Part 8

Racine was in despair; for that not inconsiderable section of the public which judges of the merits of a play solely by results was beginning to declare that his tragedy was a complete failure and Pradon's a brilliant success. After, however, the trick had been played for three more nights, he triumphed. Perhaps Madame de Bouillon had begun to find her amusement, which is said to have cost her 15,000 francs, the equivalent of five times as much to-day, somewhat too costly a one; or possibly Racine, discovering the tactics of his enemies, had appealed to the king for protection, and the duchess had received a hint from his Majesty that such practices were highly displeasing to him. Any way, the lady retired from the field, and, with her withdrawal, the rival _Phèdres_ speedily found their respective levels. Nevertheless, in spite of his ultimate success, Racine never forgot the mortification to which he had been subjected, and there can be no doubt that this had not a little to do with his decision to renounce writing for the stage.

When _Phèdre_ was played before the Court, Mlle. de Champmeslé, fearing that Madame de Montespan might take the lines afterwards addressed on a memorable occasion by Adrienne Lecouvreur to the Duchesse de Bouillon:--

"Je suis mes perfidies OEnone, et ne suis pas de ces femmes hardies Qui, gôutant dans la crime une tranquille paix, Ont su se faire un front qui ne rougit jamais"--

to apply to herself, begged Racine to alter or erase them. The poet, however, though he yielded the palm to no one as a flatterer of royalty, and was, moreover, under considerable obligations to the king's mistress, indignantly refused to mutilate his play. Several of those present remarked upon the verses; but Madame de Montespan had too much good sense to complain.

As Phèdre, the declamation of which, according to the Abbé du Bois, Racine "had taught her verse by verse," Mlle. de Champmeslé seems to have put the comble upon her fame as a _tragédienne_. Of all her creations, it is the one that La Fontaine names first in the frontispiece of _Belphégor_:--

"Qui ne connaît l'inimitable actrice Représentant Phèdre ou Bérénice, Chimène en pleurs ou Camille en fureur? Est-il quelqu'un qui cette voix n'enchante?"

So inimitable was she in this character, affording her as it did an opportunity for the display of all the resources of her art, that _Phèdre_ was the play selected to consecrate the birth of the Comédie-Française on Sunday, August 25, 1680; and it was _Phèdre_ again, with Mlle. de Champmeslé in the title-part, which inaugurated the new playhouse in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, on April 16, 1689.[52]

The popularity of Mlle. Champmeslé was not confined to the theatre. Her house was "the rendezvous of all persons of distinction of the Court and the town, as well as of the most celebrated writers of the time." Among the former were Charles de Sévigné, Madame de Sévigné's troublesome son, the Marquis de la Fare, the author of the curious and all-too-brief memoirs, and the Comtes de Revel and Clermont-Tonnerre. The latter, besides Racine, included Boileau, Valincourt, Racine's successor at the Academy, Chapelle, and La Fontaine, "who very much regretted that he was only a friend" of his charming hostess. The utmost cordiality and an entire absence of the restraints of etiquette characterised these gatherings, and noblemen and writers met on a footing of perfect equality. "Permit me to address you," writes Boileau to the Comte de Revel, in April 1701, "in the familiar tone to which you formerly accustomed me at the house of the famous Champmeslé."

The actress's _liaison_ with Racine was not only public but accepted by the easy morality of the day; Madame de Sévigné jests about it in her letters, and La Fontaine, writing to Mlle. de Champmeslé, mentions it as the most natural thing in the world. Many years afterwards, Boileau reminds Racine of the numerous bottles of champagne which were drunk by the lady's accommodating husband. "You know," adds he, "at whose expense."

According to M. Larroumet, Racine's latest biographer, the poet's passion for the interpreter of his heroines was of a less defensible kind than that which he had felt for her predecessor in his affections, Mlle. du Parc, "with whom he had experienced a sentiment which had the dignity of love." M. Larroumet is of opinion that "he only loved her with the facile love which the professionals of gallantry frequently inspire."

