actors hamstrung, the audiences in despair. The public were being asked to do what they never did, to decide for themselves, to make up their own minds, to take an initiative at the risk of looking silly - all things people are most loth to do in Paris.'32 It was the first and last attempt

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115

to deal with the problem by administrative action, though in the excitement of the World Exhibition of 1878 it was found possible to dispense with the claque at the Opera and the Comedie-Franc.aise at least so long as the city was thronged with uninhibited foreign visitors - though the Opera-Comique did not follow suit, confident that its claque was by now so well trained that few could suspect its presence. At the first performance of E. Paladilhe's Suzanne, on 30 December that year, the claque iaughed at the appropriate moments, but so discreetly that the laughter seemed almost witty. They emphasized the tender passages by an opportune blowing of the nose. They uttered mischievous exclamations at every naughty remark'33 - in short, they had by this time learned to behave no differently from any responsive or susceptible member of the audience and, since they were no longer distinguishable in dress or appearance from ordinary members of the public (the red scarves and heavy coachmen's coats which used to mark them out had long since vanished), they had virtually merged, chameleon-like, into the background, and their role was now to provide an imperceptible though effective stimulus to the audience at certain moments. The claque was not employed everywhere even in Paris. It would have been inappropriate at the Italian Opera, frequented by connoisseurs who had no need of ignorant outsiders to tell them where applause was called for. Similarly the management usually dispensed with the claque for the subscription evenings at the Theatre-Fran^ais on Tuesdays and Thursdays, leaving it to its gentlemanly audience to applaud when it felt so inclined. At the other end of the social scale, the working-class audiences at the Funambules and elsewhere along the Boulevard du Temple had no need of encouragement: they clapped enthusiastically at every performance, deliriously whenever Deburau was playing. And the claque never took root outside Paris. Malliot warned dramatists about this: 'the most pacific provincial is very touchy on this point, he won't permit anyone to do his thinking for him and he would be capable of dealing with the claque in no uncertain way if they tried to organize themselves at his theatre as they do in the capital'.34 Added to which was the circumstance that provincial directors seldom stayed very long in the same town, and so were unable to develop the same symbiotic relationship with a chef de claque as was not uncommon in Paris, where he would often stay in the same theatre for years. Santon, who led the claque at the Varietes, knew

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The audiences

the repertory there by heart, so much so that all the way through a performance he would read the paper instead of following the play and yet would never fail to give the signal for a shout of laughter or a burst of applause at exactly the right moment. In the hierarchy of the administration, a chef de claque ranked, with the stage manager, immediately below the director; he sat in at dress rehearsals, taking notes which would serve him to give instructions to his subordinates when the play came to face the all-important opening performance, and afterwards he would have a private conference with the director in which the play or musical comedy was analysed scene by scene in order to determine where it might need to be boosted a little, or where the chef de claque could safely rein in his men, confident that the scene would 'carry' without their help. It was towards the end of the nineteenth century and over the first decade of the twentieth that the institution began to lose ground before finally withering away. The claque was abolished for good at the Odeon around 1895 anc ^ a t t n e Comedie-Fran^aise in 1900, when Dorlot, who had served as chef de claque for many years, took his retirement. Its disappearance may well have had nothing to do with the popular resentment of the claque's activities, which had, if anything, diminished over the years. The probability is that the claque fell victim to the new custom of extinguishing the houselights at the start of a play, a procedure greatly facilitated by the replacement of gas-lighting by electricity. A claque could only function if it could keep its eyes on its leader, who alone could send the necessary signals for applause, laughter etc. But with the auditorium plunged into darkness, his gestures were no longer visible, and the claque of necessity had to be disbanded. Thus technical advances sometimes achieve silently and suddenly reforms which years of complaints and protests have failed to bring about.

CHAPTER 8

Working-class audiences

The underprivileged urban population of pre-revolutionary France was not by any means deprived of sources of more or less innocent entertainment, both at the fairgrounds and at the various commercial theatres that were started up on the northern boulevards of Paris during the last three decades of the ancien regime. First Nicolet's theatre, later renamed the Gaite, then Audinot's Ambigu-Comique and several smaller houses were established here, specializing in a repertory primarily aimed at lower-class audiences and priced in accordance with their straitened means. In addition, there was a long-standing tradition of throwing open the larger, more aristocratic theatres to all comers, free of charge, to mark occasions of national rejoicing. Thus, the royal theatres put on free performances to celebrate the birth of a daughter to Marie-Antoinette in 1778 and again at the birth of heir to the throne in 1785. During the Revolution, as part of their efforts to sustain the morale of the sansculottes, the Jacobins resolved to generalize what had been under the monarchy a very sporadic festivity, and instituted, in August 1793, the enactment of named 'republican tragedies' for which no admittance charge was made, the theatres concerned being promised an appropriate indemnification. These free performances, known as 'representations de par et pour le peuple', were for a short while of fairly frequent occurrence, the rule being that designated theatres should mount one every ten days (the decade having replaced the seven-day week under the new revolutionary calendar); and these continued under the Directory, though no doubt at a reduced tempo. Some indication of their popularity, causing gross overcrowding of the theatres whenever one was announced, is afforded by Charles Maurice's description of an incident he witnessed at a production of Demoustier's Le Conciliateur given 'de par et pour le peuple' at the Theatre Feydeau in 1797. In the course of the evening 117

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The audiences

the right-hand balcony, overburdened by eager spectators, gave way or at least began to sag in a frightening manner. Instead of leaving, those who were crammed into it clung on to each other or on to the planks that were starting to part; but they continued to follow the actors as though nothing was threatening them. Nevertheless the commotion could not but be accompanied by some noise to which the rest of the audience objected, shouting: 'Silence! Throw them out! One can't hear a word!' The balcony on the left, even more irritated, started to curse the half shipwrecked right balcony, and an exchange of stinging repartees ensued, bringing the performance to a temporary halt.1 Fleury, who had the lead part in the comedy, took it on himself to discharge the part of 'conciliator' which he was acting in the play, and succeeded in calming down both sides; his pleas for quiet were finally accepted and the performance completed without further mishap. The custom continued under the succeeding regime; writing of the celebrations in 1801 which marked the conclusion of peace with England, Lemaistre noted that all the theatres except the Italian Opera were 'thrown open to the public', though his friends dissuaded him from witnessing any of these gratis performances, warning him 'that the attempt would be attended with considerable danger', 2 with reference possibly to the near-disaster at the Feydeau four years earlier. Free performances were put on regularly on 15 August every year from 1802 to 1813 in celebration of Napoleon's birthday; there were others at each of his major victories in the field, not to mention the anniversary of his coronation, his wedding to Marie-Louise of Austria, and the baptism of his infant son in 1811. Etienne de Jouy devoted an essay, dated 4 December 1813, to one of these popular festivities, probably the last of those celebrating the anniversary of Napoleon's coronation.3 He describes how, at daybreak, crowds begin to collect in front of the walls where the theatre bills were posted. The literate read them aloud, sometimes mispronouncing grotesquely the titles of the works to be performed. Each theatre has its own fanciers; but it is above all along the embankments and at the central market that it is delightful to listen to the arguments about the merits of each play, the actors' talents and the preference to be given to the various types of entertainment. At noon every workplace is deserted; reckless of what they lose in wages in satisfying their desire to attend a 'free performance', the

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people start forming queues two hours in advance in front of the theatre of their choice. Jouy emphasizes that, contrary to what one might expect, the biggest crowds gather before the 'privileged' theatres advertising opera or classical tragedy; but these were art forms that working-class people never saw except on such occasions and their curiosity was whetted by the prospect of witnessing, at least once in their lives, what the rich take pleasure in and pay large sums to enjoy. In front of the Theatre-Franc.ais 'the crowd is immense, heaving and pressing up like the waves of the sea . . . The doors open; the ocean does not flood the docks at Cherbourg with greater violence; the mob invades in an instant the courtyard, the staircases, the corridors, the pit and the boxes.' The normal appearance of the auditorium is totally changed; instead of the fine ladies with their fans and the elegant dandies accompanying them, one sees bonneted fruit-sellers, market porters wearing their grey hats, coalmen and barbers besprinkled with the detritus of their trade. They sit where they can, this one in the other's lap, a dozen or more crowding into a box meant to accommodate four or six at the most; the noise is terrific, with everyone shouting, whistling, stamping. But as soon as the curtain is raised, absolute silence is restored as if by magic; if anyone were to break it, he would be instantly expelled. The audience on those days of 'no charge for admission', by the very fact that it can seldom afford to go to the theatre, brings to bear on the performance a concentration of attention that nothing can disturb, a keenness ofjudgement that nothing can blunt. Taken separately, not one of the individuals composing it could perhaps have understood a single line of £aire;* but this mass of men, as unenlightened the one as the other, like a pile of damp hay that ignites spontaneously in a loft, is suddenly endowed with a warmth of sentiment and a purity of taste which permit it to discern all the beauties of the work and to appreciate all the efforts of the actors. Jouy's impression, in this last respect, was amply confirmed by Talma, 5 who admitted that such an audience brings out the best in me. You should come along to one of those free admission days, you would see how it responds to every hint, how it applauds at all the right places, how warmly and with just the right measure. It grasps every nuance, nothing escapes it; it is nature in the raw, if you will, but it is nature, and if the actor is truthful, the working-class audience, which is truth personified, responds immediately.

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The audiences

The tradition of free performances was kept up for a few years during the reign of Louis XVIII, and the account given by Mme de Bawr in her memoirs confirms everything Jouy had said respecting the chaotic scene before the curtain rose and the utter silence that fell as soon as the players were seen on stage. The anecdote she proceeds to tell illustrates to perfection the mixture of appreciation and mystification created in this rather special audience by the works sometimes offered at that period by the senior theatre - works designed for a very different public composed of the cultivated aristocratic theatre-goers of the ancien regime', it shows too how terrified the actors were at heart of the lawless audience before which, exceptionally, they were called on to perform. Curiosity had led her to attend a revival at the Comedie-Frangaise of an old tragedy by Belloy, and having watched the first two acts she decided to pay a social call on Mile Mars in her dressing-room. Suddenly a frightened actor appeared at the door, interrupting their conversation with the news that by some mischance the third act had been entirely skipped. 'They're on the fourth act now, they're going to think we're trying to make fools of them, in which case we're all lost.' The party crept downstairs, trembling, and stood in the wings. The fourth act was being listened to with the usual rapt attention, 'the fifth act was played through just as peaceably; at last the curtain fell, the spectators broke into applause, not having noticed, thank heaven, that they had not been served up with the whole tragedy'.6 The furious riot, which the actors seriously thought would break out if the rabble discovered they were being shortchanged and which might easily, as they imagined, have led to the theatre being burned down, had fortunately been averted. Probably because of the deep-seated unease felt by the governing classes in France at this period, confronting a discontented proletariat suffering wage-cuts and layoffs as the industrial revolution gathered pace, free performances for the working class seem to have been discontinued later in the Restoration and were not resumed under Louis-Philippe. After the 1848 revolution J. P. Lockroy, newly appointed administrator of the Comedie-Frangaise, had the idea of reviving them, but with a difference: instead of the doors being open to all comers, with the inevitable result that everyone who could squeezed in, free tickets up to the maximum number the theatre would hold were drawn by lot and distributed to the lucky ones at the various city halls. George Sand, reporting on the first of

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these occasions, stressed how well behaved the audience was. 'Not a single apple core or bit of orange peel was left in the boxes, not a sound was heard while Corneille's lines or Moliere's were being declaimed: nothing but a religious silence, a gentleness of manners, a delicacy in the applause such as could be looked for in vain elsewhere.'7 The programme was concluded by a recitation of the Marseillaise by Rachel; after which a young workman, carrying a bouquet for which a collection had been taken among his mates, mounted the stage and begged her respectfully to declaim once more the final verse. Unfortunately only two of these free performances could be organized that year before the political horizon darkened again. They were resumed, however, under the Second Empire: regularly on the birthday of Napoleon I from 1853 onwards until the last in 1869, and for certain special thanksgivings, such as the birth of an heir to the throne. These free performances were always held in the afternoon and in the absence of the claque. The repertoire at the Comedie-Frangaise usually consisted of well-tried classics, Phedre, Andromaque, Le Medecin malgre lui, etc.; but occasionally a new play

was tried out and evoked applause or hissing exactly as if it were being performed in front of the usual select audience. The practice continued after the fall of the Empire; only the date of the regular annual performances was changed, from 15 August to 14 July, and in addition certain notable events of importance to the new republic were commemorated in this way, such as the death of Hugo, solemnized by a free performance of Hernani by the ComedieFrangaise on 7 June 1885, the centenary of the summoning of the Estates General for which the Odeon offered Le Manage de Figaro (5 May 1889), and a revival of Voltaire's Mort de Cesar by the ComedieFrangaise on 22 September 1892 to mark the centenary of the First Republic. Free performances of works thought eminently suited to a working-class audience were also occasionally put on at the request of authors who, needless to say, waived their royalties for the occasion: Zola and Busnach persuaded the directors of the Ambigu and the Chatelet respectively to open their doors to a non-paying public for special performances of UAssommoir (14 April 1879) and Germinal (28 April 1888). These free shows, popular as they were, never of course came anywhere near satisfying the insatiable demands of the working-class population of Paris for dramatic entertainment. They were always

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special occasions, allowing the plebs the chance otherwise denied them of entering the august theatres normally frequented only by their 'betters' and of watching the cream of the acting profession who, by all accounts, exerted themselves to the utmost for this unusual but invariably appreciative audience. But for ordinary, dayto-day purposes the lower classes relied, down to 1862, on the chain of little theatres situated along the Boulevard du Temple, in accordance with a tradition which had lasted a hundred years. The working-class audiences here consisted not of factory-hands, too poorly paid in any case to afford visits to the theatre, but of the skilled artisans whose workshops were scattered over the area to the east of the Rue SaintDenis, together with small shopkeepers and pensioners able to spare the price of an occasional cheap seat out of their meagre annuities.8 The Boulevard du Temple had, of course, altered considerably in character since its heyday in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution. The numerous side-shows, cafes, and public gardens had largely disappeared, and in the nineteenth century it did not differ greatly from any of the other boulevards of Paris. Under the July Monarchy 'the hovels that used to cluster round every theatre disappeared; the wine-shops, the brasseries, and the open-air stalls were replaced by imposing houses and elegant cafes . . . The orange-sellers were installed behind commodious tables, protected by huge red awnings from the sun by day and the rain by night.'9 Some things never changed: the vendors of liquorice water or roast chestnuts were still active, as too the girls offering cakes and appletarts to people in the queues who now, courtesy of a caring municipality, no longer had to stand in the rain but could shelter under a convenient canopy. At nightfall, the Boulevard du Temple was still one of the brightest spots in the city, thanks to its numerous street lamps and well-lit shops, cafes and theatres. The Parisians gravitated there spontaneously, unconsciously, drawn by the brilliance as the moth to the lighted candle and in obedience to man's invincible horror of the dark. Every evening a cheerful, excited, busy or loitering crowd criss-crossed on the broad terrace, arm in arm or dreaming by themselves, idly sauntering or pursuing love-affairs, and jostling the actors in the crowd who established in this way a tie with their audiences for whom they were never strangers.10 Seven theatres were strung along the Boulevard du Temple eight if one included the Porte-Saint-Martin at the extreme end

Working-class audiences

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which was, however, never a predominantly working-class theatre. The oldest of them was the Gaite, the theatre originally built by Nicolet and, in spite of its name, specializing in the nineteenth century in sombre melodrama. Audinot's Ambigu-Comique, burned to the ground in 1827, na cl been re-erected on a different site the following year, and next in line on the boulevard now stood the Folies-Dramatiques, which like the Gaite showed melodrama but more often musicals. Then came the Funambules which owed its immense popularity almost entirely to the mime of genius, Deburau; the Cirque-Olympique, alternating between military pageants and fairy plays; and two more recent foundations, the Theatre-Historique and the Delassements-Comiques, the first intended originally for Dumas's historical dramas but turning later to comic opera, and the second owing its prosperity to its energetic director Leon Sari, later to inaugurate the imperishable Folies-Bergere. Finally there was the diminutive Petit-Lazari, where the plays had the oddest titles, like The Philosopher and the Bed Bug, where they played blind man's buffin the pit while waiting for the curtain to rise, and where audience participation was a recognized feature of the entertainment. A member of the audience, sitting in the pit or the upper gallery, would shout out some rude comment; the actors on stage would reply, using the vilest slang; this would be followed by reciprocal threats and a cross-fire of invective which delighted the assembly, who would often fill the same part as the chorus of antiquity, until the authorities intervened, though always cautiously.11 The Boulevard du Temple was commonly referred to as the Boulevard du Crime, a sobriquet not intended to reflect on the morality of those who frequented it, but given in consideration of the immense quantity of bloodshed and mayhem on its seven stages, particularly on those where the melodrama ruled supreme. Read today in cold blood, the text of most of these thrillers that held the working-class stage in the first half of the nineteenth century would strike us as more comical than terrifying; they were nothing like as hair-raising as the inventions of Andre de Lorde and his associates at the Theatre du Grand-Guignol in the first decade of the twentieth century. Nevertheless they presented an extraordinary spectacle, which it was necessary to witness, as Jules Janin wrote, sitting in the middle of the pit, surrounded by bareheaded, panting women and aficionados in workmen's overalls, at the peak of the furious consump-

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The audiences

tion of apples, gingerbread, barley-sugar, beer and exclamation marks. This crowd has to be heard, the performance has to be seen to be believed. On the stage, theft, prostitution, gambling, informers, police, the executioner, the guillotine; below, men and women eating and gawping.12 They were so drawn into these horrors that they sometimes made no distinction between the actress and the persecuted heroine she portrayed, or between the actor and the bewhiskered villain he impersonated. 'Vice is vice on the boulevard', commented Thackeray approvingly: and it isfineto hear the audience, as a tyrant king roars out cruel sentences of death, or a bereaved mother pleads for the life of her child, making their remarks on the circumstances of the scene. 'Ah! le gredin!' growls an indignant countryman. 'Quel monstre!' says a grisette in a fury. You see fat old men crying like babies, sucking enormous sticks of barley-sugar.13 It was not unusual for the villain to have to slink away at the end of a performance by the back door; even so he might be tracked through the streets to his lodgings by the hostile spectators, so incensed they would on occasion relieve their feelings by hurling a brick through his window. 'The lower orders', wrote Eugene Mirecourt in 1843, give themselves up body and soul to the fascination of the drama; they follow the plot anxiously as it unfolds. You see them, with necks outstretched and mouths gaping: not a word do they miss, not a syllable; they shudder at every turn of events and weep at the conclusion. They take everything for real with a frightening naivete.14 Hence, of course, the complete silence that fell as soon as the curtain rose, something that so astonished observers at the Comedie-Frangaise when a free performance was given; they thought they were behaving with extraordinary respectfulness, while in fact they were doing no more than what they were accustomed to do on the boulevard. These seven theatres aforementioned were so located that the audiences became more and more exclusively working class as one moved from west to east along the Boulevard. Juste Olivier described the Gaite as 'a theatre such as one might find in the provinces, with the difference that the better-class people are seldom to be seen there. The fat, jolly ladies filling the front galleries looked to us to be shopkeepers, rolling in the aisles and fanning themselves with the

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cheap fans on sale for six sous in the theatre itself.'1^ The FoliesDramatiques, before 1834, was typically working-class: cheap, dirty, and always jam-packed. 'Even in the summer months they crowded in, gasping with the heat but enjoying every moment; nobody dreamed of making an outing to the country for a breath of fresh air after their day's labour . . . They never troubled themselves with what was on the programme, that had no importance at all: they were off to the theatre and that was that!' 16 But in 1834 Frederick Lemaitre's hilarious satire Robert Macaire attracted a different audience: everyone wanted to see it, 'all Paris crowded into its narrow, smoky hall to applaud vigorously this eccentric work, which the customary public of the place failed to understand and would occasionally hiss. Since then, the Folies-Dramatiques have always kept something of Robert Macaire.' 17 The repertoire became less crude, attracting a predominantly middle-class audience, while its former patrons drifted away to the Funambules and the PetitLazari. By 1842 the Folies-Dramatiques had been transformed, its balcony resplendent in white and gold, the benches in the pit no longer covered with grey cloth but with well-stuffed scarlet velvet; and the prices reflected this metamorphosis. 'The best society of the Marais and the suburbs have conferred lustre on this theatre', wrote Gautier at the time; 'you get looked at askance if you turn up in a jacket; in a workman's overall you would not gain admittance. It's gloves everywhere in the balcony and front boxes, the audience making it a point of honour to sit nowhere else; the pit is practically empty.' 18 The reputation ofJean-Gaspard Deburau, spread by hearsay and newspaper reports, drew the very best of Saint-Germain society to the Funambules; but the working-class admirers of the marvellous mime refused to desert their theatre in face of this invasion by the 'nobs', so that every evening the audience presented a mingling of the classes such as was rarely seen in any Paris theatre. It was, as Janin wrote, a confusion of lace and unspeakable rags, of velvet and filthy workmen's overalls; the scent of ambergris at odds with a strong smell of garlic, sprays of camellia brushing up against chip bags, the satin shoe alongside the clog; here, patches and stains, there the virgin white of an immaculate glove; the artisan's horny mitt alongside the delicate hand of a duchess. At the same moment you could hear the soft murmuring of those gently mocking voices and the hoarse shout of a tipsy man.'9

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The audiences

Probably Janin is allowing his pen to run away with him in this passage, and the picture he draws must not be taken too literally: the pricing policy, at the Funambules as elsewhere, would have ensured a partitioning of the classes rather than a fusion. But it was a theatre which the poorer people persisted in regarding as strictly their own, and where the better-dressed were allowed only on sufferance. While waiting for the entertainment to start, woe betide anyone who dared to direct an impertinent lorgnette on to those picturesque groups, clustering and hanging dangerously from the railings of the balcony! Woe betide the ridiculous costumes that ventured to display themselves in a front box, or any spectator who too obviously flourished a scent-bottle before his nostrils! Innumerable sarcastic shouts, an impetuous hurrah, animal cries, an unbelievable luxuriance of imagination would soon have put an end to the slightest breach of manners.20

