CHAPTER V

The drawbacks to theatres which have the monopoly of a great actor--Lafond takes the rôle of Pierre de Portugal upon Talma declining it--Lafond--His school--His sayings--Mademoiselle Duchesnois--Her failings and her abilities--_Pierre de Portugal_ succeeds

The great day for the representation of _Pierre de Portugal_ came at last. Talma, preoccupied with his creation of the part of Danville in the _École des Vieillards_, had declined to take the rôle of Pierre de Portugal. Lafond had accepted it, and he and Mademoiselle Duchesnois had to bear the brunt of the whole play. Herein lay the indisputable test pointed out by Lassagne: could the play possibly succeed without Talma? The great inconvenience of that _rara avis_, as Juvenal puts it, or, in theatre parlance, the actor who brings in the receipts, is that on days when he does not play the theatre loses heavily; plays in which he does not figure are judged beforehand to be unworthy of public notice, since they have not been honoured by the actor's concurrence.

At the time to which we are referring the Théâtre-Français was better off than it is now. One day it made money by Talma's tragic acting; the next, it made money by Mademoiselle Mars in comedy. Casimir Delavigne began its downfall by making the two eminent artistes appear together in the same play and on the same day. As for Lafond and Mademoiselle Duchesnois, neither apart nor together did they bring in sufficient receipts.

Lafond would be about forty then: he came out first in 1800, at the Théâtre-Français, in the part of Achilles. Later, when supported by Geoffroy, in _Tancrède_, in _Adélaïde Duguesclin_ and in _Zaire_, he became as successful as Talma. The scurvy race of sheep which we have always with us, which takes its nutriment in the pastures of poetry and which is too feeble to form its own opinion based on its own mental capacity, adopts a judgment ready made wherever it can. It bleated concerning Lafond, "Lafond is inimitable in the rôle of French cavalier."

There was always, at this period of the drama, a part called the French cavalier. This part was invariably played by a person decorated with a plumed toque, clad in a yellow tunic braided with black, ornamented with representations of the sun, or of golden palms when the cavalier was a prince, and wearing buff-leather boots. It was not imperative that the hero should be French, or wear golden spurs, to be a French cavalier: the rôle was designed on well defined lines, and belonged to a particular school. Zamore was a French cavalier, Orosmane was a French cavalier, Philoctètes was a French cavalier. The only distinctions between them were as follows: Zamore played in a cap decorated with peacock feathers, and in a cloak of parrot's feathers, with a girdle of ostrich plumes. Orosmane played in a long robe of white taffeta dropping with spangles and trimmed with minever, in a turban opening out wide like a blunderbuss and decorated with a crescent of Rhine stones, in red foulard trousers and yellow slippers. Philoctètes played in a loose coat of red horse-hair, a cuirass of velvet embroidered with gold, and was furnished with a warlike sword.

Vanhove, in order to play Agamemnon, had a cuirass which cost him a small fortune, two hundred louis, I believe; it was ornamented by two trophies, hand-worked--a magnificent bit of work, representing cannons and drums.

I once said to Lafond--

"M. Lafond, why do you play Zamore in such a shabby girdle? Your feathers look like fish-bones; they are positively indecent!"

"Young man," replied Lafond, "Zamore is not rich; Zamore is a slave; Zamore could not afford to buy himself a new girdle every day; I am true to history."

What was perhaps less true to history was the expansive Stomach which the girdle enclosed.

Lafond's triumphs in these cavalier parts made Talma nearly die of envy. One day Geoffroy's articles exasperated him to such a degree that, on meeting the critic in the wings, he flew at him and bit him--at the risk of poisoning himself. But as the law of universal stability decrees that every bullet shall find its billet, the populace, by degrees, grew tired of Lafond's redundant declamation and emphatic gestures, which, at the time of which we are speaking, being used only by a few old-fashioned members of the school of Larive, drew receipts no longer, even when they played the parts of _chevaliers français._

Lafond was an odd fellow in other ways besides. Thanks to his Gascon accent and to his way of saying things, one never knew whether he were talking nonsense or saying something witty.

He once came into the lounge of the Théâtre-Français when Colson (an indifferent actor who was often hissed) was blurting out his caricature of Lafond's trick of over-acting. Colson pulled himself up; but it was too late: Lafond had heard his voice in the corridor. He made straight for Colson.

"Eh! Colson, my friend," he said, in that Bordelais accent of which none but those who have heard and followed it could form any idea, "they tell me you have been taking me off?"

"Oh! M. Lafond," Colson replied, trying to recover himself, "take you off?... No, I swear I...."

"All right! all right! that was what I was told.... Come, Colson, do me a favour."

"What is it, M. Lafond?"

"Act my part before me."

"Oh, M. Lafond...."

"I beg you to do it; I shall really be extremely obliged to you."

"The deuce!" said Colson. "If you really wish it...."

"Yes, I do wish it."

Colson yielded, and began Orosmane's tirade--

"Vertueuse Zaire, avant que l'hyménée...."

and declaimed it from the first line to the last, with such fidelity of imitation that one might have thought Lafond himself were declaiming.

Lafond listened to the end with the deepest attention, nodding his head up and down and expressing his approbation by frequent and obvious signs.

Then, when Colson had finished, he said, "Well! why ever don't you act like that, my dear fellow? The public would not hiss you if you did!"