Deburau was the magnet that attracted these interlopers from another world; but the great Pierrot was theirs alone, sprung from the people and playing for the people. However little attention they may have paid to the curtain-raiser, when the orchestra struck up the air which announced the mime, a religious hush gripped the entire audience. At the Funambules, the only actor heard in dead silence was Deburau, who never uttered a word. Such was their respect for him that if a stage-hand made a sound behind the scenes they yelled for quiet. One evening, some reveller ventured to imitate a donkey's braying when Deburau made his appearance. 'In less than no time, the unfortunate fellow's cap and overall were torn to pieces; he was passed from hand to hand like a parcel to the door of the pit, where an enormous kick in the rear sent him flying.'21 The Funambules, the Delassements-Comiques, and the PetitLazari at the east end of the Boulevard du Temple constituted the three playhouses that the working classes had marked as peculiarly their own; at the Petit-Lazari it was considered imprudent to venture inside unless one was wearing the dress of one's trade, the stonemason's overall or the mud-bespattered garb of the streetsweeper. If for any reason displeased with the performance, the audience never had the least compunction in venting their dissatisfaction, but whereas at other theatres a violent outbreak of whistling and catcalls would suffice to call an actor to order, at the PetitLazari such expressions of disapproval would have been regarded as altogether too tame. Banville recalls how, during the July Monarchy

Working-class audiences

12 7

when Bonapartism had numerous adherents among the lower classes, one actor had the misfortune to parody Napoleon the Great. The allusion was immediately understood and violently resented. One could feel as it were a storm gathering in the auditorium; suddenly the thundercloud burst; there was a furious whistling and numberless projectiles of the most varied kind, from smoked sausages to apples, descended like hail on the actor's head, more dishevelled than King Lear's. Two policemen entered to restore order; but a moment later they had disappeared, vapourized like two drops of water falling on to a red-hot metal sheet. What had happened in reality was that they had been stuffed under the benches, from which their vague complaints could be heard in the darkness, and from which they would not have emerged until the day of judgement had not a squad of municipal guardsmen, helmeted and with drawn sabres, arrived in the middle of the uproar to evacuate the hall after taking it by storm.22

These theatres were not only dirty and ill lit, but tiny too. At the Petit-Lazari the stage was so low that the actors had to crouch down as they made their entry, and if they exited on the far side, since there was no way of crossing behind the back curtain, they emerged on to the boulevard and re-entered the theatre by the stage door. The maximum capacity at the Funambules was only 500, and it was always full since a seat in the gods cost less than a newspaper or a loaf of bread; those who could not get in at the 6.30 p.m. performance on high days and holidays could always try for the second, at 9.0 p.m. The Boulevard du Crime lasted down to 1862, when it fell victim to Haussmann's grandiose plans for clearing the slums and driving handsome new arteries through Paris. This inevitable sacrifice to the requirements of modern town planning had long been anticipated; even under the July Monarchy it was rumoured that the city authorities were contemplating a realignment and straightening of the Boulevard which would necessarily involve the destruction of most of the 'workers' theatres', some of which dated back to the beginning of the century. The Theatre des Funambules gave its closing performance, a lengthy pageant in mime entitled Les Memoires de Pierrot, on 17 May 1862, and on 14 July following, demolition began. Under the Second Empire, 14 July was no longer celebrated as a national holiday; but the choice of date could not but be regarded as ominous. 'On 14 July 1789, the people stormed the Bastille and demolished it stone by stone, dealing its first gigantic sledgehammer blow against "the rampart of tyranny". On 14 July

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1862, tyranny counterattacked, seizing the people's Boulevard du Temple and destroying this rampart of gaiety and amusement.' 23 Most of the theatres disappeared for ever: the Gaite and the CirqueOlympique were relocated, the remainder became rubble, to the poignant regret of certain sentimentalists. 'Where are the snows of yesteryear?' asked Vizentini in 1867, listing all the little playhouses that were now but a cherished memory. 'Anyone who talks nowadays of the former Boulevard du Temple passes for an old buffer opposed to progress and urban sanitation; the general public could not care less.'24 But the faithful, ragged, turbulent audiences had to look elsewhere for their nightly entertainment, and they could find it only in theatres - some of them new, like the enormous Theatre du Chatelet - which no longer catered exclusively for a working-class clientele. Meanwhile, as the luxurious new apartment houses rose either side of the broad new boulevards, the factories and workshops where the proletariat found employment moved further out from the centre, and the theatres that had been built in the outlying suburbs acquired a new importance as neighbourhood places of entertainment. The oldest of these dated back to the second decade of the century. It was in 1817 that Louis XVIII had granted to one PierreJacques Seveste the exclusive right to establish theatres beyond the inner city boundary. Seveste owed this favour, it was said, to the macabre chance that his grandfather had been gravedigger at the cemetery where the remains of Louis XVI had been interred; the old man's reminiscences remained in Seveste's memory and, at the Restoration, he was able to indicate to the authorities where the dead monarch's bones could be located and exhumed. In 1819 he opened the first of the suburban houses, the Theatre de Montparnasse; this was followed by the Theatre de Montmartre in 1822. At his death in 1825 t n e licence, passing to his widow, was further exploited by his two sons, Edmond and Jules, down to 1855 when Henri Larochelle bought them out; by 1867 there were eight suburban theatres, scattered round the outlying districts and managed by Larochelle and three associates. In this year Jules Claretie devoted his theatre column for 16 September to a roundup of the audiences to be found at the suburban theatres, from which it is clear that they inherited many of the characteristics of the now vanished working-class theatres on the Boulevard du Temple. At Montparnasse, the audience was

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packed like sardines, noisy and excited during the intervals, filling the auditorium with a warm reek, with the buzz of crowds in the streets on public holidays, then suddenly falling into a religious silence as soon as the curtain twitched before rising. An audience of workmen and clerks, all eyes glued on the stage, the best audience anywhere, easily moved to applause, laughing at everything and nothing and thoroughly amusing themselves for their money. At Belleville, much the same: 'it's the same public one found for the old melodramas of the Boulevard'. There were, however, some inexplicable paradoxes. Claretie noticed a curious contrast between audiences at the Batignolles and at Montmartre, two theatres in close proximity which alternated repertoires week by week. At Montmartre they responded readily to modern drama, and seemed to appreciate the 'advanced' work of Augier, Sardou, and Barriere, which they much preferred to the outdated melodrama in which, conversely, audiences at the Batignolles revelled. 'It was much the same difference as one used to observe between audiences at the Folies-Dramatiques and the Ambigu-Comique', he commented; not, however, a class difference, since those who attended both suburban theatres were the same blend of middle-class folk, 'quiet to the point of being more or less passive', and the working class, 'turbulent and easily excited'.25 Another feature common to the small local theatres and the extinct working-class theatres on the Boulevard du Temple was that the audiences habitually combined the pleasures of the table with those of the spectacle, instead of eating their evening meal first and seeing the show afterwards as happened elsewhere. This was something that struck Justin Bellanger forcibly when he began his acting career at the Gobelins. The working-class family would invariably arrive carrying a basket of provisions; at the interval, the goodwife would 'calmly share out, to her brood first of all, then to her husband and herself, the portion of victuals due to each. The meal generally consisted of garlic sausage or assorted delicatessen. It was washed down in the course of an excursion to the nearest wineshop, after which they resumed their seats and fell to applauding the actors frantically.'26 The solitary spectator, the young unmarried worker, would take his seat 'carrying a loaf of bread under his arm. Then, at the interval, he would find, stationed along the pavement, women selling hot broth such as are encountered early in the morning at the approaches to the markets. He makes his meal al fresco, dipping his

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bread into a steaming bowl of bouillon.'2? It was not so much that they needed constant sustenance as that the two classes had different eating habits: the bourgeoisie was accustomed to sit down twice a day to a substantial meal, the workers tended to subsist on more frequent snacks. By the beginning of the twentieth century some of the older suburban houses had become very run down, to some extent no doubt in consequence of competition from the cafes-concerts. The Belleville theatre had degenerated into a veritable fleapit, still gaslit, the approach steps worn down, while inside 'everything breathes decrepitude, dilapidation, melancholy, from the greasy pass-out tickets soiled by twenty thousand dirty hands to the cracks in the ceiling and the scored, faded imitation leather of the benches'. The audience was correspondingly lack-lustre, the men ragged, down-at-heel, with a scarf wound round the neck to replace the absent shirt, their hands and faces smeared with soot, arriving just as they were after their hard day's labour, looking for a bit of relaxation. And the women take hardly more trouble. Apart from the occasional hussy provocatively got up in the hope of a pickup, the rest are dreadful, with crumpled blouses and skirts badly hitched up, theflabbyfleshof their anaemic faces scored with premature wrinkles, with tangled, ill-combed hair and pitiful eyes, distressful, angry, and frightened.28 But even the slum-dwellers and outcasts must have needed what amusement they could buy for the few pence they could spare. Over the years 1903-5, alongside this ruinous theatre in the suburb of Belleville, a second 'working-class theatre' called the Theatre Populaire sprang up in the same district, running a series of weekly performances and showing a different play each time. The hall it used was large, able to accommodate between 1,000 and 1,200 spectators; prices, ranging from 25 centimes to a maximum of 1 franc 50, were well within the reach of the working-class population of the area. The object of the director, Berny, was clearly not to make money: he wanted to provide his audiences with a more elevated repertoire than that normally offered them. He opened on 19 September 1903 with Romain Rolland's drama of the French Revolution, Danton; over the short period during which the Theatre Populaire was open, it put on plays by Rostand, Octave Mirbeau, Ibsen, and Hauptmann. Works were selected according to whether they satisfied Berny's three desiderata, formulated as follows: c i, to provide relaxation, both physical and moral; 2, to provide a source

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of spiritual energy, sustaining and inspiring the soul; 3, to enlighten the mind, awaken thought, and show how to see and judge oneself and others.'29 The idealism that informed Berny's thinking can be traced to an initiative launched by the Revue a"art dramatique in 1899, when it offered a prize of 500 francs for the best proposal for a working-class theatre. The prize was won by Eugene Morel, who visualized a new theatre, 'less refined than that of the elite but with none of the vulgarities associated with the theatrical fare served up to the lower classes'.3° It would need to be subsidized by the state, in order to provide low-cost seating, though Morel was not in favour of giving completely free performances which would simply transform it into an evening version of the municipal libraries. Behind these ideas one can detect a certain hostility to the avant-garde theatres of the time and their repertoire of baffling symbolist works; and also, more importantly perhaps, the fear that the unthinking masses, unless they could somehow be indoctrinated by contact with ideologically sound (i.e. republican) works of dramatic art, would remain at the mercy of the gutter press which had shown itself so successful in arousing ignorant chauvinism and anti-Semitism at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. The movement for a 'people's theatre' eventually foundered over the difficult question of finance. If the state were to subsidize the venture, it would be in its power at any point to reduce or cut off the subvention if the repertoire ventured beyond the ideological parameters it could tolerate. If finance were sought from left-wing organizations, the same thing could happen; and besides, the leaders of the socialist party were reluctant to allocate resources to a cultural experiment when the priority was to campaign for a social and economic transformation of the country. So Berny's experiment, so well-meaning, had to be abandoned after a couple of years: the theatre had been, in spite of the low entry charge, only one-quarter filled on average. He attempted unsuccessfully to sell the idea of collective subscriptions to the trade unions; however sympathetic they may have been, they preferred understandably to reserve their limited funds for more essential purposes. A similar fate awaited other innovators. A former actor at the Theatre-Antoine, H. Beaulieu, opened a new theatre on the Avenue Clichy in the Batignolles district, which was a neighbourhood not primarily working class; he soon discovered that the bourgeoisie would not attend unless they

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could reserve seats, as was by now common at other theatres, while the working classes fought shy of a repertoire which included plays by Sudermann, Hauptmann, and Emile Verhaeren; within a year Beaulieu was forced to close his doors. Adrien Bernheim was not much more successful with his awkwardly named '(Euvre des Trente Ans de Theatre' which had two distinct aims: to provide pensions for actors who had worked in the theatre for at least thirty years; and to introduce the labouring classes to the French classics. He had noticed that in spite of improved transport, workers and their families were reluctant to make the effort to attend the 'national theatres' where these works could be seen performed by experts; his idea was to take a trained company drawn from the Odeon and the Comedie-Francaise to various working-class neighbourhoods where they would present the classics, Moliere, Racine, Beaumarchais and the rest, in whatever premises proved available in the district. The movement, taking these various forms, lasted barely a decade. By 1905 it had collapsed, though the proliferating experiments had aroused considerable interest, even attracting Zola's notice before his untimely death; one of his plans for future implementation had been to write a series of some dozen plays dramatizing the different problems facing the Third Republic since its foundation thirty years earlier. 'There are complaints', he noted, 'that there is no theatre for the people. Why not create it?'31 The epitaph on the movement was written by Jean-Richard Bloch in a lengthy essay entitled 'Le Theatre du peuple: critique d'une utopie', published in the review UEffort in June 1910. He argued here, echoing Zola, that all attempts at interesting industrial workers in the theatre were doomed, since no plays were being written by and for that class. He still had hopes this might happen; but a proletarian art 'will have no connection with the drama as it exists at present. It will be written specially for it . . . The working classes will provide it themselves, or they will never have it.'32 But, by 1910, the working classes were in any case beginning to desert the theatre, abandoning it to the middle classes which had dominated it for so long; they had discovered a new medium, for it was at this time that the earliest cinemas, in darkened halls, showing flickering films where it seemed to be perpetually raining, were beginning to spread like wildfire throughout working-class districts in Paris and the provinces.

PART II

The acting profession

CHAPTER 9

A pariah profession

In the twenty-third of his Lettres philosophiques of 1734, Voltaire observed that the great British actress Anne Oldfield had recently received the posthumous honour, shared also by Isaac Newton, of interment in Westminster Abbey. He added that certain Englishmen considered that the move was intended as a covert rebuke to the French, 'in order to make us feel the more the act of barbarous and despicable injustice that they tax us with, for having thrown to the dogs the remains of Mile Lecouvreur'. It had been Adrienne Lecouvreur's misfortune to have died suddenly and mysteriously, without having received the last rites, in the same year as Mrs Oldfield, and the contrast between the manner in which the two countries treated those who in life had been the ornaments of their national theatres aroused not just Voltaire's indignation, but that of all enlightened men in France in the eighteenth century. The difference in attitudes between England and France was to confound theatre-lovers in the following century too. As late as 1871 Frederic Febvre, one of the small detachment from the Comedie-Fran^aise who visited London in the summer of that year, noted in his diary that no prejudice attached to the acting profession in England such as still persisted in France. The heir to the throne, over here, was happy to accept an invitation to lunch with Sir Squire Bancroft, the actor-manager, but although the President of the French Republic was known to have ties of close friendship with at least one member of the Comedie-Frangaise, he would have thought it highly improper to share a meal with him after he had become head of state. Religious differences had everything to do with the divergence in social attitudes between the two countries. The refusal of the Gallican church to admit actors and actresses to the community of the faithful was strictly maintained throughout the ancien regime, in

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spite of the more liberal rules applied by the Roman curia. For historic reasons, however, this bar admitted certain exceptions. It did not apply to members of the Comedie-Italienne in Paris, so that when their popular harlequin, Carlin Bertinazzi, died in 1783, even though the end came too suddenly for him to make a last confession, no objection was made to the proposal to give him an elaborate funeral at the church of Saint-Roch. There is, as Baron de Grimm commented slyly, cno question of excommunication for those who act on the right bank of the Seine [where the Theatre-Italien was situated], but on the left bank [where the Comedie-Fran^aise had its home] they are all damned as imps of Satan'. 1 Nor did members of the third royal theatre, the Opera, surfer any such disability, in spite of the notoriously dissolute way of life led by many of them; the reason for this inconsistency was apparently that the Opera had been originally founded as the 'Academie Royale de musique', which explains why Mile Clairon endeavoured in 1766, though without success, to have the Comedie-Frangaise officially restyled the 'Academie Royale dramatique'. Excommunication meant that the sinner could not be visited by a priest on the point of death nor receive final absolution. True, a certain latitude was permitted in respect of actors and actresses who fell seriously ill; they were not denied the consolations of religion, and provided they promised solemnly to abjure their profession, the priest was allowed to hear their confession and absolve them though it was generally recognized that, should they happily recover, they would conveniently 'forget' their promise and reappear on the boards, having 'renounced their renunciation', as Colle put it cynically.2 This happened to Mole, when to the great delight and relief of the audience at the Theatre-Fran^ais in 1766 he showed himself on stage after a period when he was thought to be at death's door. On one occasion at least a celebrated actress whose life was ebbing refused to make any promises even though this meant that she was denied the sacraments; but she gave in finally. When she lay dying of inoperable cancer in 1772, Mme Favart declined to lend herself to this mummery; but when she felt herself to be on the point of death she exclaimed: 'Oh, hang it, I renounce.' These were, according to Grimm, her last words. Even in the seventeenth century La Bruyere had pointed out the absurdity underlying the regular gatherings of Christians of both

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sexes to applaud a company of excommunicates. 'It seems to me', he remarked drily, 'that one should either close the theatres, or else pronounce less harshly on the acting profession.'3 It was not merely that to die impenitent was to risk eternal damnation; even in this life the penalties attaching to excommunication could include refusal on the part of the lawcourts to swear in an actor as witness in a civil case; nor could he, so long as he remained an active member of his profession, discharge any public function or fill any public office. Even a distant family connection with one of the outcasts could spell professional ruin, as young Francois de Neufchateau, later to become one of the five Directors guiding the fortunes of France, discovered to his cost when he was still a struggling young barrister. In order to launch himself on the world, he agreed to marry, for the sake of her handsome dowry, a charming young lady, well bred and well brought up; but he had overlooked the fact that one of her uncles had been on the stage. His colleagues in Paris, hearing of this mesalliance, voted his disbarment, and he was forced to retire to a distant province where he remained in disgrace and idleness until his young wife, sorely troubled to know herself the author of his misfortunes, fell into a decline and died, so allowing him to return to the capital and resume his career. In general, since the appropriate church ceremony was essential for the solemnization of a marriage, actors and actresses could enter into matrimony only if they pledged themselves to end their connection with the stage. In the case of members of the ComedieFrangaise, it was necessary for them first to obtain the permission of their superiors, the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, to quit their employment, since they were, strictly speaking, servants of the king. The honeymoon over, it invariably happened that they would go back on their pledge and resume their former avocation. In August 1786 Bachaumont recorded that Mile Vanhove, not yet fifteen years old and a virgin, in order to forestall the dangers threatening her virtue in the ambience of the theatre, was prudently given in marriage by her parents at the beginning of this month to M. Petit, a dancing-master. The church required first that the actress should renounce her profession. She obeyed, and four days later was seen on the boards again.4 This arranged marriage lasted only until the legalization of divorce in 1792 allowed it to be dissolved and Caroline Petit-Vanhove was

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then free to follow her heart and marry Talma, whose first marriage had been similarly dissolved. Talma's earlier union (with Julie Careau) had been the occasion of a brush between the young actor and the ecclesiastical authorities which aroused some public interest in the first year of the Revolution. The legal contract was drawn up on 30 April 1790, but the parish priest of Saint-Sulpice to whom Talma applied giving his profession as that of an actor, refused to publish the banns or celebrate the marriage. Furious at this rebuff, Talma laid a formal complaint before the National Assembly on 12 July. 5 In it he drew attention to the grounds the clergyman alleged for his refusal to officiate: canonical law forbade him to bless Talma's union unless the actor first renounced his profession, a pretension which, the plaintiff argued, conflicted with the earlier declaration by the Assembly that all French citizens were henceforth to enjoy equal rights. The complaint was referred to the standing committee on ecclesiastical matters, which moved slowly whereas Talma was, with good reason, anxious for a quick decision. In the end he was obliged to apply to another parish priest from whom he concealed his profession. His marriage was solemnized on 19 April 1791 at the church of Notre-Dame de Lorette; twelve days later, Julie Careau having in the interval given birth to twin sons on 30 April, the infants were both baptized at the same church. Talma's contention that actors had been granted the same civic rights as all other citizens was based on the outcome of a debate in the Assembly on a motion introduced on 21 December 1789 to abrogate an earlier edict debarring non-Catholics from occupying official posts of trust in the kingdom. The debate took place two days later, the central point at issue being the ban on public employment with respect to three categories in particular: Protestants, Jews, and actors, the last-named following a profession which entailed automatic excommunication and so had hitherto made them ineligible for employment in an official capacity. In introducing the motion, Clermont-Tonnerre made great play with the unwarranted prejudice which he said operated against actors no matter how talented; many of the plays that had sown the intellectual seeds of the Revolution would have remained lifeless texts if they had not been so persuasively enacted on the stage. Robespierre, while expressing sympathy for the position of actors, did not think they should be specifically named in the proposed decree, which should be concerned exclusively with abolishing previous tests based on religious

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faith; and this suggestion was eventually adopted. The acting profession had won, as it were by default, the same civic rights as all other citizens; but legislation is powerless to abolish at a stroke a deep-rooted prejudice, and the feeling remained widespread that it was for actors to prove, by their patriotism and exemplary conduct, that they were deserving of the favour conferred on them by the Revolution. Underlying the hesitations of many members of the National Assembly may well have been the strictures on the acting profession voiced by Rousseau who, in his Lettre a M. d'Alembert sur les spectacles of 1758, had called playacting 'a trade by which those who practise it exhibit themselves in public for monetary reward, submitting to whatever ignominy and insults the onlookers have purchased the right to offer them, in short, putting themselves up for sale' like the slaves of old; any honest man is bound to feel, he averred, that there is something abhorrent in this trafficking of one's own person for gain. Now Rousseau was universally honoured by the progressives as one of the founding fathers of the Revolution, whose lightest word could not be dismissed out of hand. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, actors whether in Paris or the provinces did not hesitate to take advantage of the new opportunities that opened up to them; they had many of the qualities needed for electioneering - the habit of addressing a public gathering, a good memory, a certain aplomb and readiness with repartee. Since posts in the Milice parisienne, a forerunner of the Garde nationale established in 1789, were all filled by ballot, a number of actors, including Dugazon and Naudet, secured the necessary votes to serve as officers. Having, for the most part, no great stake in the preservation of the status quo, resentful in many cases of the scant respect accorded them under the previous regime, actors were apt to embrace the most extreme wing of the revolutionary movement. Fusil, an actor at the Theatre de la Republique who was despatched to Lyons at the height of the Terror and may have had some hand in organizing the frightful massacres that took place there, explained his conversion to hard-line republicanism as being a consequence of the disdainful attitude of the aristocrats before the Revolution. 'They used to clap us at the theatre because we amused them, but apart from that we were only pariahs and bohemians in their eyes. The most trumpery nobleman believed he had the right to insult us, and if we dared to issue a challenge, it was prison cells and

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fetters for us.' 6 So Fusil was overjoyed when they lost their estates and dignities and were forced to go into exile or risk imprisonment in their turn. Beaulieu, an actor at the Varietes-Amusantes, took fire from the very start, figuring prominently among those who stormed the Bastille; he subsequently toured the provinces and was everywhere acclaimed. His membership of the Jacobin Club gave him the right of entry at every meeting, where he seldom failed to exercise his talent for oratory. But the actor who figured most prominently in the Revolution was Grammont, formerly of the Comedie-Fran^aise, who rose rapidly through the ranks to become a general; he had command of the squad detailed to escort Marie-Antoinette to the scaffold but himself perished a few months later in the round-up of the Dantonists. None of this endeared the profession to moderates, and after the fall of Robespierre, Fusil and others were made to recant and do penance on the public stage. Nevertheless the reforms introduced early in the Revolution held and the church, in particular, never regained entirely its power to relegate the acting body to the status of outcasts, doomed to eternal perdition unless they repented of the sin of treading the boards. The Concordat of 1801 ended the long quarrel between France and the papacy, but by its terms Napoleon reserved for himself the right to staff the church with prelates unlikely to cause him trouble and it was not long before he made it clear that he had no intention of allowing the church to pursue policies at variance with his own. In 1802 the death of a ballerina attached to the Opera threatened a renewal of earlier scandals caused by the refusal of Christian burial to unrepentant actors and actresses. Mile Chameroi had died in childbirth, without having made her confession. Her remains, accompanied by a large body of sympathizers, were conducted to the doors of Saint-Roch, which remained obdurately closed. Dazincourt, a much-respected member of the Comedie-Fran^aise, succeeded in calming the fury of the crowd and suggested they move on to a neighbouring church where the officiating priest made no difficulty about admitting the funeral cortege. The First Consul, when the incident was reported to him, took it coolly; his own preference would have been to inter the poor dancer at the cemetery without troubling to involve the church; nevertheless he sent for the archbishop and insisted that the recalcitrant priest should be made to undergo three months confinement in a seminary. Thereafter, so

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long as Napoleon held power, there were no further attempts on the part of the church to revive the obscurantism of the previous century. However, no sooner had he fallen from power than the old indignities resurfaced. On 15 January 1815, when the ex-Emperor was living in banishment on Elba, the death occurred in Paris of Mile Raucourt, an outstanding tragic actress at the ComedieFrangaise in the years before the Revolution. In her youth she had been conspicuous, even in the dissolute circles in which actresses were accustomed to move at those times, by her excesses — though the outrage probably arose chiefly from the fact that she preferred to take her pleasure with women instead of men. In middle age, however, she developed a remarkable talent for organization: after her release from prison during the Revolution she had shown herself tireless in striving to unite the dispersed fragments of the ComedieFrangaise, and Napoleon had thought well enough of her capacities to entrust her with the task of forming and leading a company of French actors to tour the cities of Italy between 1807 and 1814. Then, in the last year of her life, having returned to Paris, she edified the devout by distributing large sums in charity; she also made a particular friend of the vicar of her parish, the Abbe Marduel, who was a constant visitor at her house. On her deathbed she was not denied the last rites; but Marduel had received orders from the metropolitan chapter not to admit her mortal remains to his church, Saint-Roch, nor to conduct the customary funeral mass for the repose of her soul. Nevertheless her coffin was accompanied to the church doors by a large concourse of mourners who, incensed at finding them closed, attempted to batter them down, starting a major riot in the streets outside. The police finally ordered the doors to be opened, and a priest was found to officiate; according to some reports, Louis XVIII had despatched his own chaplain.7 It seems not improbable that the liberals, fearful of a return to power of the church party, had used the occasion to demonstrate their anti-clericalism. Be that as it may, the moderating influence of Louis XVIII may have been responsible for the absence of any further scandals of this nature during the rest of his reign. But under his successor, Charles X, the 'Congregation5 that Stendhal was to depict in such menacing colours in his Scarlet and Black resumed its campaign against the actors. The opening shot was fired at the funeral of

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Philippe de la Villenie, known on the stage by his first name, Philippe. He had been a popular figure at the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin since 1815 and had gained a reputation in melodrama, particularly for his part in Nodier's Le Vampire (1820). A man of imposing physique and powerful delivery, he was carried off by a stroke on 16 October 1824, a bare month after Charles X succeeded his brother. When his body was taken to his parish church the clergy refused it admittance, exactly as in the case of Mile Raucourt. His friends and colleagues, with six fellow actors bearing the coffin on their shoulders, set out slowly for the Tuileries, intending to deposit it in the palace yard. But before they reached their destination they found their way barred by a squad of mounted police. Five representatives were nominated to wait on the new king; this honour was denied them, and instead they were received by the Minister of the Interior who informed them haughtily that the clergy made its own rules with which he was not empowered to interfere. The delegates, seeing that further argument would be useless, returned to the funeral party which then conveyed the coffin silently through the streets of Paris to the Pere-Lachaise cemetery for inhumation. 8 A similar incident aroused widespread resentment only a few months later when Lafargue, described by Charles Maurice as 'the most promising actor of our time', died of a lung complaint on 4 April 1825 a ^ Auteuil. The parish priest, announcing this to his flock, read out at the same time a directive from the archbishop to the effect that he was forbidden to permit entry to his church to any actor, dead or alive; and he added that he expected unquestioning obedience to the archbishop's ruling.9 It may have been on account of these incidents that Talma, whose end came, after a painful illness, on 19 October 1826, left formal instructions that his body was to be transported directly to the Pere-Lachaise after his death. Talma had courageously refused the so-called consolations of religion, even though the archbishop himself, De Quelen, was waiting outside his chamber to administer extreme unction. 'What do they want of me?' he asked. 'To get me to abjure the art to which I owe my celebrity, an art I idolize? To repudiate the forty best years of my life? To separate my cause from that of my fellows and acknowledge the profession they follow to be infamous? Never.'10 The change of dynasty in 1830 had the effect of denying the clergy

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the opportunity of offering this kind of affront to the acting profession. It is true that when Mme Duversin, an actress at Rouen, died on 1 May 1833 the cathedral remained closed when the funeral procession reached its doors. But the municipal authorities insisted on their being thrown open, the coffin was placed before the altar, and the usual prayers for the dead were recited, though the priesthood refused to lead them. And on 11 August that year the funeral of Mile Bourgoin, of the Comedie-Frangaise, was witnessed at Saint-Roch by a large congregation without any of the unseemly rowdiness that had marked the interment of Mile Raucourt. The church was gradually coming to terms with a more enlightened age. In 1849 a council of the clergy held at Soissons appeared to signal a change in policy with regard to the theatre. Its deliberations included the phrase: 'as for actors, we do not count them among the infamous nor the excommunicate'; but the force of the concession was considerably weakened by the next sentence: 'Nevertheless if, as almost always happens, they abuse their profession by presenting impious or obscene plays in such a manner that one cannot but regard them as public sinners, they should be refused communion.' 11 The implication was that the actor, rather than the author of any play judged 'impious or obscene' — the interpreter rather than the originator - was to be forbidden participation in the ritual of the mass. However, the church appears finally to have abandoned its age-long hostility to the acting profession shortly after, leaving it to the state censorship (re-established provisionally in 1850 and permanently in 1852) to ensure that nothing 'impious or obscene' was shown on the stage. But this does not mean that actors were immediately welcomed back into society and placed on the same footing as any other respectable citizen. The ancient stigma still clung to them, in one form or another, down to the end of the nineteenth century and even beyond: official pronouncements rarely have the power to extirpate a deep-rooted prejudice of this sort. Discussing the position in 1853, Lacan wrote that while, like so many others, it grows weaker from day to day, it still preserves, notably in the provinces, aflickerof life. People associate with the profession itself an idea of licentiousness and irreligion which encourages the belief that it is dishonourable, and which frequently causes the disfavour attached to their calling to reflect on men whose conduct in life may be utterly blameless.12

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Gone were the days, admittedly, when the academician and dramatist Charles Brifaut, who as an amateur actor took lessons from Fleury of the Comedie-Fran^aise, found some polite way of declining to take Fleury's hand when he proffered it; gone too the time when the devout Catholic Chretien Urhan felt obliged to obtain a special dispensation from the Archbishop of Paris before accepting, in 1831, the post of first violinist at the Opera, and even so insisted on playing his instrument with his back to the stage so as not to be corrupted by the profanities he might witness there. 'He would execute the airs of the ballet conscientiously, religiously, with expression, but without a glance at the ballerina. If she missed a beat, so much the worse for her, Urhan ploughed on regardless. If she had slipped and fallen on the stage I do believe that Urhan would have continued to the last bar."3 Members of theatrical companies were, as Lacan had pointed out, persistently treated as pariahs in certain country towns, and this attitude was still observable well into the twentieth century. Writing in 1918, the author of a work on theatrical life in the French provinces asserted that 'in certain small towns, no more than ten years ago, actors were not made welcome in hotels, nor even in country inns. I recall that at Pontivy the inhabitants crossed themselves if they saw them passing by.'1* In Paris itself there were certain private institutions, tennis clubs or clubs for the devotees of clay pigeon shooting, where an actor would be refused admittance even as a guest of one of the members. In other countries, like the United States, there were restricted areas where hotels, for instance, would not accept bookings from Jews; in France before 1914, 'actors were the objects of a similar ostracism. In Paris, there were countless apartment houses which had a policy of not letting rooms to theatrical people.'15 Actors themselves were, in those relatively strait-laced days, partly to blame for the continuing disdain that attached to them among society people, as one well-known member of the profession admitted,16 citing in particular the eccentricity of their dress, the vulgarity of their professional slang, and their use amongst each other of the familiar form of address, tutoiement, which at that time was confined more strictly to the family circle than it is today (the modern English equivalent would possibly be the profusion of 'darlings' with which actors and actresses are thought to bespatter their conversation). In an article about Coquelin's return to the Comedie-Frangaise in 1889, after taking French leave in order

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to make an unauthorized tour of the South American republics, Jules Lemaitre commented that 'what makes us-even though we dote on them [the matinee idols] to the point of being unable to manage without them — affect sometimes to treat them slightingly, is that we do not judge it to be a very distinguished way of earning one's living, to grimace at fixed hours in front of one's contemporaries even when one has not the slightest inclination to do so. And it is undeniable', added Lemaitre, 'that it does infinitely more honour to a man to serve in the army or to farm the land.'17 Hobnobbing with actors and actresses elsewhere than behind the scenes or in certain restaurants was frowned on, even as late as the 1890s; Dupont-Vernon, a solicitor turned actor, cites his own experiences as proof. 'A lady, a Parisian - which makes it even more staggering - asked me in all seriousness one day whether she could, since I had taken to the stage, continue to receive me as a guest in her home. It should be said that the lady had known my family, had welcomed me previously with the utmost affability and had even entrusted me with the defence of her interests.'18 The cold-shouldering of actors by upper-class society down at least to the Great War is graphically illustrated by a passage in Louis Verneuil's memoirs. He recalls that in January 1912 he was invited by the Comte de Greffulhe to give a private dramatic performance, together with a star actress and one other well-known stage personality. The train journey took them a couple of hours; they were taken from the station in a chauffeur-driven car to the chateau, where they were received by the majordomo who conducted them to their rooms, it being necessary that they should stay overnight, and informed them that they would be served dinner there privately. The performance, timed for 10.30 p.m., took place before a small and select audience in a well-equipped private theatre built in another part of the chateau. As soon as the curtain fell, the majordomo conducted them back to their apartments, handed them their fee, and bade them good-night; at 8.30 the following morning the car was ready to take them back to the station. They left without having met the count or the countess or any of their aristocratic guests. A private dramatic performance given in one's home by hired professionals was considered a supremely elegant addition to an evening's entertainment, but the entertainers were left to be looked after by the servants. The Prince of Denmark did at least order a privy councillor to 'see the players well bestowed' when they arrived at Elsinore; but such

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courtesies were evidently considered superfluous in the so-called belle epoque.

Nothing illustrates better the reluctance in France-in government circles at least - to treat members of the acting profession on a par with other citizens than the long campaign that had to be waged before even the most celebrated of them could receive the decoration normally awarded to men and women who were considered to have done the state some service. The Legion of Honour was founded by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. The esteem in which it was held diminished considerably as time went on, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the distinctive red ribbon was sported by more than one country apothecary turned political journalist, unless Flaubert was greatly exaggerating when he came to pen the concluding words of Madame Bovary. The question of bestowing the award on actors seems not to have been raised until 1863 when the medal was pinned on the breast of a member of the ComedieFran^aise — but only after he had retired from the stage and only, by the terms of the citation, in consideration of his years of service as a teacher at the Conservatoire. At that time the rights and wrongs of official policy where actors were concerned came under anxious discussion; a pamphlet on the question was published later that year, in which the current arguments were rehearsed - ironically - by the author. There were it appears two principal objections to making the award to stage personalities: 'if you decorate actors, you will have to decorate actresses; and their way of life does not always bear examination'; secondly, 'let actors leave the stage, then we will decorate t h e m ' - t o which the pamphleteer retorted: 'You may propose the medal in such a case; a man of honour will not accept it; his answer will be that one does not forswear one's past, nor abandon a principle for a bit of ribbon.5l9 The same arguments came up a little later, in the 1880s. After praising Coquelin's consummate acting in Augier's play The Adventuress (1881), Barbey d'Aurevilly exclaimed: 'They give the cross of the Legion of Honour to M. Augier who has written a play I find tedious, but not to his interpreter who, by dint of sheer talent, causes me to take some pleasure in listening to it!'20 Laglaize, in the preface to his Figurines dramatiques of 1882, protested against the absurdity that composers, conductors, pianists, lecturers, photographers, theatre critics should all be considered fit recipients of the honour, but actors never. Jules Lemaitre made the same point in an article

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dated 19 July 1886, arguing that the red ribbon had been so devalued over the years that it was hardly worth striving for. They decorate X for his talent, Y for his success; this man for being entrusted with a diplomatic mission so young, that decrepit ancient for having sat at an office desk for thirty years; another [Menier] for having manufactured quantities of chocolate, or for having supported the right political line, or for following in his father's footsteps. They decorate the name a man bears, the situation he has acquired, the opinions he holds, the age he has reached; there is no earthly reason why they should not decorate a man for his talent in declaiming verse or prose on the stage with the appropriate gestures.21 But it was all very well to argue that the cross, given to nonentities of all kinds, was not worth the metal it was made of; the fact that actors were automatically excluded from consideration was in itself galling, when every other profession was represented in this far from select band. To be sure, there were actors who wore the coveted rosette. Edmond Got was awarded it on 4 August 1881, but the citation made no mention of his long and distinguished career at the Comedie-Franc^aise; it was given in recognition of the assiduity with which he had discharged his duties as a teacher at the Conservatoire and a lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Similarly Delaunay, who was decorated only after he had announced his retirement from the stage in 1883. It was not until 1889 that an actor (MounetSully) received the decoration qua actor; and it was not until 1905 that Julia Bartet became the first actress to be so honoured. The ostracism to which the profession was subjected was not necessarily felt to be insulting by those principally affected; it could be seen as a natural consequence of their ambiguous social status, necessary for the work they were called on to perform, work which set them apart from the body politic, while at the same time it allowed the best of them to attain a quasi-heroic position in the eyes of the commonality. They had always been, possibly they always would be, pariahs but equally idols, the stage being at one and the same time, in the words attributed to Frederick Lemaitre, a pedestal and a pillory. Their vocation was unlike any other, making them both ultra-sensitive when facing an audience and yet occasionally delighting in mocking it. The actor knew himself to differ from lawyers and doctors, teachers, architects, and agriculturalists, in being superfluous to society's progress and prosperity; hence he

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would always be regarded by the generality as fascinating but marginal; moreover, not altogether trustworthy, not even quite honest in a purist's eyes, since his very business was to feign convincingly to be someone other than he was.

CHAPTER 10

Social origins

In spite of the social ostracism to which they knew they would be condemned, there never seems to have been any shortage of recruits to the acting profession. Even to make an approximate guess at the number of young men and women who ventured on to the stage in the course of the century would be hazardous; the most one can say is that it must have run into thousands, perhaps tens of thousands if one includes the provincial companies, the bands of strolling players, those who staffed suburban houses as well as providing the backbone for the numerous theatres of central Paris. Far more of them left no trace of their passage on the stage than ever won even a temporary celebrity; in many cases their theatrical experience would have been of the briefest, to be followed by a swift descent into unemployment, temporary or permanent, and finally recourse to some obscure livelihood, as lack of talent or lack of perseverance dictated. In this legion of unknowns it needed an altogether exceptional fluke for even their name to survive: the chance, for instance, of having inspired the muse of some great poet, as happened to Marie Daubrun, briefly in demand at the Porte-Saint-Martin and the Gaite in the late 1840s and 1850s when her childlike features allied to more mature charms aroused Baudelaire's mystic fervour and prompted some of his most moving love poetry. But she was a mediocre and unreliable actress, as even her lover admitted, and after i860 she disappeared from the public gaze; the record thereafter is blank apart from the date of her death, 1901. The dozen or two dozen outstanding stars of the period, from Talma and Mile Mars down to the inevitable Sarah Bernhardt, have compelled the attention of biographers; in addition a few actors have left memoirs, often ghosted and not always completely reliable, or diaries. But for the majority, the only available sources of information consist of the various dictionaries published to satisfy the H9

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curiosity of theatre-goers throughout the century, beginning, for the earlier period, with the four volumes of Manne and Menetrier's Galeries historiques and culminating in the monumental two-volume Dictionnaire des comediens frangais, in small print and double columns, by Henri Lyonnet (1908-12). Of the remainder, many are serious, some even scholarly studies,1 but all together they give biographical particulars of only a tiny proportion, between two and three hundred, of the many who flitted over the stage in the nineteenth century. A survey designed to elucidate their social origins could well start by considering the large group, comprising something like an eighth of the total, made up of members of acting families. They included such gifted players as the two brothers Baptiste, both of whom started their acting careers during the Revolution; their father and uncle played in theatre orchestras, their mother was a well-known actress at Bordeaux before coming to Paris, and the elder Baptiste married the leading lady at the Theatre du Marais. Then there was Hippolyte Mars, the perennial grande coquette at the ComedieFran^aise under the Restoration and July Monarchy, who had been born the illegitimate daughter of the actor-playwright Mole and a provincial actress. The inimitable mime Gaspard Deburau was the youngest of a whole family of tumblers; after his death his son Charles continued the tradition he had established. One comes across whole dynasties of playactors, stretching from one end of the century to the other. Suzanne Brohan, the first of her line, was fathered by a soldier in 1807, and began her acting career in Paris at the age of sixteen; her two daughters, Augustine and Madeleine, both became societaires of the Comedie-Frangaise. An even more impressive record was that of the forebears of Jenny Thenard; here too the acting streak descended through the female line. Jenny's mother was an opera-singer who gave up her career on marrying a stockbroker; her grandmother, Louise Thenard-Durand, began with children's parts at the age of eight, and at the Comedie-Fran^aise specialized in the parts of soubrettes (pert serving-wenches) until middle age obliged her to turn to duennas. Her own mother, Jenny's great-grandmother, Madeleine Thenard, had been a pupil of Preville and had made her debut at the Comedie-Fran^aise in 1777. Her first marriage was to the actor-revolutionary Grammont by whom she had two sons (Louise's half-brothers) both of whom went on the stage.2 The question whether an aptitude for acting was 'bred in the

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bone' or was simply a matter of following in father's (or mother's) footsteps was certainly discussed at the time, though no firm conclusions could be reached any more, probably, than they can today. In some cases, certainly, a child brought up from birth in the heady atmosphere of greasepaint and hair powder, accustomed from infancy to the tittle-tattle of the greenroom, raised in the expectation that this career was the obvious choice for him or for her, would naturally be moved to attempt it. Flore Corvee, whose parents were both employed at the Varietes, the husband as a stagehand and the wife as a member of the cast and later as a dresser, was all but born in the theatre itself, her mother, according to family tradition, having been taken with her pains when she was standing waiting for her cue. As she grew up, Flore relates, T spent every evening in the wings or in the actresses' dressing-rooms, where they kissed me and gave me sweets';3 and it was almost inevitable that in her turn she should embrace the acting profession. But often such children were forced on to the stage before they were of an age to make a choice, let alone feel the call. One of Marie Dorval's grandfathers had acted at the Porte-Saint-Martin and later became stage-manager at that theatre, in which position it was not too difficult for him to procure an engagement for his 17-year-old daughter, Marie's mother. But the little family lost their jobs as the result of some shake-up and were forced to take to the roads, joining a troupe of strolling actors. They were at Lorient when the future heroine of romantic drama came into the world on 7 January 1798; she was enrolled among the backstage singers almost as soon as her piping treble could be heard. She later confided, in conversation with Henri Monnier, some of the tribulations of this life. I can still remember walking hand in hand with my mother on the way to the theatre and looking longingly at the local children dancing in circles in the town square or playing on the doorsteps of the houses. I would spend part of the day in a dark, cold, grimy room in which not a ray of sunshine ever penetrated. The rehearsal over, we would return to our lodgings and swallow a bite of lunch before making up a parcel and setting out for the evening performance. On the rare occasions when I was not acting I would go along with my mother and help her dress. Finally, worn out, I could go to bed. My poor mother would have liked nothing better than to love mebut how can one be a mother in the atmosphere of quarrels, vexations, hurt vanity, of violent, vulgar passions which is the whole life of a penniless actress belonging to a wandering troupe?4

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Marie's father, an actor attached to the same company, had deserted them a few years after her birth; she was only fifteen when her mother died, far too young at that age to be left unprotected in this jungle, but not too young to contract a loveless first marriage with an obscure ballet-dancer, a man of good family who had taken the stage name of Dorval; he died at Smolensk on his way to take up an appointment at St Petersburg, leaving her a widow with two young children to support, and she still in her teens. Far from choosing the profession of which she later became one of the brightest ornaments, Marie Dorval was condemned to it from the very start; circumstances would never have permitted her any other career. Not all these enfants de la balle as the French called them,5 children of acting families, had so wretched an introduction to their predestined career as she did. For many of them, indeed, to be the centre of attention from an early age seems to have been sufficient to give them a taste for the work. Thus Leontine Fay, born at Toulouse in 1810 to two talented singers at the Theatre du Capitole in that city, made her first stage appearance at the tender age of five at Boulogne; at eight she was taken off on a professional tour through the French provinces, and when she was eleven her appearance at the Gymnase took Paris by storm. A born actress, she needed only to be threatened that she would not be allowed to appear on stage that evening for her to stop misbehaving and become once more an obedient little girl. Rose Cheri, who eventually became a popular actress at the Gymnase and married the director of that theatre, Montigny, in 1841, had been born to a couple of provincial players and made her debut at the age of six, enjoying it enormously besides delighting the audience. Like her, Marie Laurent, nee Luguet, both of whose parents were professional actors, showed astonishing precociousness. As a child, sent on an errand to the grocer's one morning, she stopped at a street corner, lost in her recollections of the play in which she had seen her parents act the previous evening, and 'started to re-enact the characters with such exactness in the tone of voice and the gestures that it was not long before a group of bystanders gathered, listening, admiring, and all but applauding her', 6 until eventually her parents, wondering what had become of her, burst through the circle, scolding her and dragging her away. Her greatest ambition was to perform on the stage herself. She was ten when this happened, in a melodrama in which she was given a small part. The villain was to approach her threateningly and ask

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who her father was, whereupon the little girl was supposed to answer: 'Zopiero.' It was a keyword, the crux in the drama. The scene started, the villain, in his most terrifying voice, put the question: 'Child, who is your father?' and in reply she piped up: 'Papa, why it's M. Luguet.' Marie Laurent later admitted that never once in her long career was she ever to bring the house down so successfully. As these instances tend to show, it was the daughters rather than the sons of acting families who followed dutifully in their parents' wake. The reason was not, as was commonly held at the time, that acting comes more naturally to girls than to boys; it was simply that boys had a much wider choice of employment, and even if they expressed a desire to go on to the stage, as often as not their parents, knowing from personal experience the trials and disappointments they risked, actively discouraged them. Thus Rose Dupuis, a much admired member of the Comedie-Fran^aise, whose son showed early signs of succumbing to the fascination of the footlights, did everything she could to dissuade him from entering the profession she had been following with great success since 1808. She sent him to a good school, procured his entry to an architect's office, later to a banker's; but still the theatre remained the object of his fondest dreams and finally she had to give in. The same mistrust was shown by Monrose, in spite of the successful career he had had as an actor, first in Italy as a member of the company headed by Mile Raucourt during the First Empire, and subsequently at the Comedie-Frangaise. Monrose had a son, Louis, whom he destined for the bar, sending him first to the Lycee Charlemagne, then to law school in Paris. But in spite of his father's warnings nothing would satisfy the young man but that he should enter the Comedie-Fran^aise in his turn, where he had, as it turned out, a reasonably successful career. Sacha Guitry began thinking of a future in the theatre round about his fourteenth year, but his father, as he relates in his memoirs, was dead against the idea, though less because he thought the profession too chancy than because he believed his own considerable success on the stage was blinding his son to the difficulties and drawbacks. 'Think again, my boy, don't be misled. The very natural desire you have to prove yourself as an actor is not the sign of an irresistible vocation. You can't buy your way into the acting profession as you can buy a notary's practice.'7 In spite of these warnings Sacha Guitry did act, besides becoming a popular, if somewhat predictable, playwright.