In the interval between the first and second acts of _Pierre de Portugal_, Lucien Arnault was in the wings; during the second act, Pierre de Portugal, disguised as a soldier of his army, insinuates himself unrecognised into the house of Inès de Castro, who takes him for a common soldier.

Lucien saw Lafond advance in a costume resplendent with gold and jewels.

He ran up to him. "Ah! my dear Lafond," he said, "your costume is all wrong!"

"Have you anything to say against my costume?"

"Rather, I should just think so."

"But it is blatantly new."

"That is precisely what I take exception to: you have put on the garb of a prince, not that of a common soldier."

"Lucien," replied Lafond, "listen to this: I would rather arouse envy than pity." Then, turning haughtily on his heels, no doubt in order to show the back of his costume to Lucien, since he had shown him the front, he said, "They can ring: Pierre de Portugal is ready."

When, five years later, I read _Christine_ before the Théâtre-Français, whether or not Lafond was a member of the committee, or whether he did not care to trouble himself to listen to the work of a beginner, I had the misfortune to read it in his absence. Although, as we shall see in its proper place, the play was rejected, the reading excited some interest, and it was thought that a drama might be made out of it sooner or later.

One day I saw the door of my humble office open and M. Lafond was announced. I raised my head, greatly surprised, unable to imagine why I should be favoured by a visit from the viceroy of the tragic stage: it was indeed he! I offered him a chair; but he refused it with a nod of the head, and stopping close to the door, with his right foot forward and his left hand resting on his hips, he said, "Monsieur Dumas, do you happen to have, by any chance, in your play, a well-set-up gallant who would say to that queer queen Christine, 'Madame, your majesty has no right to kill that poor devil of a Monaldeschi, for this, that, or any other reason'?"

"No, monsieur, no! I have no such gallant in my play."

"You are quite sure you haven't?"

"Yes."

"In that case I have nothing to say to you.... Good-day, M. Dumas." And, turning on his heel, he went out as he had entered. He had come to ask me for the part of this well-set-up gallant, as he called it. Unfortunately, as I had been compelled to acknowledge, I had no such part in my play.

In the heyday of his popularity M. Lafond never spoke of Talma, or of M. Talma: he said, _the other person_.

The Comte de Lauraguais, who had been Sophie Arnould's lover, and who, like the Marquis de Zimènes, was one of the most constant visitors to the actors' green-room, said one day to M. Lafond, "M. Lafond, I think you are too often _the one_ and not often enough _the other?_"

Mademoiselle Duchesnois was quite different from Lafond: she was really kind-hearted, and her great successes never made her vain. She was born in 1777, one year before Mademoiselle Mars, at Saint-Saulve, near Valenciennes, and she changed her name, after her début in _Phèdre_, in 1802, from Joséphine Ruffin to Duchesnois. We have said that she was Mile. Georges' rival in everything: her rival on the stage, her rival in love. Harel was the handsome Paris who was the object of this rivalry. Harel, who was in turn manager of the theatre de l'Odéon and of the théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, will play a great part in these Memoirs--the part that a clever man, be it known, has the right to play everywhere.

Mademoiselle Duchesnois had had to struggle all her life against her plain looks: she was like one of those china lions one sees on balustrades; she had a particularly big nose which she blew stentoriously, as befitted its size. Lassagne did not dare to go into the orchestra on days when she acted; he was afraid of being blown away. On the other hand, she had a marvellous figure, and her body could have rivalled that of the Venus de Milo. She doted on the part of Alzire, which allowed her and Lafond to appear almost naked. She possessed a certain simplicity of mind which her detractors called stupidity. One day--in 1824--people were busy talking about the inundation of St. Petersburg, and of the various more or less picturesque accidents that had occurred through this inundation.

I was in the wings, behind Talma and Mademoiselle Duchesnois, to whom an actress, who had just arrived from the first, or rather from the second, capital of the Russian Empire, was relating how one of her friends, overtaken by the flood, had only had time to climb up on a crane.

"What! on a crane?" said Mademoiselle Duchesnois, in great astonishment. "Is it possible, Talma?"

"Oh! my dear," replied the actor questioned so oddly, "no one ought to know better than yourself that it is done every day."

But, in spite of her ugliness, in spite of her simplicity, in spite of her hiccough, in spite of her nose-blowing, Mademoiselle Duchesnois possessed the most profoundly tender inflections in her voice, and could express such pathetic sorrow, that most of those who saw her in _Marie Stuart_ prefer her to-day to Mademoiselle Rachel. Especially did her qualities shine when she played with Talma. Talma was too great an artiste, too superb an actor to fear being outbidden. Talma gave her excellent advice, which her fine artistic nature utilised, if not with remarkable intelligence, at least with easy assimilation.

The poor creature retired from the stage in 1830, after having struggled as long as she could against the pitiless indifference of the public, and the cruel hints from other actors which generally embitter the later years of dramatic artistes. She reappeared once again before her death in 1835, in _Athalie_ at the Opera, I believe.

It was very sad to see her: it inevitably brought to mind the line from _Pierre de Portugal_--

"Inès, vivante ou non, tu seras couronnée!"

Alas! poor Duchesnois was crowned when she was more than half dead. She had a son, a good honest lad. After the Revolution of July, Bixio and I got him a sub-lieutenancy; but he was killed, I believe, in Algeria.

The tragedy of _Pierre de Portugal_ was a success; it was even a great success; but it only ran fifteen or eighteen nights, and did not bring in any money.

Lassagne was right.