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The unreasoning prejudice against actors which, as we saw in the preceding chapter, was rife throughout the nineteenth century especially among the more 'respectable' members of society would seem to rule out recruitment to the profession from among middleclass families. But in fact there were not a few rebellious sons, though fewer such daughters. The situation was, however, different if the head of the family and sole provider died prematurely or was ruined financially. In such cases the sons, if they already had a strong leaning to an acting career, were no longer browbeaten by their fathers, while the daughters sometimes went on the stage as a more attractive alternative to earning their keep as governesses or piano teachers. Frederick Lemaitre, the outstanding boulevard actor of his day, might never have had his name emblazoned on the playbills had his father not met with a serious accident from which he never recovered, leaving him orphaned at the age of nine. Lemaitre senior had been an architect, a member that is to say of one of the best regarded professions of his time, which he had no doubt supposed his son would enter in due course. His untimely death put an end to any such hopes. The family moved from Le Havre to Paris, where they had relatives; Frederick was sent to a good school but proved a far from model pupil, dreaming only of the footlights. His mother hoped he might make his fortune in the colonies, and booked him a passage on a transatlantic packet; he got as far as Rouen where he saw Joanny at the Theatre des Arts and promptly returned to Paris, more determined than ever to go on the stage. And so eventually, by dint of determination, he did; the management of a recently opened theatre on the Boulevard du Temple entrusted him with the part of the lion in a reworking of the Pyramus and Thisbe story; this he discharged with considerably more ferocity, by all accounts, than did Snug the joiner before the noble Athenians. But Frederick had at least made his debut, albeit on all fours. Bouffe, gifted with a marvellous mimetic talent about which various extraordinary stories were current, was born in the same year, 1800, as Frederick but came from rather lower down the social scale. His father ran a prosperous interior decorator's business, giving employment to up to thirty hands, until in 1814 the contraction of trade brought about his financial ruin and a breakdown in health besides; for the next three years he was incapable of lifting a finger to help himself or his family. Desire Bouffe had already begun learning his father's trade, without any thought of turning actor; his highest

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aspiration was to become a scene painter. But his elder sister had accepted an offer from the directors of the Ambigu-Comique and he was in the habit of meeting her after every evening performance to escort her home. Struck by the lively camaraderie he encountered back-stage, fascinated by one young actress in particular whom he later married, Bouffe took his courage in both hands and declared to his parents that he wanted to give up his trade and become an actor. His father reacted more calmly than he had expected, blaming himself for having taken the boy too often in the past to see the great performers of the period, Talma, Lafon, Fleury, and Mile Mars; and he gave his consent, at least provisionally, asking only that the young man should promise to abandon the career if he felt he would never make a great success of it, for, as he reminded him sententiously, 'it is a hundred times better to be a good workman than a poor actor'. 8 Both Edmond Got, born in 1822, and Mounet-Sully, born in 1841, belonged to families in comfortable circumstances, until the ruin or early death of their fathers brought about a drastic alteration in their career expectations. Got was the son of a rich landowner who, as the result of an unwise investment and the bankruptcy and flight of the notary who was administering the greater part of his estate, found himself almost overnight reduced to poverty. Although Edmond, thanks to a scholarship, was able to complete his education at the College Charlemagne, his mother had to seek employment as a lady companion and his sister as a shopgirl. Got began his diary at the end of 1840, before he embarked on the career that was to culminate in his becoming doyen of the Comedie-Frangaise, and in an early passage set down quite frankly the reasons why he was drawn to it in the first place. The triumphs of the stage, although short-lived it is true and superficial, but immediate, personal, cash on the nail, attract me more than anything else, to the point where I am ready to affirm that, even if I were rich, I would be loth to give up the idea - for it's not the money that counts; it's the theatre first and foremost for its own sake, for the emotions it gives and the freedom it offers, the adventures even, mingling with writers, artists, women.9

As for Mounet-Sully, though his father died in 1851 when he was ten, the family was left comfortably provided for; and it was not until he was fourteen that his vocation manifested itself, as the result of hearing an actor from Paris declaim the famous 'stanzas' from

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Corneille's Polyeucte. However, he continued until his mid-twenties leading the life of a gentleman of leisure at his native town, Bergerac, dabbling in art, reluctant to face the clash with his mother which he knew would be inevitable once he had spoken of his ambition. She wanted him to enter the ministry; then, since he was manifestly unsuited to become a pastor, she urged him to study for the law, when all he wanted was to entrain for Paris and learn the elements of his chosen art at the Conservatoire. But my mother was obdurate. The prejudice against actors admitted virtually no exception, especially in the provinces. When by dint of perseverance, I finally got the dear woman's consent, on the day of my departure as she kissed me goodbye she said to me: 'Your father left us a small fortune and an unblemished name. Be sure you do not compromise either the one or the other.'10

It was undoubtedly a harder life for the daughters of the bourgeoisie when, through some disaster, they were left to fend for themselves; but the stage was at any rate a possible bolt-hole. Pauline Aubert, who later hid her real identity under the name Anais, was born in Paris in 1802, the daughter of a sugar-refiner who died when his business failed, leaving his wife and only child practically penniless. It was only thanks to the family's friendship with Corsse, at that time manager of the Ambigu-Comique, that she was able to take the first steps in her career before deciding to join the company of French actors founded in London in 1816 under the patronage of the Duke of Wellington. Eugenie Doche, whose reputation was made when she created the part of Marguerite Gautier at the first production of La Dame aux camelias in 1852, had been born, thirty years earlier, the daughter of the Baron de Plunkett, an offshoot of one of the Irish Catholic families who had accompanied James II into exile. But she lost her father at the age of fourteen. She had been gently nurtured, and her mother was taken aback when, having asked the girl what she intended to do in life, she found her already set on a career as an actress. Having taken advice, the widow reluctantly gave her consent, but only on condition that her daughter took a husband, since it appeared necessary that she should begin by travelling around the provinces, something she could scarcely have done unaccompanied and unprotected. A wedding was hastily fixed up: Doche, the conductor of a theatre orchestra, agreed to take this child-bride for the sake of her small

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dowry. The marriage, however, proved a mistake, and the couple separated after eighteen months, Eugenie now being saddled with an infant daughter whom she was obliged to bring up unaided. Then there was Louise Periga, born at Rouen in 1834 where her father was one of the foremost merchants in that city. Unfortunately, when she was fifteen and on the point of leaving her convent school, his business foundered in the depression that followed the 1848 revolution, and instead of pursuing the expected course of action or inaction which would have been, for a young lady of her class, to wait quietly at home until an eligible suitor presented himself, she found herself obliged to go out into the world and earn her own living. Too well educated to think of taking up a manual trade, she was advised to train as a schoolmistress, but at the time this was a hard and poorly paid profession. That left only the stage. Similarly Aimee Desclee, who after numerous vicissitudes emerged as the star of Diane de Lys, La Femme de Claude, and other of Dumas//j's dramas in the 1870s, had received one of the best educations open to girls at the period; her father, a lawyer and later an industrialist, was a friend of Enfantin and himself an adherent of Saint-Simonism; her uncle had been one of the founders of the well-known publishing firm, Desclee de Brouwer. But the unexpected ruin of her family obliged them to consider a theatrical career for their daughter, whom they accordingly entered for the Conservatoire in 1853. Thus, contrary to what was sometimes said at the time,11 the middle classes did furnish a goodly quota, probably proportionate to their numbers in the population, of the successful actors and actresses of the century; nor did these invariably come from families who for one reason or another had come down in the world. Jacques Genies, born in 1800, was the son of a high-ranking army officer; his two elder brothers were both killed in the battle of Borodino, and although the youngest did enlist in the light cavalry during the Hundred Days, his mother prevailed on him to abandon this dangerous calling. He chose, after consultation with Talma, to switch to acting, and pursued this new career with some success in the provinces and, between 1828 and 1841, at St Petersburg, where a large company of French actors were paid over the odds to entertain the Russian court aristocracy. Georges Monval, another colonel's son, having taken a law degree and served as sergeant-major during the Franco-Prussian war, discovered his true vocation at the relatively advanced age of twenty-eight. However, he never achieved his

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life's ambition to become a member of the inner circle of the Comedie-Frangaise, though he was appointed archivist there and permanent secretary of the administrative committee. Neither of these two young men seems to have met with any strong parental opposition to their decision, but it was otherwise with Pierre Levassor, the son of a captain in Napoleon's imperial guard. A devout Catholic, his father felt he would be more suited to the church than to the army and had, says Hervey, 'a strong antipathy to anything connected with the stage'. But even as a boy, at home in Fontainebleau, his son's chief amusement consisted in getting up amateur plays with his young companions, the price of admission to his theatre being a pin. The stage was formed of some planks laid on a couple of casks before the stable door, and the actors changed their dress in the stable. The general wardrobe was composed of three or four aprons, a gendarme's hat or two, which latter article they contrived occasionally to borrow; as for the dialogue of their pieces, they said exactly what they liked and consequently did not require a prompter.12

But this 'pin-money theatre' lasted only until the day when the retired officer, coming on a performance unexpectedly, laid about audience and actors alike with a stout cudgel and sent them all flying. Shortly afterwards Capt. Levassor despatched his 12-year-old son to Paris and had him apprenticed to a maker of shawls and silk goods. But the youngster soon found his way to the Boulevard du Temple and on Sundays his meagre pocket-money sufficed to buy him a seat in the gods at Mme Saqui's theatre. In 1832 he was able to begin acting at the Palais-Royal, where he established himself as an indispensable member of the company for the next thirty years. In the social hierarchy of the period, after gentlemen-farmers, industrialists and army officers came the expanding class of professional men. Here we can start with Talma, the son of a dentist who from humble beginnings as a manservant had worked his way up to the top of his profession; Lord Hervey, who availed himself of his services while in Paris, persuaded him to move to London where in a short while he built up a brilliant clientele which included the Prince of Wales. His son, Francois-Joseph, joined him here and in due course began practising dentistry on his own back in Paris. But his true vocation declared itself shortly afterwards, and the elder Talma appears to have opposed only the mildest of objections to this switch to the stage. ^ Pierre Lafon, who under the Empire did his

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best to supplant Talma as a tragic actor, was the son of a surgeon who originally hoped he would in his turn wield the scalpel; but the young man disappointingly abandoned his medical studies to join a company of strolling players, learning his new trade the hard way. Other well-known actors who sprang from the professional middle classes included Michelot, the son of a translator-cum-interpreter, who joined the Comedie-Fran^aise in 1805 and served it faithfully until 1831 (one of his last appearances was at the 'battle of Hernani' where he had the part of Charles V); Lafont, whose father, a successful auctioneer at Bordeaux, paid for his son to go through medical school and qualify as a ship's surgeon, only to see him, after he had completed three sea voyages, abandon it all to train as an actor in Paris; and Jose Dupuis, the son of a drawing-master and brother of two members of the teaching staff at the Conservatoire of Liege, who made his way to Paris and began acting at various small theatres until he found a niche at the Varietes, achieving great success as a comic in Offenbach's operettas when they were all the rage during the Second Empire. Mile Naptal, the anagrammatic stage-name of Gabrielle Planat, was the daughter of a man of letters who also dabbled in painting and fully expected her to take up one or other of these civilized occupations, deemed entirely suitable for a gently nurtured young lady under the July Monarchy. But he was imprudent enough to take her a little too often to the Comedie-Fran^aise, never supposing it would enter her head that she might want to join the company. When she declared that she would never touch brush or palette again and that nothing would satisfy her but to go on the stage, he was totally disconcerted and tried his best to dissuade her. In the end he agreed to her acting, not however on a public stage but before an audience of fashionable folk in Jules de Castellane's private theatre in the Rue Saint-Honore. Here her beauty and obvious talent made her the talk of the town and shortly afterwards she was offered an opening at the Odeon. Another young hopeful belonging to the professional middle classes who met with strong opposition from his family when he asked to be allowed to go on the stage was SaintGermain, the son of a qualified architect employed as an inspector of buildings. When an incapacitating disease obliged his father to curtail his activities, the younger Saint-Germain, not to be a burden on the family's straitened resources, took a job as a travelling booksalesman. It was not much to his liking, however, and whenever he

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had a spare moment during the day he would pull out a volume of Corneille or Racine and proceed to commit the more celebrated speeches to memory; while in the evening nothing gave him greater pleasure than to join the claque, a favourite way, as we have seen, for impecunious young men to get into a playhouse without payment. But when he broached at home his longing to give up trying to sell books and instead to earn his living as an actor, his parents poured cold water on the idea, even though his father was related to Michel Masson, one of the most prolific playwrights of the period, and sometimes entertained of an evening actors and actresses whose conversation, listened to by the boy, may well have instilled in him the yearning to join their glamorous profession. 'His laments, his pleadings, his appeals met only, alas, with energetic and reiterated refusals; despairing of ever getting his parents to relent, he wrapped himself up in a sorrowful silence which in the end touched them more. Finally, at supper one evening, his father announced that he had that very day put down his name for the Conservatoire.'14 This did not automatically secure him admission: he still had to present himself before three judges and recite a major speech from one of the classical tragedies or comedies. But it passed off well and SaintGermain was accepted; what is more, at the end of the first year he was awarded a special bursary. It cannot be denied, however, that the great majority of actors who achieved some measure of fame and fortune in the nineteenth century originated much further down the social scale than those we have considered so far. A handful came from families that already had some connection with the stage, without being themselves actors. They may have had charge of a theatre in the provinces or abroad, like Louise Despreaux's father who was manager of the theatre at Mons in Belgium during the First Empire. Talma, on a visit to Brussels, and wanting to put on a performance of Racine's Athalie, asked whether anyone knew of a suitable child actor for the part of the boy-king Joas; it was suggested he try Despreaux's 10-year-old daughter. Talma was so struck by Louise's acting potentialities that he proposed to her father that she should return with his wife and him to Paris where he would see that she was properly trained. Eventually, after Talma's death, she was accepted for the ComedieFran^aise. Anna Judic had the good fortune to be the niece of Montigny, the celebrated director of the Gymnase in the midcentury; her father was employed as a ticket inspector at the same

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theatre, and Anna was earning her own living in a very humble capacity, working for a laundress, until her uncle, realizing her latent talent, recruited her to his company. Gabrielle Reju, known on the stage as Rejane, was also the daughter of a ticket inspector with a wife who had charge of the bar at the same theatre, the Ambigu, whither her daughter from an early age used to accompany her of an evening. When she felt sleepy, little Gabrielle would clamber on to a bench in a corner where her mother would cover her up with a blanket; and when she woke up, she would creep on to the balcony and stay there long hours, trying to make sense of one of the melodramas for which the Ambigu was famous. After the FrancoPrussian war, when she left school, her mother, now a widow, wanted her to work for the necessary diploma to become an elementary schoolteacher; but Gabrielle had her own ideas about her future, ideas which caused her mother to recoil in horror. 'When an honourable career opens up to you, you haven't the right not to embrace it. Just think: 40 francs a month and free lunches! You haven't the right to make of me the mother of an actress!' Ah, that disdainful phrase, 'the mother of an actress'! After twenty-five years, Rejane cannot forget it. But the only vengeance she takes is to repeat it occasionally to Mme Reju, now quite crushed by the triumphs earned by the little rebel of yore.i:>

It is clear that even at the end of the century the prejudice against 'putting one's daughter on the stage' was by no means confined to the wealthier sections of the population. It is difficult to think of any trade or occupation which did not supply the theatre companies with fresh recruits, and since it was realized that those with a genuine talent for acting obtained in time a secure position in which they could look forward to a rather more prosperous life than their working-class parents had enjoyed, the latter rarely raised any objection to their choice of career: Mme Reju's jaundiced view of the profession may have been due to seeing too many actresses flirting with her customers at the bar. It was said by Brazier at the beginning of the century and by Robert de Flers at the end that no group was so keen to embark on it as the daughters of janitors.' 6 There is nothing intrinsically improbable in this, since such girls, left to answer the door to callers, had plenty of free time when they were on their own and, if they had the slightest inclination to act, would occupy it avidly reading the texts of the latest theatrical successes, with intervals for daydreaming about how

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brilliantly they would have played the part of the heroine. But it is a fact that janitors' daughters do not figure at all prominently among the great or even middlingly good actresses of the nineteenth century, though of course we have no means of knowing how many of them were given minor parts when they were still young and pretty and never rose above these subordinate functions. Shopkeepers' families were far more apt to provide promising recruits to the profession. Brunet, the comic actor who was to draw the crowds to the Theatre des Varietes under the First Empire, was the son of a baker who had given up selling bread in order to open a lottery office next door to the Comedie-Italienne, a fact which may have prompted the boy to attempt the first steps in the art he was later to illustrate to such perfection. The Coquelin brothers were also the sons of a baker, who had his business at Boulogne. .When his elder son left for Paris in 1859 the father raised no objection and was even rather proud — as well he might be — when his boy succeeded brilliantly at the Comedie-Frangaise and was promoted to be societaire at the early age of twenty-three. But when his second son gave signs of wanting to follow in his brother's footsteps, the elder Coquelin baulked at the idea of having two actors in the family and suggested he should enter a more respectable profession, such as teaching. So the younger Coquelin left for England where he found himself without much difficulty a post as French master in a boarding school. He stuck this for three months, then returned to France and found another opening as booking clerk at a railway station, which however ended with his being discharged for not keeping his mind on the job. Shortly afterwards, their father's death allowed the brothers to sell the business and the younger one to achieve his ambition under the elder's tutelage. Wig-makers were more in demand before the Revolution which made short-cut hair, in the 'Roman' style, almost essential for all good democrats, Robespierre excepted. Francois-Pierre Revaloir, to be seen at the Ambigu and the Porte-Saint-Martin at the turn of the century playing the brigand chief, was the son of a wig-maker, himself one at the start; he was a man alleged to be completely illiterate. Damas's father similarly was a master barber; the boy was one of the child actors who drew the crowds to the Theatre Beaujolais in 1778; in 1792 he joined the Theatre de la Republique and in spite of his coarse face and thick-set body was made a member of the Comedie-Fran^aise at its reconstitution in 1799. An actor at

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the Theatre du Marais at Bordeaux, and a member of Mile Raucourt's Italian troupe until it was repatriated in 1814, Moessard came from the same background: his father had a hairdresser's establishment in the Rue Montmartre in Paris; while Lucinde Paradol, who trained as a singer and made her debut at the Opera in 1816, was the daughter of a barber. When the Comedie-Fran^aise, having finally lost the services of Mile George, was looking for an imposing tragic actress to replace her, their choice fell on Mile Paradol. Her son, by her marriage to a high-ranking officer in the engineers, was the noted Second Empire publicist Prevost-Paradol, elected to the Academie Franchise and briefly French ambassador to the United States. Mile George's father, of German extraction, exercised at the time of her birth the functions of master tailor in Bayeux: this too was a trade which produced in the second generation several gifted new members of the acting profession. Another was Virginie Dejazet, the daughter of a tailor who had a shop in the Rue Saint-Lazare in Paris and was progenitor of a family of thirteen, most of whom were employed in the ballets and choruses of the Opera. Was it by chance that Minette, the star of the Vaudeville, two years Dejazet's junior, befriended her at her beginnings and persuaded the manager, Barre, to take her into the company? For Minette, by her real name Jeanne Menetrier, was also the daughter of a master tailor down at Besan^on. Tailors presumably begot sons as well as daughters, but it seems to have been mainly the girls who had successful acting careers; we can cite as a further example Suzanne Reichenberg, whose mother had been Suzanne Brohan's lady companion until she left the house to get married to a handsome tailor and cutter. They had a daughter, named Suzanne after her mother's former employer, but unfortunately the tailor fell ill and died at the age of thirty. In due course Suzanne Reichenberg, with the backing of her godmother, gained a place at the Conservatoire, later joining the Comedie-Fran^aise where she specialized in ingenue roles until well after the normal age for such parts. Soldiers discharged after Waterloo constituted a significant proportion of the population in the Restoration years, and it is not altogether surprising that many of them tended to look askance when their sons saw their future as strutting on the boards of a stage instead of drilling on the parade ground. Jean Puberaux had been nicknamed Sainte-Foy by his comrades in arms, amused by this

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favourite oath of his; when his son, born in 1817, decided to apply for admission to the Conservatoire in 1837, he chose - perhaps to tease the old man - Sainte-Foy as the name by which he would be known on the stage. According to Pericaud, the elder Puberaux was far from pleased to learn that his son was proposing to enter the famous school of drama. ' "A barnstormer in my family, never!" he muttered, frowning. "He'll be a soldier, like me, and as he has had a better education than my father was able to give me, he'll be an officer." ' But the young man persevered and, being gifted with a good singing voice, was accepted by the Opera-Comique. The old sergeant, who was present at his debut, expressed his displeasure the following day in no uncertain terms. ' "You'll give up this clown's trade immediately, or I'll disown you!" "Impossible," replied Sainte-Foy; "I've signed on for three years."' The old man broke with his headstrong son and died a few years later, though not before he had been reconciled with the young tenor in view of the success he had been having.17 Frangois-Louis Lesueur was likewise the son of an old soldier who had apprenticed him to a paper factory at the age of thirteen, from which he had escaped to work at various third-rate theatres on the outskirts of Paris until he was seen by chance by the manager of the Gymnase, Montigny, who signed him up. Here he had the good fortune to win the heart of Anna Cheri, whose sister had married, as we have seen, the redoubtable director, and so Lesueur became Montigny's brother-in-law and remained a pillar of the Gymnase for most of his acting career. Charles Blondelet, the son of a former drummer in the Guards, had a much more difficult start. Apprenticed first to a printer, he was for a while unemployed, reduced to serving as conductor on one of the new horse-drawn omnibuses. Then he made friends with a puppet-master who gave him employment as a barker, attracting audiences on the strength of the lessons he had learnt from his father on the art of wielding the drumsticks. After that he succeeded in picking up jobs at various small theatres along the Boulevard du Temple, writing little sketches for them as well as acting the clown on the stage. Finally he found his proper place, a modest but essential one, at the Varietes, where he spent the next thirty years down to 1888. Leonide Charvin, who adopted for the stage the biblical name Agar (i.e. Hagar, Abraham's handmaid and the mother of Ishmael), was born the daughter of a sergeant in the cavalry somewhere in the provinces, at Bayonne or Sedan or Saint-Claude in the Jura - her

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various biographers are not of one mind on the point. Her mother having died when she was still young and her father remarrying, Leonide soon discovered the drawbacks of life with a stepmother; so she contracted a loveless match with the first man who proposed to her, left him shortly afterwards and made her way to Paris where she eked out a precarious living as a piano teacher. Realizing she had a good stage presence, friends suggested she should take lessons in acting from one Achille Ricourt who ran a drama school; he accepted her willingly, struck from the first by her personal magnetism and strange beauty. Felix Savard, who saw her acting Phedre in March i860, was equally impressed, and amazed when talking to her after the performance to hear her admit that six weeks previously she had never heard of Racine or the Phaedra of whom he wrote. In 1862 she was offered an engagement at the Odeon, whence in time she moved to the Comedie-Fran^aise. Her greatest triumph here came in 1870 when, with the outbreak of war, there was a clamour to hear once more the Marseillaise, banned during the Second Empire for its revolutionary connotations. Agar declaimed it rather than sang it, as had Rachel at the same theatre during the 1848 revolution; the effect was electrifying and she repeated the performance night after night until, with the Prussians at the gates of Paris, all theatres were closed for the duration of the siege. On 1 May 1871, bidden to a concert at the Tuileries, Agar had the courage, in the presence of the leaders of the Commune, to refuse their demand that she should give a repeat recital of the revolutionary anthem. 'Mounting the platform, she told the audience that she had sung the Marseillaise in the face of the invader but she refused to do so in the midst of a civil war. There ensued a deep silence, followed by an immense burst of applause.' 18 It was an act of audacity of which perhaps only the daughter of a soldier would have been capable. Stories such as that of Agar having not the ghost of an idea who Racine was or the Phaedra whose tragic tale he unfolded were told similarly about herself by Aimee Tessandier, whose candid memoirs are of interest chiefly for the light they shed on the struggles facing a very poor, totally uneducated girl who eventually became a highly acclaimed actress in Paris. Her parents were small tradespeople whose business failed and who moved to Bordeaux when she was three. Here her father found employment on the railway at a wage of 2 francs a day; the family subsisted on a famine diet of rice and water. She was sent out to work at the age of seven, monotonously

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turning a little wheel in a ropemaker's factory from eight in the morning till six in the evening for wages of 40 centimes a day. Later she was taken on as a tailor's apprentice for which she was paid 5 francs a week. Even so she managed to go to the theatre once a week, occupying a seat in the gods for an outlay of 5 sous (25 centimes). Her apprenticeship terminated, she ran off to Paris at the age of fourteen with a girl-friend, found work with another tailor and took an additional spare-time job as an extra in an outlying theatre. A fellow townsman in the audience recognized her one night, gave her address to her father, and she was dragged back home. But she managed to give her parents the slip once more, rented herself a room in town, picked up a wealthy lover, and started planning seriously to enter the acting profession. She began by making overtures to a teacher of drama at Bordeaux who demurred at first on learning she could neither read nor write; but the exorbitant fee she offered overcame his scruples and six months later she was taken on at the Grand-Theatre. But her appearance on stage created a near-riot, either because the audience realized how inexperienced she was or more probably because it was common knowledge that she was leading an irregular life. Several years later, after acting at Brussels, Rheims and Cairo, she arrived in Paris and was offered a short-term, trial appointment at the Comedie-Fran^aise. In her autobiography she relates an occasion when the director, Jules Claretie, asked her what she thought of the part of Clytemnestra in Racine's Iphigenie. To the consternation of Claretie and the amusement of the actor Mounet-Sully who was also present, she declared: T have no idea who this Clytemnestra was, any more than the Iphigeneia and the Racine you are talking about.' Mounet-Sully, with an expressive glance at the director, took her off to the theatre library and read her the play out of an old folio bound in russet leather. The actress was greatly moved and declared herself ready and willing to take the part. Mounet-Sully returned with her to Claretie's office and said with a smile: 'Racine and Mademoiselle Tessandier have made one another's acquaintance now and seem to get on very well together.'*9 It was always a source of wonder when actresses coming from the dregs of society, completely untaught, unable to write a letter without making elementary spelling mistakes, succeeded in incarnating the tormented queens of classical tragedy so much more convincingly than their educated sisters; intuition, it seemed, was

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worth any amount of understanding. Catherine Rafuin, who was to be known on the stage as Mile Duchesnois, started working at the Comedie-Frangaise some eighty years earlier than Aimee Tessandier's initiation to the magic of Racine, and she was obviously quite as ill-acquainted as her distant successor with the history and mythology of Greece and Rome. The playwright Legouve, who took her under his wing when she arrived in Paris, relates in his memoirs some of the solecisms into which her lack of the most rudimentary education betrayed her. It was she who, hearing one of her fellow actresses talking about a trip she had made to Troyes, said to her gushingly: 'Troy! You know Troy! How lucky you are! I am always talking of Troy in my lines and I've never been there!' After a performance of Bajazet, she wanted to know who were all these mutes [the eunuchs] who were always being referred to in the play. Then one day, at my father's table, emerging from a daydream she said aloud: 'M. Legouve! What a sad thing to happen to Henry IV! When I think that if Ravaillac had not assassinated him, he might still be alive today!'20 In fact the good king, whose death was the subject of a tragedy by Legouve in 1806, had perished at Ravaillac's hand in 1610. She was by no means unintelligent, this shabby, ugly, but gifted starveling, but she had received the minimum of education, just enough to read and write, and even that little she owed to her good luck in being befriended by a lady living nearby who taught her her letters. Her parents could have done nothing for her: her father was a horse-dealer, her mother kept the village inn; she herself went out to service at the age of sixteen. But she had an elder sister in Paris and it was while visiting her that Catherine was taken to the TheatreFran^ais to see Racine's Britannicus. She astonished her sister and everyone else in the house the following day by repeating word for word and with the fire of inspiration the finest tirades of the play which she had never heard or read before. Her future was clear; she began acting at Valenciennes after her return home; it was on a later visit to Paris that she made the acquaintance of Legouve and his circle of friends and was taken under the protection of Josephine Bonaparte and Chaptal, Napoleon's Minister of the Interior. Between them, these powerful patrons smoothed the way for her to make her debut at the Theatre-Fran9ais, where she found herself competing with the younger and infinitely more beautiful Mile George, both of them consummate actresses who encouraged all the

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connoisseurs of the Consulate to believe that high tragedy, under an eclipse since before 1789, was due at last for a renaissance. If so, it hardly outlived the Empire, and after the July Revolution only a sprinkling of old-timers turned up to see Racine and Corneille acted at the Theatre-Franc,ais until, in the autumn of 1838, rumours started flying around Paris of a new actress, Rachel, who had succeeded in blowing up the cold embers of seventeenth-century tragedy to a blaze of passion such as had scarcely been seen before. Like Duchesnois when she started playing Racine, Rachel was almost entirely uneducated, barely able to read. Samson, who had undertaken to coach her, discovered this with amazement, as his wife relates: 'she was like someone who had learned her letters very late in life and needed to mouth the words she read. Handwriting, or even a printed text, made no sense to her unless she spoke it aloud.' This meant that she never read a play through, only the part she had to get by heart, and so never understood what it was all about. So Samson found her a teacher who used to visit her in the garret where she lived with the rest of the family, and the woman reported how she frequently found Rachel sitting on a stool beside the fire on which a pot was simmering, 'on her knees the play by Racine she was conning, and in her hands the carrots she was scraping to add to the stew'.21 Yet this kitchen-girl, speaking her lines at a rehearsal, had the bearing and dignity of a princess of legend, and the lines themselves emerged fresh as though newly minted, unobscured by the staleness that had accrued around them through having been mumbled or droned in classrooms by generations of schoolchildren. But Rachel had never gone to school; it wras a young and graceful barbarian, endowed with a Voice of which the accents could vary from the metallic to the wistful, who revealed anew to the French the beauties of their great dramatic poets. The paradox was that she had not a drop of French blood in her veins; her parents, the Felix couple, were Jewish peddlers, and the family always spoke Yiddish at home. Rachel first saw the light of day in a Swiss hamlet, where at first they were refused a room police regulations forbidding nomadic Jews to be given lodging in the canton - until the innkeeper's wife, seeing the woman's time was very near, relented and allowed them to stay for one night only. After wandering hither and thither through Switzerland and the German states, they finally entered France and settled at Lyons, the father of this numerous brood, Jacob Felix, trying to establish

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himself as a teacher of German, his wife selling second-hand clothing. Elisa, as Rachel was then called, would visit the cafes in the company of her elder sister, offering oranges for sale and singing folk songs and sentimental ballads. They were still doing this when they came to Paris and in fact it was Choron, a former director of the Opera, who, struck by the sweetness of their voices heard in the streets, offered to give the two girls free lessons; but after a short while he realized that Rachel's voice was better suited for declaiming verse and prevailed on Saint-Aulaire, who directed a school of drama, to take over his pupil. Rachel's career was altogether exceptional. For years, until her health broke down during a tour of the United States, she was the mainstay of the Comedie-Fran^aise and even more appreciated abroad than in France. On the second of her many visits to England she was granted a private audience with the young queen who presented her with a gold bracelet, suitably inscribed, as a memento of the occasion. The Duke of Wellington escorted her everywhere, and the houses of the aristocracy were thrown open to her. When she toured Russia in 1853, the crowds besieging the theatres were such that some fanatics were reported to have reached the doors by crawling over the shoulders of men in the queues, careless of punches and vociferous protests.22 Though Rachel was something of a phenomenon, other actresses had almost as unpromising a start and yet found in the theatre an escape route into reasonably secure employment, provided they had the mysterious gift and were prepared to work at it. Victoria Lafontaine was a foundling, adopted in charity by a plasterer who somehow succeeded in giving her the rudiments of an education. At eleven, she was taken to see Rose Cheri act at the Theatre des Celestins in Lyons and, fired by enthusiasm, studied hard and eventually reached Paris to make her debut at the Gymnase at the age of fifteen. Six years later she was admitted to the Comedie-Frangaise. Nathalie Martel, who followed a similar career, moving from the Gymnase to the ComedieFran9aise, had a strange childhood, living all the week in a dilapidated cottage from which, every Sunday, a manservant would drive her to the nearby chateau where she was fussed over by the countess as though she were her own daughter. One imagines Nathalie must have been the illegitimate child of a member of the nobility who had seduced her mother and arranged that a worker on the estate should marry her when she discovered herself to be

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pregnant. In 1833, when she was fifteen, Nathalie accompanied her parents to Paris where they opened a small hairdressing establishment; she started acting three years later at the Porte-Saint-Martin. Savard, who gives these biographical details, mentions that much of her success on the stage was due to her 'distinguished demeanour'; blood will tell, perhaps, but more probably the precepts and examples she had imbibed at those Sundays spent at the Chateau de Combreux gave her this air of refinement. Other actresses were the fruit of chance liaisons, Sarah Bernhardt being the best known; another was Sophie Croizette, who at one point was her great rival. She was born in 1847 at St Petersburg, her mother being a dancer, her father one assumes a Russian gentleman who preferred not to acknowledge her. In the circumstances Mme Croizette thought it better to return to Paris with little Sophie and bring her up there. Originally she was intended for a teaching career; Sophie obtained all the necessary diplomas but, having qualified, could not find a suitable post, and rather than remain at home idle, turned to the stage in spite of her mother's misgivings. For the most part, however, the actors and actresses who distinguished themselves at their profession were drawn from the numerous class of urban artisans: jewellers, glassmakers, hatters, cobblers, joiners, carpenters, coach-painters, saddlers and the clever fashioners of fancy goods known as 'articles de Paris'. Workmen who lived in towns, as these did, had a better chance of producing future actors thanks to the proximity of theatres; but we find the occasional farmer's labourer fathering an actor, while Tisserant and Melingue, close companions, were respectively the son of a gardener and the son of a coastguard and minor customs official. It was not until the end of the century that the acting profession became sufficiently respectable to attract recruits from the upper middle classes, the socalled grande bourgeoisie^ young people from this class were drawn into it in increasing numbers, particularly when the trade depression of the last years of the century made a business career less attractive and when the prestige of the profession meant that parents no longer raised the kind of objections they had in the past. To go on the stage became an acceptable alternative to joining a stockbroker's firm, reading for the bar or qualifying as a medical practitioner; and the new generation included an ever-increasing proportion of young men with a good education and family backing who were no longer prepared, as they might have been in Balzac's time, to look to their

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wife's dowry to give them a start in life. Much the same thing was happening to their sisters. For upper-middle-class families, the stage, as Antoine observed at the beginning of the new century, was no longer 'a sort of gulf ready to swallow up their children; the legendary life of bohemia and semi-starvation belongs to the past; a young lady, on leaving school, chooses with the approval of her family a career on the stage because this profession appears to her more gilded, more glamorous than any other'. So they turn up at the Conservatoire 'in an outfit made for them by a fashionable couturier; not to mention certain others, wearing pearls and driving up in a car, something that would have created a scandal a few years back'.23 Meanwhile, further down the social scale, the girls that might have turned to acting earlier were content to become shorthand typists or to model clothes for a fashion shop.

CHAPTER II

Training for the stage

In the French theatrical scene, nothing was so admired by foreigners as the institutional arrangements for securing an adequate supply of young actors to maintain past splendours and prove themselves adaptable enough to fill major parts in modern plays. Henry Irving had urged the foundation of a school for British actors on the model of the French one, but it was not until the year of his death (1905) that the idea bore fruit in the establishment at Gower Street of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The Ecole Royale dramatique predated it by well over a century, having been founded in the last years of the ancien regime, though not until after several proposals and counter-proposals had been submitted, beginning with a memorandum drawn up by three leading members of the Comedie-Frangaise, Lekain, Preville and Bellecour, in September 1756.1 It was urged by the signatories that the need for such a school had become acute since provincial companies were no longer able to supply the royal theatres in Paris with the new blood they required. The gap between acting standards in the provinces and the capital had been widening for some time, and when a trial was made in Paris of an actor enjoying a first-class reputation in the country, as likely as not the pit would shout him down after the first scene and call for an actor they were familiar with to replace him.2 The arguments in the memorandum were irrefutable and the project appears to have commended itself in high places, but it was eventually torpedoed through the jealousy and suspicion of Preville's colleagues in the ComedieFran^aise, while Lekain's death in 1778 removed one of the main supporters of the idea. In 1784, however, a training school for singers to supply a muchfelt want at the Opera was opened under the direction of Gossec; originally styled the Ecole royale de chant, it became better known as the Conservatoire de musique, being to some extent modelled on 172

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the conservatorii of Naples and Venice. Two years later it was decided to attach to it a drama school, with Dugazon, Mole and Fleury to give instruction. Courses started on 20 June 1786 with an enrolment of five students which rapidly multiplied, so that later in the year there were already twenty-three aspirant male actors and twentyfive young actresses on the books; they included Talma, who attended the courses between 13 July 1786 and 31 May 1788. From the start, however, there were misgivings about the new foundation: Cailhava, one of the more outspoken of its critics, called it 'the tomb of talent rather than its cradle' and, anticipating later complaints, predicted it would produce nothing but marionettes, 'mechanical actors'. 3 The new school was financed from the privy purse and did not survive the downfall of the monarchy. Its funds were cut off at the beginning of 1790, and if it continued to function this must have been on a greatly reduced scale. On 8 November 1793 a decree of the Convention officially abolished it; by that date two of its original staff of three (Dugazon and Fleury) were in any case under arrest and awaiting trial. The Conservatoire de musique, the host institution, survived however thanks to the demand for choristers at the various solemnities organized under the Revolution. To some extent, the work done by the Ecole dramatique was carried on, after 1791, by various young people's theatres: the Theatre des Jeunes-Eleves (rue de Thionville) where Firmin, Virginie Dejazet and Rose Dupuis were launched on their long and successful careers; the Theatre des Jeunes-Artistes (rue de Lancry), at which the most outstanding beginner was Monrose/^re; and the Theatre des JeunesComediens (Jardin des Capucins), on whose boards Charles-Edme Vernet made his first appearance, between 1805 and 1807. These three theatres were all commercial enterprises, attracting audiences mainly by the youthfulness of the cast; but they were all closed down by administrative action in 1807, Napoleon judging them unworthy of the splendour of his capital city. Rather different were the private lessons given by seasoned actors at the turn of the century. These attracted a mixed company of young people hoping to go on the stage and others wishing merely to gain self-confidence and assurance. Henri Beyle, in his late teens and long before he became known under his pen-name Stendhal, stagestruck but without any ambition to confront a paying audience, joined in the summer of 1804 a class of this sort run by Larive, a

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veteran of the Comedie-Frangaise. Beyle's object was twofold: first to rid himself of the regional accent he owed to being brought up at Grenoble, and secondly to have the opportunity to meet and date complaisant young actresses. In December of the same year, realizing he was progressing towards neither of these ends at Larive's lessons, he started attending a similar course run by Dugazon, the celebrated comic actor from the Comedie-Frangaise. Each session lasted two or three hours, the various participants mounting the platform to declaim the speeches they had got by heart. Dugazon would interrupt to make a suggestion or correction and on occasion would bound on to the improvised stage and demonstrate how the passage might be more effectively delivered. His pupils were sometimes astonished to see his clown's face adopt in a twinkling the gravity of a tragedy king and his eyes fill with tears, until all of a sudden he would break off to resume his seat, wearing his customary jovial expression. Dugazon was a born teacher, and when Napoleon reinstated the school of drama in 1806 he was appointed to its staff, along with Dazincourt, Monval and Lafon. The school, however, lacked autonomous status, being still regarded as an annex to the Conservatoire de musique; the one valuable provision in the decree of 1806 was that the annual intake of twelve students was hereinafter to be subsidized by the state, which also paid the teachers' salaries. This first move to ensure a supply of soundly trained actors to fill the ranks of the Comedie-Frangaise and its adjunct, the Odeon (officially known at the time as the Theatre de lTmperatrice), was justified by the number of retirements of elderly actors impending in those years: Dugazon in 1807, two years before his death, Louise Contat in 1809, Dazincourt who died in harness the same year, worn out by his efforts to organize Napoleon's dramatic festival at Erfurt, and two others who took retirement in 1811, Grandmesnil and Talma's wife, nee Caroline Vanhove. To secure the future of the school, Napoleon added twelve clauses to the Moscow Decree of 18124 regulating arrangements for what were called the 'Eleves du Theatre-Frangais': the intake was increased from twelve to eighteen, and there was provision for annual examinations, with prizes for those who distinguished themselves in one or both of the two branches of drama, comedy and tragedy. These additional clauses provided the organizational framework within which the Conservatoire functioned for the remainder of the

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century, apart from a hiatus between 1830 and 1836 when the school was closed as a measure of economy. At the beginning of Charles X's reign a certain number of minor modifications to Napoleon's legacy were published, including the provision that would-be students, if under age, had to have parental consent before joining the Conservatoire: a necessary precaution in view of the stigma still attaching to a career on the stage, and one that accounts for the occasional dissensions between father and son such as that already discussed affecting Saint-Germain.5 Before acceptance, each candidate had to prove that he or she was at least literate by taking a dictation test and by reading a passage aloud; they could be excluded if there was evidence, in the examiners' view, of an 'incurable' provincial accent.6 Regulations regarding the age of admission varied considerably from time to time. The Moscow Decree stipulated fifteen as a minimum, but previously pupils had been accepted at a much younger age: Sophie Belmont, for instance, born in 1781 and taken under the protection of the composer Mehul, entered the school before the Revolution and passed out at the age of eleven. Similarly later: a ruling dated 9 November 1841 concerning the Conservatoire laid it down that no one should be admitted below the age of ten; while a subsequent code of practice — the last in the century, dated 22 November 1850-lowered the admission age to nine. It is true that young children were needed for certain plays in the repertoire of the Comedie-Fran^aise, notably in that perennial favourite, Moliere's Le Malade imaginaire. As we have already seen, the great majority of new recruits to the acting profession in the early part of the century sprang from the working classes; for this reason there could be no charge for tuition, the stipends of professors and instructors being paid by the state. In addition, eight bursaries were awarded to the most promising students, each of 800 francs a year in addition to free board and lodging. The influx of middle-class students in the latter part of the century did alter the situation radically, however. For the daughters of 'respectable' families the Conservatoire came to replace the Ecole Poly technique (reserved for male students), in the sense that it was viewed as the royal road to fame and fortune; there was considerable wire-pulling to secure admission, and as Jules Lemaitre noted in 1889, the time had long passed when the Conservatoire depended on janitors' daughters to fill its benches. 'Two years ago we saw a colonel's daughter there. Today we have the daughter of a general,

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no less! and a Moldavian prince, a queen's nephew!' (this being the actor who later appeared under his stage name De Max).7 Children of the lower classes still knocked at the doors of the Conservatoire but, faced with competition from gilded youth, they had a harder job to gain acceptance and, having done so, to follow the course conscientiously. In such cases, wrote Adrien Bernheim, the young men are obliged to ask permission of their employer to absent themselves twice a week in order to attend their classes . . . The girls have come up from the country; they have learned in secret, without a word to their parents, the speech they will have to recite at the examination that will decide their entire future; and they lack the wherewithal, poor things, to buy the modest frock in which they will present themselves for the competition!8 The objectives of the Conservatoire were defined, in a manual issued in 1883, as to teach the pupils how to enunciate, how to act, how to bear themselves on stage, and how to portray a character, i.e. how to present it logically and harmoniously so that all its aspects are of a piece and nothing jars; and to encourage them to study, in accordance with the traditions, the classical masterpieces, the dynamism of each scene, the characters as they have been transmitted to us by past masters.» It can be seen that, broadly speaking, these aims were twofold, corresponding to the two titles by which the institution was known: it was first a school of drama, teaching the basic lessons any actor must master, and secondly it was a conservatoire in the primary sense, where the manner of presenting the masterpieces of the seventeenth century, evolving from the days of Moliere, La Champmesle and Michel Baron, was supposed to be preserved and passed on to posterity. Failure to recognize this distinction led to misunderstandings, genuine or deliberate, and to various epigrammatic snap judgements such as Harel's reference to 'the Conservatoire, where they teach the rules of a trade and not the precepts of an art';10) or the rather more explicit criticism by Frederick Lemaitre, who wrote of the disheartening routine of study at the Conservatoire, which consists of transmitting to future generations, as they have been transmitted to us by past generations, every gesture, every glance, every vocal inflection, all classified, numbered and stereotyped, with no allowance for different natures, temperaments or instincts; studies which are useful only to

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imprison youthful ardour in hidebound tradition and to produce and perpetuate jumping-jacks for ever attached to the same string, like performing dogs, trained birds or chattering parrots.11 But it is noteworthy that all such criticisms, and many others of like tenor, came from those who had no first-hand experience of studying at the Conservatoire, either because, like Frederick or Firmin Gemier, they failed the entrance examination, or because, like Harel, Barbey d'Aurevilly or Emile Zola, they were judging on hearsay. Much depended, of course, on the method used, which was never laid down and which varied considerably from one teacher to another. They were all veteran actors who had had honourable careers in the Comedie-Franc^aise (there was never any question of appointing women to such positions); and each selected his pupils on the basis of their performance at the entrance examination. Some of them, like Regnier, concentrated on inculcating all the tricks they had acquired in a lifetime on the stage in order to cover up inherent defects, and took less pleasure in tutoring a naturally gifted young man or woman than in coaching some other who needed all their care and attention in order to become at any rate passable. Provost, on the other hand, 'provided one was able to show warmth and energy, was quite satisfied. A declared enemy of everything that smacked of system, his mind was open to the requirements of the age. His principal concern was to prepare young men to appear at their ease on the stage',12 and he tried to inculcate the art, rare at the time, of speaking lines instead of declaiming them. Samson, who had been Rachel's mentor, was accused of pontificating and leaving his pupils too little initiative; trying, in short, to turn them into replicas of himself. As for Got, he realized better than any, perhaps, that the rare actor of genius will make his own way regardless of the teacher; and so he concentrated on helping the less well endowed to learn the elements of the art. 'If you lack the gift,' he would tell his class, 'my method will allow you to get by, but if you possess it, you won't need my advice and you'll put it out of your mind.'13 But of course, it was rare for one student out of twenty to have this natural gift and for the great majority, Got's teaching was invaluable. Each professor took two classes a week, each of which lasted two hours or longer. Students were encouraged to sit in at other classes besides those for which they were enrolled, and there were classes too in fencing, dancing, and deportment. These were commonly cut,

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though there were usually half a dozen conscientious girls who showed up to receive old father Elie's instruction in how to walk about the stage with dignity and convey a world of meaning with a wave of the hand or by tossing one's head back. May Agate recalls how Sarah Bernhardt would make fun of the ridiculous exercises in what they called Vassiette - that is to say, the way in which you sat down. There was the assiette which said 'so pleased you have called', quite different from the one which said 'I wish you hadn't!' Then the special gesture for 'Sortez, Monsieur!' with its accompanying ferocious expression of face, and other absurdities of the old regime which she said she did her utmost to forget immediately they had been dinned into her. '4 For if they tried to put these antiquated bits of business into practice at one of the regular classes, they were sure to be roundly ticked off by the professor in charge. The criticism constantly made of the training offered by the Conservatoire in the nineteenth century was that it was purely theoretical, and that students were never given an opportunity to face an audience. Strict regulations forbade theatre managers to employ them.1^ They were flouted, of course, and for fear of being expelled, students were constrained to act under assumed names, taking precautions against any leaks that might be made by indiscreet journalists. Their teachers winked at these infractions and even occasionally took a few favoured pupils with them to perform at some suburban theatre. During the summer vacations in particular it was not unknown for scratch companies made up partly of students from the Conservatoire to travel out to some small town on the outskirts of Paris and put on a classical play. Edmond Got describes one such excursion in 1841, telling how he joined a party which set out for Rueil in a horse-drawn omnibus, with our baskets of costumes, our boxes of wigs, our various parcels, men and women together, chatting and bawling. At 5 o'clock we drove into the village; and as we picked our way through muddy streets looking for the theatre, everyone giving contradictory directions, we were followed by a score of urchins shouting: 'Hi! here they come, the players.' At last we located the theatre, a dance hall with a platform 20 feet square. We were playing Andromaque against a nondescript background, and after dining together at the village inn we were able to start the play.16 At 1.0 a.m. they clambered back into the omnibus and re-entered Paris in the small hours; having dropped off Andromaque, Hermione

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and their confidantes at their various lodgings the men were finally able to stumble home along the deserted sidewalks. Such escapades aside, apprentice actors, whether at the Conservatoire or not, could always resort to one of the theatres d'application or private drama schools which flourished in Paris throughout the nineteenth century. An early one which earned a certain reputation was run by Saint-Aulaire, a retired member of the ComedieFran^aise; it was attended by, among others, Rachel and Mme Arnould-Plessy at their beginnings; the audience consisted of friends and neighbours to whom the young actors would try to sell tickets. Saint-Aulaire's methods were original, if a trifle eccentric: he would gather his pupils together at the beginning of the week, announce the two plays (a tragedy and a comedy) which they were to perform the following Sunday, and cast the parts by drawing names out of a hat. Saint-Aulaire never batted an eyelid when this resulted in Agamemnon being interpreted by a little girl of twelve and Iphigenie by a gawky youth who, a couple of years later, would be acting the part of the booby at the Gaite. He would watch serenely as the play was rehearsed, never giving any advice, but attentive to each performance and to the potentialities of each young actor; in this way he eventually sorted out those with a genuine talent and gave them particular encouragement. A rather less happy-go-lucky private theatre was started after the Franco-Prussian war by another member of the Comedie-Francjaise who took retirement at the end of 1879. Talbot opened his school in the Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne; it came to be regarded as a kind of antechamber to the Conservatoire, and Talbot's Sunday matinees were for a while very popular until the Comedie-Fran^aise took umbrage and obliged him to put up the shutters. Thereafter there was nothing for young actors to fall back on except performances at towns within easy reach of Paris, Etampes or Corbeil, which were of doubtful value since they took place before uncritical, unsophisticated audiences. But in 1886 a member of the administrative staff of the Comedie-Fran^aise, Charles Bodinier, put forward a new scheme for the creation of a studio theatre at which students at the Conservatoire could enact the classics in front of a small audience. The idea commended itself to the then Minister of Fine Arts, and Bodinier, having discovered a suitable site, opened his theatre a"application in the Rue St Lazare with the support of the ministry and to the delight of the drama students, relieved at last that they were able

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to present themselves in their true colours and without fear that one of their professors might be in the audience threatening them with the abrupt termination of their course. Bodinier's studio theatre was not without its drawbacks, as one of the first to avail herself of its facilities, Marguerite Moreno, recalls: the stage was tiny, there was only the strict minimum of space behind the scenes; moreover, when the windows were opened to aerate the auditorium, a number of caged canaries in the courtyard joined in the performance. 'These little birds are in general', she wrote, 'of an eminently sociable disposition; the species inhabiting the Rue Saint-Lazare were more cordial than anyone could imagine. As soon as one of the neighbouring canaries heard a conversation on the stage, it would interrupt it loudly, its friends would pipe up in unison, and after a few minutes the mere humans were reduced to silence.' Bodinier, in any case, had no exclusive commitment to his original idea, and was happy to hire out his studio theatre to the various amateur dramatic societies that flourished in the 1890s; he installed an art gallery in the entrance hall, he let the premises to visiting lecturers, the building was referred to as La Bodiniere and became a fashionable rendezvous: 'as for us, poor students, we were dispossessed and obliged to find our way once more to the suburbs, acting under incongruous but sonorous names which helped throw off the scent the vigilant watchdogs of the Conservatoire. Then, youth and enthusiasm having been exiled, the Theatre d'Application collapsed and the canaries sang over its ruins.' 17 We have already traced, in connection with working-class audiences, the history of the rise of the suburban theatres, the first of which, the Theatre de Montparnasse, was opened by a former actor at the Vaudeville, Pierre-Jacques Seveste, in 1819. By the early 1840s theatres at Belleville, Montmartre, les Batignolles and Grenelle had been added; the acting companies travelled around from one to another in open carriages popularly known as 'Seveste's salad baskets'. The actors were paid derisory salaries, they had to be prepared to take whatever part was allocated to them, but the two brothers, Edmond and Jules, who had inherited the business on their father's death, knew that their audiences were not fastidious and that the reservoir of untrained acting talent they could draw on was practically inexhaustible, consisting of anyone with ambitions to go on the stage who, for one reason or another, preferred not to try for the Conservatoire.

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The only thing needed was a good memory and the ability to wear, for better or for worse, a stage costume. Everything else was but a feeble imitation of the other Parisian theatres; but the box-office takings were assured, that was the essential. No previous studies, no literary knowledge or dramatic skill was required - only a willingness to work in the most unpromising conditions. After a year or two at this galley-slave labour, the best of them - like Laferriere whom we are quoting here18 - moved on to the Ambigu or the Porte-Saint-Martin; the remainder drifted away to look for engagements in some distant provincial city or else to return to the humdrum employment they had unwisely abandoned in favour of this brief spell of excitement and glamour. Alphonse Daudet, discussing the question whether the suburban theatres constituted a better schooling than the Conservatoire, concluded finally that the latter was marginally preferable. The 'galeres Seveste', as they were called, demanded a prodigious effort for the beginner who signed on. In less than a week a long play has to be memorized, rehearsed and be ready to be shown; it is the kind of work essential at provincial theatres, but the advantage here is that the actors breathe the air of Paris, its dynamism, and can study the greatest performers of the age in their respective theatres; a lot can be learned from their example. But the perils of these suburban stages, the deplorable habits one risks getting into! The actor who makes his debut there has to rely on his instinct. He is thrown in at the deep end to sink or swim. It's a drastic method; either one goes immediately to the bottom, or else the risk of drowning develops in you a strength you never suspected you had, to cope with these terrible plunges. At the Conservatoire, you are taught the theory of swimming and the various strokes long before you have to entrust yourself to the water. Even so, how many students pass out and then, applying all the rules they have learned, succeed in drowning in spite of everything!19 The Conservatoire, he concludes, is an excellent school provided one can forget immediately every gesture and intonation of one's teacher and develop one's own originality. All through the century the Conservatoire continued to cast its spell. It is true that many brilliant performers never crossed its threshold, or if they did, stayed only for a few weeks or months and then dropped out; they included Frederick Lemaitre, Bocage, Rachel, Marie Dorval, Melingue, Bressant, Virginie Dejazet, and Rose Cheri, to mention only the best known. As for those who

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completed the course of study, only a minority - the prize-winners in the end-of-session competition - were engaged by the ComedieFrangaise or the Odeon, but such was the prestige of the school that merely to prove that one had attended the lectures and satisfied one's teachers was sufficient to give the young actor a start at one or other of the major theatres in Paris or the provinces.

CHAPTER 12

Salaries and contracts

Among the special advantages of becoming a full-time member {societaire) of the Comedie-Frangaise was that, in theory at least, one had no further financial worries, thanks to the royal subvention paid to the company since the days of Louis XIV. Before the Revolution, this subvention was divided up into a fixed number of shares on which each societaire had a claim, though only the most senior drew a full share, the younger and less experienced starting with a fraction, a quarter or half share: hence the saying that over the thirty years of an actor's career at the Comedie-Fran^aise, the first ten were spent accumulating debts, the second in paying them off, and the third in amassing a fortune.1 Any profits the Society made in addition, from receipts at the door and subscriptions to boxes, were added to the royal subvention and distributed among the societaires in the same proportions. This meant that during the eighteenth century the Comedie-Fran^aise, as well as the Comedie-Italienne which in the following century mutated into the Opera-Comique, was in a position to pay its principal actors extremely well, with fluctuations of course in periods when the theatres were less well attended.2 The Revolution put an end to this happy state of affairs, but when the Comedie-Frangaise was re-established in 1799 with full state support, the leading actors were once more in a position to feather their nests. It is true that, with the disappearance of Napoleon who had been a lavish patron of the theatre, and with increased competition from the commercial houses (the Vaudeville, the Varietes, the PorteSaint-Martin and the Gymnase, to name but the principal ones), the value of the share fell disastrously;3 the company ran into debt and, after 1830, the new regime showed itself unexpectedly reluctant to come to the rescue. The societaires started deserting the sinking ship: Samson, pleading the needs of his large family, accepted an offer from the Palais-Royal theatre, Michelot took retirement, others refused to 183

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act for such wretched payment, and Mile Mars, at sixty still the only comedienne capable of filling the house, consented to remain only on condition that she be allowed to resign as societaire and to rejoin as pensionnaire at the handsome salary of 30,000 francs; the ComedieFrangaise could ill afford it but could afford even less to let her go. Under the ancien regime, pensionnaires had consisted of a small category of probationary actors, rarely more than six in number at any one time, accepted provisionally for a short period, two or three years, until a decision was made either to promote them to the societariat or to dispense with their services. When the ComedieFrangaise regrouped itself at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the system was entirely changed: after a probationary year, those whom it was desired to retain were appointed pensionnaires for an indefinite period, at salaries negotiated with and paid by the Society which could vary from 5,000 to 12,000 francs.4 This was not unreasonable payment for young actors, and more and more of them accepted engagements on this basis, until the pensionnaires came to outnumber the societaires, and the company was effectively split into two halves, the smaller of which, having the exclusive right to sit on the all-important committees, was apt to patronize and snub the larger one. Francisque Sarcey, in his feuilleton of 6 October 1862, gives a number of instances of the arrogance of 'Messieurs les Societaires de la Comedie-Fran^aise' in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, who, he said, maintained the same distance between themselves and the pensionnaires as between 'a planter and his blacks'. The pensionnaires were assigned a separate greenroom and on one occasion Louise Contat, walking past its open door, exclaimed at the supposed stench and hurried on holding her nose. Another societaire, Emilie Leverd, mistaking the door, walked in on one occasion but decided to stay. 'All the seats were occupied, so she went up to a girl of fifteen or sixteen, saying to her: "Come, my child, get up, I am feeling tired." ' The 'child' was Louise Despreaux, the future Mme Allan-Despreaux, who spent four years, from 1827 to 1831, as a pensionnaire at the Comedie-Frangaise; on this occasion, remaining seated, she answered coolly: 'Mademoiselle, if you had asked me politely, I should have been happy to pay the tribute of youth to age.'5 Mile Leverd, an actress in her early forties but a societaire since 1809, bit her lip and left the room without a word; but Mile Despreaux's contract was not renewed and she had to move to the Gymnase. Shortly afterwards she married and left with her

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husband for St Petersburg, where they stayed for eleven years. On her return to Paris she continued to act at the Comedie-Frangaise particularly in the revivals of Musset's rediscovered comedies et proverbes - until her death in 1857, though she was never promoted to the rank of societaire.

When in 1831 Mile Mars, fearing the imminent bankruptcy of the Comedie-Frangaise, resigned as societaire and gave notice that she would only return as a highly paid pensionnaire, she was creating a precedent that others would follow, so long as the Theatre-Franc,ais continued to face thin audiences. Thus Mme Arnould-Plessy, when she returned to the Comedie-Frangaise in 1855 after spending the previous ten years in Russia, evidently found it paid her better to negotiate a fixed salary of 24,000 francs as pensionnaire than to accept the more prestigious appointment as societaire when so much of the profit made by the Comedie-Frangaise was absorbed in the endless task of pacifying its creditors. This was at a time when an arrete of the Minister of State dated 6 October 1855 fixed the salary ordinarily payable to pensionnaires at the Theatre-Frangais and the Odeon at 1,800 francs for the first year, 2,400 for the second and 3,000 for the third. Mme Arnould-Plessy was thus receiving eight times the maximum normally accorded to a pensionnaire, but she was a seasoned actress whose appearance on the stage guaranteed a full house. Rachel also attracted large and enthusiastic audiences; her original appointment in 1838, before she attained her majority, was already generously remunerated at 4,000 francs; two years later it had soared to 37,000 francs, thanks largely to the insistence of her father, acting as her agent. When in 1841 her promotion to the societariat was mooted, Frangois Buloz, the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes who had been appointed royal commissioner in charge of the affairs of the Comedie-Frangaise, wrote to the ministry advising that she should be allocated a special allowance of 42,000 francs from the state subsidy to the theatre, which at the time amounted to a total of 200,000 francs; in other words, 21 per cent of the annual subsidy was to be made over to this new societaire. Buloz, in his letter, justified this exorbitant fee on the grounds of 'the brilliance of this young tragedienne and the services she is rendering and is destined to continue to render to the Theatre-Frangais'. 6 The minister accepted the proposal and Rachel received her annual salary of 42,000 francs which, with the additional sums she earned from her lucrative

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tours of the provinces and abroad, must have netted her the princely income of at least 100,000 francs. Commenting on this decision a few years later, Eugene Laugier called it 'nothing short of disastrous', and argued that it would have been far better to keep her as pensionnaire, paying her as much as was felt appropriate in view of her exceptional gifts and her ability to fill the theatre every time she appeared; 'but to appoint her societaire, with no other condition save those applying to the other members of the Society but with a share in the profits three or four times bigger than any of them receive - that is the height of folly', since she would continue to receive it even if her powers waned some time in the future.7 Were this to happen, as a pensionnaire she could have been eased out; as a societaire she retained all her rights until her death or resignation. A pensionnaire was kept on until his or her short-term contract ran out and was renewed or not as the case might be; but a societaire had life tenure and the Comedie-Fran^aise counted more than one sleeping partner, who was seen on stage not more than once or twice a year but continued to draw the salary consonant with his or her share. At the non-subsidized theatres, run on strictly business lines, every actor was a pensionnaire and was commonly referred to as such. Managers, always looking to strengthen their companies, tended to pay better than did the state theatres: thus Pierre Magnier, working as pensionnaire at the Odeon on a monthly salary of 150 francs, jumped at the offer of a five-year contract at the Vaudeville, rising by annual increments from 800 to 1,500 francs a month; as he later recalled, 'before 1900, 150 francs was a starvation wage, but 1,000 francs allowed you to live comfortably. With 1,500 you could count yourself rich.'8 Payment at the smaller, working-class theatres along the Boulevard du Temple was naturally on a more modest scale: the two leading actors on the payroll of the Funambules in 1853, Paul Legrand and Charles Deburau (the son of the inimitable mime who had died in 1846) were paid at the rate of 240 and 200 francs a month respectively.^ But the basic salary could always be augmented by bonuses of one sort of another, the principal one being an allowance known as 'lights' (feux), granted in principle every time an actor appeared on stage. The name is said to have derived from a decision made in 1682 that 5 sous should be paid to each performer at the Comedie-Fran^aise every time he took a part, this sum representing the costs he incurred in lighting and heating his dressing-

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room; but by the nineteenth century it had come to mean simply a fee, over and above the agreed salary, and payable not just for stage appearances but sometimes for participation in rehearsals, or to defray the expense of special costumes. Fashionable actors often received far more in feux than in salary, the salary being in that case the equivalent of a retaining fee; but feux could only be paid for work done, and the system did have the advantage from the manager's point of view of discouraging absences due to minor indispositions and the like. An actor at the boulevard theatres {theatres de genre as they were called)10 in the first half of the century did not have a particularly easy time of it at the start of his career, but could look forward eventually to earning a modest competence. Bouffe, born in 1800, secured his first theatrical appointment at the newly founded Panorama-Dramatique where he was paid 25 francs a month, 'just the wage of a second-class cook at that period'.11 He got by only by taking on a second job, repairing plaster moulds for sculptors, at which he worked first thing in the morning, before rehearsals were due to begin, and last thing at night, sometimes continuing into the small hours. He was able to give up this gruelling programme when, ten months after his first appointment, his salary was doubled and later, with the arrival of a new manager, doubled again to 100 francs a month. Within less than three years he was earning 3,000 francs, enough, he reckoned, to get married to the dancer for whose sake he had originally been persuaded to take up acting. But the new manager was a poor businessman; at the end of the month his staff had to content themselves with small sums on account, then nothing at all, until finally he went bankrupt owing them all three months' pay. This was a constant risk incurred by actors, particularly in the 1820s, when theatres were often underfinanced and subject besides to all kinds of petty restrictions which made it difficult for a new one, like the Panorama-Dramatique, to establish itself. Fortunately Bouffe was beginning to make a reputation for himself and did not have to wait too long before being offered a contract at the Gaite, to run for three years, at a salary of 2,000 rising to 2,300 francs a year. Even though this represented a considerable drop in earnings, he was glad to accept; unfortunately the engagement was not due to start immediately and for the next seven months he and his wife had to live on her salary as a dancer, together with what he could make by a resumption of his former

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trade of repairing plaster ornaments. However, in 1825 Berard, the director of the Nouveautes, offered him a four-year contract at 6,000 francs, together with a bonus of 5 francs every time he appeared on stage: these were the first/^wx Bouffe had been offered. Since at the same time his wife was appointed at the Opera at a salary of 5,000 francs, their joint earnings now ran into five figures — a veritable fortune for the hard-working couple, particularly welcome since they now had a thriving young family. Shortly afterwards, however, disaster struck from an unexpected quarter: his father was threatened with bankruptcy and in order to rescue him from this pass, Bouffe agreed to make over to his creditors half his own earnings over the next six years. Then a fresh calamity loomed: the Theatre des Nouveautes, as previously the Panorama-Dramatique, ran into hard times and could not pay the actors more than a small fraction of their agreed salary; even the supply of firewood to heat the greenroom ran out. At this critical juncture, overtures were made to him by DelestrePoirson, the manager of the Gymnase-Dramatique: the offer was of a five-year contract at the same rate as Berard had paid him, plus a bonus of 5 francs every time he acted in two plays on the same evening. Bouffe accepted, only too glad to be out of the wood, and at the end of the five years, that is in 1836, Poirson sent for him and proposed renewing the contract at the same salary but with his feux raised from 5 francs to 10; in addition he was promised three months' leave every year, which would enable him to join the lucrative circuit of the provincial theatres. Attached to this contract was a penalty clause by which Bouffe agreed to compensate Poirson to the tune of 100,000 francs should he leave the Gymnase for another theatre before the expiry of the contract. This was regular practice and implied that the actor had now become a valuable property; known as the dedit, it was intended to be a safeguard against poaching by other managers. Nevertheless if the actor were thought to add sufficient lustre to a different company, it was not unknown for such exchanges to take place; the new manager would reckon it worth his while to pay part or all of the dedit out of his own pocket; and this is what happened when Bouffe was finally scooped by Nestor Roqueplan, director of the Varietes. It was agreed that Poirson's 100,000-franc indemnity should be paid by the two of them, Bouffe sacrificing some of his personal savings and Roqueplan making up the remainder. In exchange, Bouffe would receive at the

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Varietes twice what Poirson had been paying him at the Gymnase, plus a bonus of 50 francs for each stage appearance together with a guarantee that he would have the opportunity to make such appearances at least twenty times a month; this clause had the effect of doubling his basic salary. This was the last contract Bouffe signed,12 since he fell seriously ill in 1848 and had to limit his stage appearances thereafter. His curriculum vitae was not untypical of a successful actor in the earlier part of the century, and can be matched by those of Virginie Dejazet, whose career spanned the years from 1828 to 1844, and of Frederic Febvre, who began at Le Havre in 1850, earning 110 francs a month which seemed to him untold wealth until he tried to live on it, and who ended ten years later signing a five-year contract at the Vaudeville which promised him an annual salary of 12,000 francs for the last three years.13 Towards the end of the century star players commanded much higher salaries, having realized that they were indispensable to the theatre that wanted to keep them. When in 1885 Albert Carre became co-director of the Vaudeville with Raymond Deslandes, he fell out almost immediately with his associate over the question of the proper remuneration of their principal actor, Jolly, whose earlier contract was due for renewal and who refused to sign another unless it guaranteed him an annual salary of 30,000 francs. 'My personal opinion was', writes Carre, that this incomparable comic actor, to whom we owed our greatest successes and who in addition had been responsible for ensuring good runs for sometimes mediocre plays by the mere fact that he was in them, was well worth the salary he demanded. Deslandes disagreed. We asked Francisque Sarcey to arbitrate. The old critic came down in favour of my partner, exclaiming, as he raised his arms: 'What are we coming to?' But Carre got his way in the end; he saw clearly enough that the time had passed when major actors would be content with the modest remuneration that had by and large sufficed them in the past: 'the actor whose art made him wealthy was a sign of the times'.1* Moreover, the rise in actors' salaries was general, affecting even the notoriously underpaid pensionnaires at the Comedie-Francjaise: in 1874 their rate of pay was still only 150 francs a month; in 1890 it had gone up to 300 francs, while by 1909 it had risen to 1,000 francs, at a time, moreover, when the cost of living was still relatively stable. An additional factor in the situation at the end of the nineteenth century was the decline of the company system. At the conclusion of

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his history of the Theatre du Palais-Royal, published in 1886, Eugene Hugot pointed out that the Palais-Royal was about the only theatre de genre in central Paris that could still boast a complete company, able to cast any play it wished without the assistance of guest stars. In general, what one found in the latter part of the century was that actors and actresses who had won a name for themselves were operating as independents, under contract to no particular theatre but prepared to figure for an agreed number of performances in this or that new play by a well-known dramatist, who would offer it to a manager only on condition that the lead role were given to the indispensable player. Their earnings no longer depended on an agreed annual salary plus bonuses paid by a particular manager, but on the high fees they charged for a limited number of appearances. The practice appears to have started at the Opera, specifically with the famous Second Empire tenor Tamberlik, who demanded no less than 3,000 francs for a single appearance.15 Operatic singers, throughout the century, led the way in this respect: their virtuosity was appreciated the world over, and if the Paris Opera was not prepared to pay them the kind of fee they felt was their due, they had only to cross the Channel and risk ruining their voices in the London fogs for the sake of a magnificent purse at Covent Garden. In an industry as chaotically organized as was that of the theatre in nineteenth-century France, the generous payments awarded to the few were counterbalanced by the wretched wages given to the many, the beginners, the supers, and, at the Opera, the so-called 'little rats', adolescent ballet girls paid at the rate of 600 francs a year under the Second Empire and only slightly more under the Third Republic/ 6 George Sala, in 1878, watched a group of them behind the scenes, clustered like so many painted peris outside the portals of the paradisiacal foyer into which, I presume, they are not privileged to enter unless their salary exceeds a certain number of francs a month. The shoes of many of these poor girls left much to be desired. The heel of one satin slipper had been darned, I am certain, at least seven times, and the hose of many of the poor things were full of 'Jacob's ladders'. Not to be too particular, the majority of the 'extras' looked as though they were half-starved. Red egg, fromage de Brie, threehalfpenny-worth of fried potatoes, and a bit of garlic sausage now and then — such, I apprehend, would be the ordinary menu of an operatic 'extra'; meagre, sickly, ill-favoured, often old, but dancing and posing with wonderfully mechanical skill and aplomb.17

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On the regular stage, corresponding to the rats d'opera, were the extras employed in crowd scenes for 20 or 30 sous an evening (1 franc or 1 franc 50) or for non-speaking parts, such as that of the servant who brings in a letter on a silver platter. They were known as figurants and were normally recruited by a recognized employee of the theatre, a chef defigurationwho was not always too particular whom he picked - whether a jailbird recently released or a stagestruck young man of good family who did the job for nothing, for a lark or for the kick he got out of appearing in a costume before the footlights.18 Mostly they were people whose main business was one they could safely abandon for an evening, janitors or self-employed artisans; and sometimes they were professionals 'resting5 between two engagements. The women needed to be at least presentable, and for that reason were paid at a higher rate: they might be the wives of minor clerks, unmarried working girls, or artists' models. We have seen how Bouffe, at his beginnings, needed to supplement his inadequate salary by working at the trade to which he had originally been apprenticed. In this, he was doing no more than following the normal trend in the early part of the century, when actors were obliged to supplement their earnings by pursuing some spare-time avocation. At the Gaite, one of the actors was also a pastrycook who had his own shop in the Carre Saint-Martin and in addition ran an open-air stall outside the theatre where he did good business during the intervals. Another, employed at the Porte-SaintMartin, combined acting the villain in various melodramas with a sideline as a restaurateur, while a thirds at the Ambigu-Comique^ spent the daylight hours on his old job of clock-maker. At the Funambules, all except the principal actors had trades: one was a cardboard-maker, another a dry-cleanef, another a chiseller, others wine-merchants or dressmakers. At the other end of the century the system was revived by Antoine who recruited as actors to the Theatre-Libre men and women who invariably exercised a second trade or profession. One was a seller of walking-sticks, another was employed in a publishing firm, a third worked in a telegraph office. They were all amateurs, as Antoine insisted, and he could never afford to pay them as professionals, though he was constantly having to fill vacancies as they received tempting offers of full-time acting jobs; and when this happened, Antoine was the first to urge them to sign a contract. The items that chiefly interested an actor in a new contract were

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obviously those dealing with his future pay, including any provisions forfeux and for the occasional benefit performance. As for the small print, he rarely did more than cast his eye over it, in spite of the fact that the obligations it imposed on him were numerous and sometimes onerous, and were not balanced by any corresponding obligations undertaken by the manager. Thus, a manager might reserve the right to cancel an engagement at the end of the theatrical year, after giving the actor two months' notice; whereas the actor was bound to continue, with or without receiving his pay at the end of the month, until he had served his full term of from three to five years. Certain contracts included truly draconian clauses, specifying for instance that if the fines imposed for various peccadilloes, such as turning up late for a rehearsal, failing to learn a part properly, failing to enter on cue, being rude to the stage-manager etc., exceeded a certain sum, the actor could be dismissed without notice - which meant that if the manager, for one reason or another, wanted to get rid of him, all he needed to do was to pile on the fines. Another clause, sometimes included, stipulated that if an actor had the temerity to take his manager to court, his pay would be stopped until the case had been heard and judgement given: a powerful disincentive for the actor who wished to have his grievance settled, however good a case he might have. Other clauses commonly included in a contract required the actor never to absent himself from Paris, even for a few hours, without written permission, under penalty of losing a full month's pay; to lodge in the vicinity of the theatre, and at all times to hold himself in readiness in case of a change in programme. Thus the contract tended to surround the manager with every conceivable safeguard, while denying the actor any remedy if he felt he was being unfairly treated. Nevertheless it was unheard of for an actor to insist on the deletion of a clause to which he took exception, and perhaps it still is; as a theatre critic of our day has put it: 'an actor who tries to discuss his contract might as well be a tom-cat engaging in debate with the vet'.r9 The one obvious remedy for a group of actors who felt they were being imposed on by management was to declare a strike. But this implied forming a union; and for most of the century unions remained illegal. The law as it stood was admittedly directed against workmen in their relations with their employers, and it was always a much-disputed question whether actors were employees of a manager in the same sense that bank clerks were employees of a

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bank or masons of a master builder. The word artiste, increasingly used in place oiacteur or comedien,20 suggested otherwise, artists in the modern age being essentially freelance. In 1828 the courts were called on to settle the question whether a 'coalition' formed by members of the chorus of a theatre could be assimilated to a coalition formed by workmen to secure an increase in wages: if the latter, it fell under the interdict expressed in article 415 of the penal code. Earlier that year the stage manager at the Vaudeville had been obliged to announce to the audience that all his female choristers were refusing to sing. The revolt had been sparked off by a decision of the management, provoked by the insubordination of the singers, to double the scale of fines; the young women (not supported, it should be noted, by the male voice choir) reacted not just by demanding a return to the status quo, but for good measure an increase in annual pay from 300 to 500 francs. Instead of simply dismissing the recalcitrant sopranos and recruiting new ones, the managers of the Vaudeville went to l a w - b u t were disappointed, the court ruling that lady choristers could not count as striking workmen. There appears to have been only one other comparable incident in the nineteenth century, when the singers at the Opera-Comique went on strike for several weeks in 1876—7. Choristers were naturally more prone to form a pressure group than actors* notoriously individualistic. Trade unions were finally legalized in 1884 under Jules Ferry's second ministry, but it was not until 1890 that a union of the acting profession was formed, calling itself the 'Chambre syndicale des artistes dramatiques, lyriques, et musiciens5. This attracted 5-6,000 adherents but foundered after a short while, partly because the membership fee proved difficult to collect and partly because of internal dissensions between the three constituent groups. But at the start the union had set itself two principal objectives: to do something to free the profession from the stranglehold of management, and secondly to set up a new organization to replace the bureaux de placement or recruiting agencies which were notorious for exploiting actors working in the provinces. Nearly every town of any size outside Paris boasted at this period at least one well-staffed theatre attracting large and discerning audiences: those of Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseilles, Lyons, Lille, Nantes, Rouen were outstanding, but there were dozens of others of lesser importance. They rarely put on anything that had not been seen in Paris: there was no question of launching new plays outside

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the capital, but all the same the maintenance of a dramatic tradition at least as old as that of Paris made it a matter of local pride to ensure that these theatres were properly run. This entailed giving them financial support out of local taxes, and as a consequence the municipal authorities reserved the right to appoint the managers and supervise the way they spent their grant. A manager was given a free hand to recruit new actors for each new season; the company he eventually formed had to be large enough to include every type of dramatic performance likely to appeal to an audience drawn from a much smaller population than in Paris. There, one had theatres specializing to some extent in the separate branches of the dramatic art; here, on the other hand, it was necessary to put on everything the local inhabitants might want to see: comedy, farce, melodrama, vaudeville, operetta, even grand opera. In the earlier part of the century the practice, one established well before the Revolution, was for managers from the provinces to come up to Paris in order to sign on the actors of whom they had need. This ceremonial originally took place during the Easter closure in one of the alleys in the Palais-Royal gardens; later, various cafes were earmarked for the purpose, notably, in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, the Cafe Touchard, described by Etienne de Jouy as the central depot for those unlucky actors in the provinces who do not possess sufficient talent to secure an appointment in their home town; for those whose engagement has been countermanded by an intolerant audience; for those hounded by their creditors who waylay them outside the theatre; for those who had hoped to make their debut in Paris. Actors of every type and speciality make their appearance at the Cafe Touchard. Directors for their part visit this theatrical bazaar at which all talents are up for auction and can be purchased at knockdown prices.21 The Cafe Touchard must have borne some resemblance to the agricultural fairs of the period, frequented by farmers looking for cattlemen or shepherds to hire for a season. The Cafe de Suede on the Boulevard Montmartre replaced it in the 1840s, but by that time dramatic agencies had already monopolized most of the business. These 'bureaux de correspondance dramatique', as they were officially called, had the advantage for the provincial director that they spared him the trouble of visiting the capital in person. All he had to do was to acquaint the Paris office of his needs by letter; the agent, having interviewed and auditioned each unemployed actor or

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singer, would make his recommendations, taking into account what he knew about the special preferences of this or that locality and the financial resources of each provincial theatre. He would suggest the appropriate level of remuneration, but the actor despatched would have to pay him in advance a fixed percentage of his year's salary. This fee normally amounted to 2.5 per cent if he was offered employment at a provincial theatre, and 5 per cent if the engagement was for a theatre abroad; but it could happen that the director in the provinces, after a month's or six weeks' trial, decided to cancel the engagement and tore up the contract. The luckless actor in this predicament, stranded far from home, might be found another situation by the agent who would, however, still exact his pound of flesh, his 2.5 per cent paid in advance, without, of course, reimbursing the first payment. It would be worse than useless to complain. 'Cheated and skinned alive, [actors] prefer to pay these excessive commissions or submit to leonine conventions rather than incur the ill-will of such tenacious and dangerous adversaries as some of these agents are, who can open the doors of a theatre but just as easily slam them shut.' 22 Every actor knew, when setting off for some distant city, that his appointment was conditional on his satisfying the theatre-goers; and they could be extremely difficult to please. The director had appointed him on a trial basis: the decision whether to accept him definitely or not was dependent on his public performances on the three evenings which constituted his debut; if he failed this test, he would not only see his chances of employment vanish, but would be expected to reimburse any advances on salary he had received from the director, including his travel expenses. These three trial appearances were in general listened to in silence; after that, one of two things would happen, depending on the custom prevailing in the particular town. Either a committee composed of long-term subscribers to seats (the abonnes who were regarded as the principal supporters of the theatre), together with an equal number of ordinary spectators who would receive on entry a card entitling them to join the abonnes, would retire at the end of the third performance and vote in secret, for or against the new actor; or else the entire audience would be asked by the stage manager, appearing before the curtain in evening dress, to give their opinion. In certain theatres (at Metz, Orleans, Nantes, and Marseilles) the result was obtained in a relatively pacific manner by the counting of heads; but

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elsewhere, notably at Rouen, Toulouse, Rheims, and Le Havre, the audience was invited to declare itself either by applauding if they were satisfied or by whistling if they were not. Unless public opinion was unanimous, this could sometimes result in a brawl. 'I have personally witnessed in several large towns', wrote Eugene Lassalle, 'occasions when the local police was obliged to call in the troops who, with fixed bayonets, evacuated the theatre and dispersed the crowds in the square outside and the adjoining streets so as to prevent serious fighting', and he goes on to relate his own experiences at Rouen in 1881. When, after his third debut, the stage manager advanced to the footlights and invited the audience to pronounce on whether or not the actor Lassalle should be admitted to the troupe, there ensued an almighty row, an indescribable tumult, the shrill whistles matching the applause, the most outlandish shrieks resounding from every quarter and from top to bottom of the auditorium. For how long? I could not say, but it seemed to me an eternity, which I spent waiting impatiently in the wings, while the police commissioner, swathed in his tricolour sash, whose task it was to judge whether the applause was drowning out the whistling or vice versa, stood in the middle of the front row of the balcony, hesitating whether to signal to the stage manager to display one of the two scrolls he held in his hand, the one inscribed laconically 'Accepted', the other 'Refused'. In the end he decided, in his wisdom, that opinions being divided, he would grant the new actor a further debut the following day. Lassalle, though minded to ask for the cancellation of his contract, was persuaded to accept this fourth trial, and decided to play the part of Don Salluste in Ruy Bias. This time 'the curtain fell to prolonged applause from all sides; the whistles stayed in the spectators' pockets' and it was unanimously agreed that Lassalle should be incorporated in the troupe.23 Stormy scenes attendant on debuts had been traditional at Rouen throughout the century. In 1819 they continued for several months; in 1820 the audience was so irritated with the director for having engaged such poor singers that they broke up the benches and flung the pieces on to the stage and into the orchestra pit. In 1828 and 1829 t n e spectators came to blows; an open knife was thrown into the stalls, injuring one of the occupants; when the mayor finally forbade all applause and hostile manifestations in the course of a performance, the spectators started coughing and sneezing, creating

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almost as much noise as before. Similar scenes were witnessed at the same period in Le Havre: there, on one occasion, a 50-year-old actor was reduced to tears, kneeling on the stage, and left the town in a suicidal mood. From the point of view of the actor arriving a few days earlier in a strange city, there was no ordeal more terrifying than the timehonoured 'trois debuts'. Admittedly he or she had the right to choose the part and the play - but this was the only concession made. The actor knows nothing of the audience and their tastes and preferences, the theatre is unfamiliar, he has no idea where to position himself on the stage for his voice to carry best, he has to perform alongside actors he does not know, who, like him, have been recruited here, there, and everywhere during the preceding season. And yet, if he is to earn a living wage, he has to confront the systematic hostility of an audience prepared to tolerate no failings, to pick on the slightest mistake.2* In spite of this, if he dared take umbrage or show any resentment the consequences could be terrible. At Toulouse, in 1844, an actress who made a rude gesture when she judged herself unfairly barracked by the audience was hauled off the stage, locked up in the town gaol and not released until the early hours. The system was widely condemned as a barbarous relic of a bygone age. 'How is it that it has not disappeared along with the tithe and the use of torture?' asked Pierre Giffard in 1888. Here we have twelve or fifteen hundred people banded together to terrify out of her wits some unfortunate girl facing destitution and who, after all, is acting no worse than many another, or hurling insults and orange peel at some wretched ham actor who has nothing but his pitiful salary to live on and who often collapses, in sheer terror of being rejected, when confronting this many-headed monster. I regard this as barbarous, odious, and despicable to the nth degree.2s Moreover, as another observer pointed out, the exercise often missed its object by eliminating the better performer while retaining the worse. Mediocrity is in general counterbalanced by audacity, while true talent is modest and timid. An actor with more self-confidence than real merit will often submit to the ordeal with imperturbable sangfroid; whereas one possessing genuine gifts, unable to display them because of the panic that grips him, sensing his usual resources suddenly abandon him, will lose his head completely.26

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Such objections, on moral or practical grounds, were commonplace in the nineteenth century, yet the 'trois debuts' continued to be universally required at all towns outside Paris that boasted a theatre. No doubt local connoisseurs thought the system necessary in order to maintain standards; rowdy elements looked forward to the 'season of the debuts' for less admirable reasons. But essentially it persisted by reason of the paucity of theatres in the provinces; there were only one or two in receipt of municipal subventions in each town, and when there were two, each offered a different type of dramatic or musicodramatic performance. In Paris there were a score or more, not counting the four or five state-subsidized houses. There, a director who signed contracts with incapable actors would soon notice the thinning of his audiences; spectators would, as the saying goes, vote with their feet, spending their evenings at other theatres where his rivals were offering better entertainment, with the result that he would either go out of business or be forced to improve his cast of actors by discharging some and engaging better ones in their place. The lack of competition in provincial towns meant that, with the normal wastage each year, it was essential for the townspeople to make sure that any new recruits to the local theatre should be as good as they could hope to have; they knew that if an incapable actor were appointed, they would have to put up with him for the rest of the year. Most importantly, the director had usually little idea, when he offered a new actor a provisional contract, whether he would prove suitable; he had never seen him on the stage before, he had been obliged to accept him from an agency whose only interest was in finding him a niche. But if the actor was not found acceptable by the audience, he was left without employment and with no alternative but to plead with the agent to find him some other berth, where he might have more luck . . . or again might not.

CHAPTER 13

The difficult life of the actress

Insouciant her life might appear to be, but it was anything but a bed of roses, as Theophile Gautier observed when enumerating all the demands made on the average actress every day as a matter of course. To stay on good terms with the director, the stage manager, the costumier, the prompter, the callboy, and apart from these, not counting her protector, with boyfriends past, present, and to come, with playwrights, choreographers, composers, critics and the claque! To exchange a few words with one, smile at another, be charming to everyone and never upset anyone, for that might result in a prolonged hiss coming from a darkened box or the black waves of a hostile cabal surging from a corner of the pit; and in addition to have to change ten or a dozen times in an evening, to recite her part faultlessly, to sing in tune, to make the right gestures, graceful or bored, to cause her bosom to heave at the appropriate moment and to sink to earth dishevelled at the end, taking care not to mark her dress . . ,f

Gautier's reference to boyfriends and protectors needs clarification today. The stage provided, as much in the nineteenth as in the previous century, one of the very few careers open to single women in which they could compete with men on equal terms. This is why it could appear to someone unversed in its traditions as a topsy-turvy world, 'un monde presque renverse' as Got called it, in which the normal gender roles were reversed, in which 'vanity and the need to dazzle from the word go and at all costs, the whole business being concentrated in a small focus, sometimes turn men into women, while their complete freedom turns the women, up to a point, into men . The theatre was the only place where the woman was free to make her choice of partner and might even take the initiative. 'Thus everything is skin-deep, one picks and drops and moves on without any sense of deceiving, lying, or wrongdoing.'2 In this sense it could

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be considered a world more attuned to the late twentieth than to the nineteenth century. But in another sense it remained firmly anchored in the period, for behind the succession of boyfriends stood the protector. Balzac was as ever faithfully describing in Illusions perdues a commonplace situation when he showed the actress Coralie impatient for the embraces of the hot-blooded young journalist Lucien de Rubempre, while giving her spare moments to the middle-aged silk merchant Camusot who pays the rent of her flat and buys her dresses and jewels: Camusot, her protector. The protector, if we are to believe Marie Colombier, might make his appearance even before an actress had been launched on her career. While they were still pupils at the Conservatoire, the young ladies had in the background elderly protectors, sober, almost all of them in important positions and with appointments at court; the girls passed for being their wards, and this semi-paternity disguised in the public eye the sordid reality. Field-marshals, admirals, officers of the imperial household, these 'protectors' . . . pulled the necessary strings to facilitate each step in the dramatic career of their delightful 'wards' and smoothed the path for them all the way from the Conservatoire to the ComedieFran9aise. They busied themselves with their future on the stage at the same time as they took over responsibility for the material concerns of the present.3 Characteristically, the protector was a widower of mature years, with grown-up children, no longer looking for adventures but for some young girl to befriend. He would scrape up an acquaintance first with her mother, who would introduce him to her stagestruck daughter; he would kiss her on the forehead, promise to use his influence on her behalf and offer her a necklace which she would modestly decline . . . until things had progressed a little further. Once the jewels are accepted, the protector, who has all he could wish for, pays daily visits to his protegee. She recites fables to him, she asks him to give her her cue, to act as her prompter. He is as happy as a king. While the girl is attending her class at the Conservatoire, he relates to her mother all the steps he has taken on her behalf and the promises he has been given.* Should he lose his head and declare his passion, the girl can usually find a dozen reasons why they should remain 'just good friends' without hurting his feelings. Arrangements of this sort continued to be made all through the century and down to the First World War. An actress could scarcely survive without a protector, a banker, a

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manufacturer, a large landowner no longer in his first youth. Mady Berry, who made her debut on the stage at the start of the twentieth century, admits that 'the situation of our colleagues at that time could be considered by all and sundry as rather painfully repugnant' 5 and that it only began to be remedied when the unions turned their attention to the position of actresses in the immediate pre-war years. The basic problem arose in the first place from an apparently minor irritation: the constant refusal of management to accept financial responsibility for providing the dresses needed in contemporary plays; only for 'costume dramas' was a theatre prepared to furnish the needful out of its stock. It is true that the ComedieFran^aise, under Perrin's administration in the early years of the Third Republic, did change its policy in this respect, but elsewhere it was invariably written into the contract that actors, male and female, were obliged to provide their own costumes for 'plays in which the action takes place in our century', and it was further understood that such costumes included shoes, stockings, hats, wigs, and even the necessary accounts with hairdresser and laundress. For male actors these requirements were relatively easy to satisfy, but it was a different matter for actresses; women's fashions changed more swiftly and more radically, and there was besides the greater number of different dresses needed if stage appearances were multiplied. 'It is by no means unusual', wrote Antoine in 1892, for an actress to spend 12-15,000 francs, her entire salary for a year, in order to dress for a single part. The question of morality cannot be discussed here, but we can at least point out the absolute impossibility for women on the stage to get by on what they are paid. It should be said that certain managers have no scruples in insisting that their actresses should dress in a style totally at odds with the salary they pay them; in this respect, the theatre industry is not far from living on immoral earnings.6

When, a few years later, Antoine became manager of a regular theatre, one of the first reforms he introduced was to dispense with the traditional clause in his agreements with his actors: all expenses in respect of costumes, etc. were in future to be a charge on management. Since both actors and actresses were equally important to the success of a play, there was no marked difference in rates of pay between them;? but actresses did face special difficulties quite apart

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from the question of costumes. Antoine's veiled accusation about managers 'living on immoral earnings' would have had more substance to it had it been made earlier in the century when some of them refused to give their actresses the normal increment after the first year, telling them that they were pretty enough to attract the attention of men about town and earn their rise that way; to any protests the standard reply was: 'what are you beefing about, my dear? Haven't you got the front boxes and the orchestra stalls?' The recognized way for a gentleman who wanted a girl for the night was to fold his programme over the front of his box and, once her attention was attracted, to raise his fingers to indicate the number of 5-franc pieces he was prepared to offer. A humorous anecdote was in circulation concerning an actress who declared to everyone's astonishment that she was considering resigning 'because my director wants to raise me'. It appeared that, far from being paid by him, she had been paying him 1,000 francs a year for the privilege of appearing on his stage; he had realized she was doing quite well out of this and was demanding 1,500 francs in future. 'Unfortunately', wrote Alhoy in 1824, the principal theatres in Paris, and first and foremost the ComedieFranc^ise, have been transformed into a kind of oriental bazaar, in which most women endowed by nature with certain physical advantages aspire to show them off in order to get themselves better known. The progress of dramatic art is their least concern; whether or not they are accepted after a trial performance, their ambition is achieved once the stage has led to the boudoir, and when a few frivolous hours of study, followed by a debut which more often than not is a mere parroting of their teacher, have gathered around them a brilliant circle of admirers who leave them no time for any other pursuit than that of a courtesan.'8 This tendency gained ground until eventually, under the Second Empire, Leon Sari took it to its logical conclusion by launching the piece a femmes at the Delassements-Comiques on the Boulevard du Temple. The Delassements had been languishing over the first sixteen years of its existence, but Sari's formula transformed it into one of the most frequented playhouses in Paris. His idea was to alternate a regular and very competent company of actors with an army of pretty girls who had never acted before and who quite clearly had no idea how to act now, and who came on in scanty costumes to murder the popular tunes of Offenbach's operettas. This resulted in extraordinary scenes, applause, stamping, whistling but

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above all laughter from the predominantly male audience. The bolder girls indulged in pert exchanges with the dandies occupying the orchestra stalls; the more timid, frightened out of their wits, burst into tears and fled to the wings; the curtain was constantly being lowered and raised.9 It was a strange kind of entertainment, but it undoubtedly drew the crowds at the time. It lasted only until 1862, when the theatre was made subject to a compulsory purchase order and pulled down to make room for Haussmann's improvements, which were of course aimed at beautifying the capital rather than raising its moral tone. How far Sari's example was copied outside the DelassementsComiques is difficult to say, though judging from the scathing comments of contemporaries one would suppose that the fashion caught on fairly generally in Paris under the Second Empire, though not in the provinces. Georges d'Heilly was particularly outspoken: at such theatres, he wrote, actresses are given engagements not for their talent but for their good looks; not for their wit, but for the shapeliness of their legs. They are made to undergo a sort of inspection, and only those are chosen whose charms are likely to withstand close examination through the opera-glass . . . Such a theatre is no longer a theatre; it has become a market-stall, a place for the authorized sale of human flesh at varying prices.10 Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the disguised prostitution involved in the piece afemmes was that it blurred the demarcation line between the genuine actress and the demi-mondaine who used the stage as a means of advertising her wares, or sometimes because, tiring of her life of idleness, she took up acting hoping to discover a new excitement in appearing before the footlights. Thus one day in 1867 the notorious Cora Pearl, one of the most expensive women of pleasure of the day, expressed a desire to go on the stage. It was arranged that she should make her debut in a revival of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld at the Bouffes-Parisiens. She appeared in a suitably abbreviated costume before an audience which included the entire membership of the Jockey Club, gloved in yellow or white, ivory opera-glasses glued to their eyes; they had paid up to 200 francs apiece for a seat in the stalls to see how this celebrated wanton would acquit herself as Cupid. Her strong English accent (Cora Pearl had been born Eliza Crouch) caused some mirth; but on the whole it passed off well enough till she started to dance a little too

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freely. A group of puritanical students in the audience protested; Cora retorted by thumbing her nose at them, and after that the performance went to pieces. Offstage, a professional actress tried to console her, saying that such barracking happened all the time. 'It's all very well for you,' stormed Cora, 'you're used to it, I'm not!' She did not repeat the experiment; as one witty woman is said to have remarked at the time, actresses can occasionally behave like whores, but whores can never take the place of actresses. The trouble was that in the public at large it was generally assumed that all actresses led promiscuous lives, and it took a long time for the profession to rid itself of the imputation. By the end of the century, it is true, the stout republican Stuart Henry did observe generously that 'as the influence of the aristocracy continues to dwindle in France, and that of the bourgeoisie continues to increase, more women enter the theatrical profession, not as a high grade of courtesanship in effect, but as an honourable and elevating vocation, one in which they can lead successfully self-respecting lives'.11 But another American, writing fifty years earlier, had to admit that the then fashion was 'to consider every actress, merely because she is an actress, and without caring or seeking to inquire as to the truth of the accusation, as belonging to a systematically vicious and abandoned class',12 though he went on to admit that there were 'a few exceptions to the rule so arbitrarily and uncharitably laid down', among whom he cites Mile Rose Cheri who, a year or so after Hervey penned these words, was to marry the director of the theatre in which she worked. Acting was no bar to marriage, of course, but in the overwhelming majority of cases an actress who married chose as husband either an actor or some member of the administration of a theatre, unless she postponed marriage until after her career was over, like Sophie Croizette who, two years after her retirement from the ComedieFran^aise in 1883, married a rich American banker named Stern. Another, sadder instance was Delphine Fix who took early retirement in order to marry a director of the Credit Mobilier, Casimir Salvador. Although imbued with the most hidebound prejudices against the acting profession, this man had fallen seriously in love with her but insisted on a complete break with her former way of life. None of her erstwhile companions at the Comedie-Frangaise were invited to the wedding, and none of them either were permitted to attend her funeral which took place nine months later, Delphine having died in childbirth. The rarity of marriages outside the acting

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profession was no doubt a consequence of the social ostracism already discussed. Among those that did take place between actors and actresses, many resulted in happy and long-lasting partnerships: one may cite Louise Despreaux's marriage to her fellow actor Allan, followed by a long spell in St Petersburg where both won golden opinions; the two Lafontaines, Victoria and Louis, both societaires at the Comedie-Franc.aise; Marie Laurent, who married twice, each time to another member of the profession; and Gabrielle Planat, who married an actor at the Odeon, Alphonse Arnault, in 1846, accompanying him to Russia where, like the Allan-Despreaux couple, they acted together at the Theatre Michel until his death in i860. Sometimes, admittedly, there were difficulties, particularly when the actress was more distinguished than her husband; this was notably the case with Sarah Bernhardt, whose brief marriage to Jacques Damala, the handsome Greek attache who had joined her company, created a sensation in 1882. Damala, at best a passable amateur actor, realized he would never be more than 'Monsieur Sarah Bernhardt' and abandoned her shortly afterwards to enlist for service in Algeria. A woman equally distinguished in a different sphere, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, had followed a chequered career as an actress before emerging as one of the great poets of the Romantic period; she owed the second half of her name to her husband Prosper Valmore, a minor actor at Brussels seven years younger than she whom she married in 1817, without finding much solace in the union. Hasty and ill-considered marriages were not uncommon among girls wanting to go on to the stage, especially if their parents or guardians were opposed to the idea, or if the premature death of the head of the family left them without an adviser. Eugenie Doche's unfortunate marriage at the age of fifteen has already been mentioned; a similar case was that of Georgette Leblanc who, if one is to believe what she states in her memoirs, made up her mind at the age of seventeen to go on to the stage, but knowing this decision would be overruled by her father, a wealthy steamship owner, decided to escape from his control by accepting the first offer of marriage that came her way. She discovered only subsequently that her suitor was an inveterate gambler and that marriage to an heiress had been seen as the only alternative to blowing out his brains. Once in possession of his young bride he started maltreating her to the point where she had to seek medical advice, and her physician was able to provide

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enough evidence to convince the courts that she should be afforded protection. Recourse to the law with a plea for legal separationthere being no provision for divorce in France down to 1884-was not always, even if successful, a sufficient safeguard. When Madeline Brohan was granted separation from her husband, the playwright Mario Uchard, he reacted by swearing he would destroy her looks by throwing acid at her. Alarmed at these threats, and apparently taking them seriously, the Comedie-Fran9aise agreed to give her a year's leave of absence which allowed her to take up a temporary post at St Petersburg, and mollified the outraged husband by consenting to put on in her absence his play, La Fiammina, in which he had the satisfaction of depicting his wife in the blackest of colours. Under French law a minor's signature on a contract was invalid, which meant that no theatre manager could engage a boy or girl under age unless the father or some other standing in loco parentis signed the contract. Equally, under article 225 of the Code Napoleon, no married woman, even if legally separated from her husband, could accept any employment without his concurrence. It sufficed for a husband to object to his wife's following an acting career for her to find it impossible to embark on it or resume it; and he was never required to give reasons for his refusal.13 This must have been a powerful motive for women with ambitions for a life on the stage to shy away from marriage, preferring the uncertainties of a liaison which might or might not endure. But a contract, once signed, allowed married women the same rights as unmarried ones, and in one respect gave them an advantage over their freewheeling sisters: this was in respect of paid maternity leave. A married woman was by custom entitled to take one month off without loss of salary, following a court decision at Nancy in 1845 which concluded quaintly that a manager could not use the fact that she was presenting her husband with an addition to the family as a reason for suspending her pay, 'pregnancy and childbirth being a normal condition in the married state'.14 However, no such concession was allowed to an unmarried actress who became pregnant. Legal authorities of the period were generally in agreement that a manager was quite justified in withholding her pay, exactly as he would be if she were to catch pneumonia or typhoid fever; more justified, in fact, since the infection leading to these illnesses was never voluntarily incurred, whereas the risk of pregnancy was. 'In both cases she cannot perform the services which she had contracted to render, with the additional

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aggravation that, if pregnant, she cannot over a period of several months act certain parts, those of ingenues or leading ladies being out of the question at the least telltale corpulence.'15 But opinion was not unanimous on the question; to the more enlightened legal luminaries, it appeared that in this instance morality was dictating an illogical distinction in laying down financial penalties for prospective unmarried mothers which did not apply to married ones; while some reactionaries were in favour of treating all pregnancies alike, whether resulting from conjugal relations or not, and absolving a manager from any obligation in either case to pay for a service he was no longer receiving; the expenses incurred by an actress before and after childbirth should be met by her spouse or her common-law husband rather than by the manager whose relations with her should be regarded as strictly of a business kind.16 Apart from such tricky questions as these, generally left to the courts to settle, there seems to have been very little public demand in nineteenth-century France for a cleansing of the morals of the stage. On the contrary, wrote the author of the Code des theatres (1876), it seems to us that far too many legal knots are tied in the theatre, and that the most celebrated actresses contract marriages these days which bit by bit take them away from the stage. It is almost criminal to behave in this way . . . and some embittered writers in the public prints have not hesitated to insinuate that the decline of the dramatic art is to be attributed amongst much else to the frequency of these conjugal unions.17 Actresses, in other words, should either remain celibate or enter into informal liaisons. This view was one fairly generally held. An anonymous correspondent of Prince Metternich, reporting to him on the state of France immediately after the July Revolution, lamented that backstage morals of the good old days are not what they were, virtue and respectability have made fearful inroads, decency and propriety reign supreme, a mania for getting married has gripped the acting profession, and wherever one casts one's eye in the theatre one sees only dutiful husbands and chaste wives, the only unmarried women are ancient duennas and youthful beginners. Mile Rose Dupuis has resisted the trend, but she has married off her children and nowadays young actresses go husband-hunting with as much zest as they used to go fishing for lovers.18 Even in the lax atmosphere prevalent under the Second Empire there was at least one theatre, the Gymnase, where the repertory

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was, from the point of view of morality, above reproach, consisting almost entirely, wrote Vizentini in 1867, of insipid plays regularly ending with the marriage of the two young lovers. Behind stage, he added, it was no different; the actors were excessively polite to one another, addressing each other in the third person and never omitting to pay the traditional New Year's visits. 'If by chance a conversation got under way on a staircase it would be to exchange news about the children, for nearly everyone in the company is either father or mother. The only event ever to interrupt, from time to time, the even tenor of this little convent of the drama is news of a forthcoming marriage.'r9 After the Franco-Prussian war, as Mortier noted in 1883, flirtatiousness behind the scenes was not encouraged. 'There is talk of nothing but marriage . . . At the minor theatres just as much as at the major ones, all the young ladies seem of a mind to let themselves float down this matrimonial current.'20 Sarcastic comments such as these, made by theatre columnists, invariably men, at different times throughout the century, could be exemplified many times over, and all betray a certain nostalgia for a half-legendary past. The theatre, at the same time as it had become industrialized, had become debohemianized. Formerly, under Louis XV, a pretty girl wishing to escape the tutelage of the head of her family had only to sign on at the Opera and, whether or not she ever sang or danced there, she was free to live a life of hectic gaiety, undisturbed by the police des mornrs.'11 But in the rigidly conformist century that followed, this so-convenient availability of women of easy virtue attached to the theatre no longer existed, and only the regret remained of the joyous licentiousness of the past. True, courtesans as we have seen still found their way on to the stage, but they did not in any way represent the acting profession: the two categories were not to be confused the one with the other. At the grand seize in the Cafe Anglais, a private room overlooking the boulevard which enjoyed a certain notoriety as a meeting-place for all the dissipated men-about-town under the Second Empire, such women as were admitted consisted of courtesans and actresses, who however never met. 'On those occasions when actresses were invited, the hetaerae were told at the door: try again tomorrow.'22 But male mythologizing continued to pretend that there was really not much difference between an actress and a courtesan, whereas a gulf separated the actress from the respectable woman. In a revealing passage in Jules Renard's diary, the author of Poil-de-

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Carotte seems to be saying that the actress has no more need of chastity than a chaste wife has of acting talent. An honest woman, you! What a strange pretension! And when your partner holds you in his arms, kisses you on the shoulder, presses his lips to yours, do you imagine that at such a moment I am in the least concerned with the purity of your life and that I am saying to myself: 'She is a most talented actress, and moreover an honest woman'? There are no virtues necessary to everyone; some finery suits one person but not another. I appreciate my wife's honesty because it befits her. If I felt fidelity to be essential in conjugal life, I would never venture to marry an actress, because I know for a fact that in the art of being a respectable woman, were she armour-plated from head to foot, she would never be much of a performer.^

Most educated men of Renard's generation would have said the same, no matter how many instances could be cited to refute the proposition: among those who knew the theatre world only from the outside, it was axiomatic that no actress could fill convincingly the part of an adulterous wife in a play without having some notion of what it was to give way to passion. The argument was basically the same as inspired ignorant spectators during the early part of the century to insult an actor in the streets whom they recognized as having taken the part of the villain in this or that melodrama. The error was the same in both cases, and arose from a fundamental misunderstanding of the art of the actor.

CHAPTER 14

Acting standards

It was almost a truism in the nineteenth century that, as Maurice Baring expressed it in his monograph on Sarah Bernhardt, 'the actor's art dies almost wholly with the actor'. Only those who had seen Bernhardt on the stage could truly comprehend her greatness; others would have to take it on trust. Once his own generation had died out, wrote Baring, nothing of her would survive but the echo of her fame, ever more dimly reverberating down the halls of time. Those who come after him 'will not know, nor will anyone be able to tell them or explain to them what Sarah Bernhardt could do with a modulated inflection, a look, a gesture, a cry, a smile, a sigh; nor the majesty, poetry, and music which she could suggest by the rhythm of her movements and her attitudes'. 1 Much the same idea was expressed, but in softer, elegiac accents, in the obituary article Gautier published in La Presse on 24 May 1847 t o salute the passing of Bernhardt's distant predecessor, Mademoiselle Mars. Alas! that charming smile, with which in a flash of ivory she accompanied some witty repartee, that sidelong, seductive glance, like a spark falling on gunpowder, that voice so sweet, so rhythmic, so melodious that it made one wonder what more could music offer; that intelligence which seemed to grasp everything and which astounded the poet by the new meanings and unexpected shafts of light it revealed to him in his own work: all that has disappeared without a trace, like a bark skimming over the surface of a lake, like the flight of a butterfly through the air . . . Actors resemble that character in one of Hoffmann's tales who, seated in front of a blank canvas, traced on it with a brush devoid of pigment every stroke necessary to complete his picture. They sketch and they paint in the insubstantial air and their compositions vanish even as they are being created.2

Gautier whimsically imagines some future technological advance that would allow us to fix in perpetuity, 'daguerreotyped one evening when the actor was at his best', the great scenes in which he 210

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excelled. And it is true that some such invention was perfected in the following century; but as we know, the film has to be appreciated according to its own standards and can never quite replicate what takes place on the stage. It can certainly preserve for all time the appearance, the gestures and the voice of a great actor, but being two-dimensional it gives us only a shadow play, one moreover that never varies from one showing to the next, so that, once seen, it can contain no surprises. Above all, even though a great film actor may evoke laughter or tears in an audience, the emotions he arouses cannot, by the nature of the medium, affect him personally, and there can be none of the electrifying cross-currents between audience and player which, especially in those days of undarkened auditoriums, could key a great performer up to a pitch of pathos or terror never before attained. Thus, in trying to discover and describe what the acting standards were in French theatres of the nineteenth century and how they evolved throughout it, we find ourselves necessarily confined to the testimony of professional critics and of the ordinary theatre-goer who chanced to put his impressions on paper. Their standards of judgement were not necessarily those that would be applied today; in some respects they were more exacting, in others they might value highly what would nowadays be taken for granted, or pass over in silence what would make a late twentieth-century spectator squirm. But, since we are debarred by the lapse of time from haunting, except in imagination, the theatres of the past, we have nothing else to resort to but these faded records. The first point to note is the quasi-unanimity with which it was universally admitted that actors from Paris surpassed in technique their colleagues everywhere else in Europe. Many of them were paid handsomely to give performances abroad; this was particularly the case at the Theatre Michel in St Petersburg,^ but also in London, at the Olympic Theatre between 1831 and 1839 an