However that may be, the lady appears to have been very far from faithful to the poet. An epigram by Boileau, which is rather too _gai_ for us to transcribe, speaks of "six lovers" (including the husband), and of M. de Champmeslé living on the best of terms with the others and his wife. The favoured gentlemen appear to have been Racine and the four noblemen mentioned above. But the only one of the four about whose relations with the actress we have any details is Charles de Sévigné.

This young gentleman seems to have had something of the Oriental in his temperament; for, at the time that he was paying court to the actress, he was "wearing the chains of Ninon, this same Ninon who corrupted the morals of his father."[53] The celebrated Ninon de Lenclos, it may be mentioned, was then in her fifty-sixth year, but still retained much of her former fascination; indeed, if tradition is to be believed, she had lovers when she was over eighty!

Madame de Sévigné was much distressed by the conduct of her son. "Madame de la Fayette and I are using every effort to wean him from so dangerous an attachment," she writes to her daughter. "Besides, he has a little actress (Mlle. de Champmeslé) and all the Despréaux and the Racines. There are delicious suppers--that is to say, _diableries_." Then, on March 18: "Your brother is at Saint-Germain. He divides his time between Ninon and a little actress, and, to crown all, Despréaux. We lead him a sad life. Ye gods, what folly! Ye gods, what folly!"

From the above passages, it would appear that Racine and his friend Boileau were not exactly in the odour of sanctity with their contemporaries; indeed, both were evidently regarded as corrupters of youth by anxious mothers like Madame de Sévigné.

Three weeks later, we learn that M. de Sévigné is not prospering in his love-affairs; Ninon has dismissed him, and Mlle. de Champmeslé is on the point of following her example: "A word or two concerning your brother. Ninon has given him his _congé_. She is tired of loving without being loved in return; she has insisted upon his returning her letters, which he has accordingly done. I was not a little pleased at the separation. I gave him a hint of the duty he owed to God, reminded him of his former good sentiments, and entreated him not to stifle all notion of religion in his breast. But this is not all; when one side fails us, we think to repair it with the other, and are deceived. The young Merveille (Mlle. de Champmeslé) has not broken with him, but she will soon, I believe.... The poor Chimène says she sees plainly that he no longer loves her, and has applied himself elsewhere. In short, this affair makes me laugh; but I wish sincerely it may be the means of weaning him from a state so offensive to God and hurtful to his own soul. Ninon told him that he was a _pompion fricasseed in snow_. See what it is to keep good company! One learns such elegant expressions."

Then, on April 17, Madame de Sévigné informs her daughter that the young gentleman's health has broken down under the strain of "the abandoned life he had led during Holy Week," and that he can "scarcely bear a woman in his presence." Profiting by his remorse, his fond mother becomes his confessor: "I took the opportunity to preach him a little sermon on the subject, and we both indulged in some Christian reflections. He seems to approve my sentiments, particularly now that his disgust is at its height. He showed me some letters that he had recovered from his actress. I never read anything so warm, so passionate; he wept, he died; he believed it all while he was writing it, and laughed at it a moment afterwards. I assure you that he is worth his weight in gold."

Finally, on April 22, the marchioness writes that all is at an end between her son and Mlle. de Champmeslé, and that she has been instrumental in preventing the young man from playing a singularly mean trick upon his former enchantress: "He has left his actress at last, after having followed her everywhere. When he saw her, he was in earnest; a moment later, he would make the greatest game of her. Ninon has completely discarded him; he was miserable while she loved him, and now that she loves him no longer, he is in absolute despair. She wished him, the other day, to give her the letters he had received from his actress, which he did. You must know that she was jealous of that princess, and wanted to show them to a lover of hers, in the hope of procuring her a few blows with a belt. He came and told me, when I pointed out to him how shameful it was to treat this little creature so badly, merely for having loved him; that she had not shown people his letters, as some would have him believe, but, on the contrary, had returned them to him again; that such treacherous conduct was unworthy of a man of quality, and that there was a degree of honour to be observed, even in things dishonourable in themselves. He acquiesced in the justice of my remarks, hurried at once to Ninon's house, and, partly by strategy and partly by force, got the poor devil's letters out of her hands. I made him burn them. You see by this what a regard I have for the reputation of an actress."

According to M. Gueullette (_Acteurs et Actrices du temps passé_), Racine, though deeply in love with Mlle. de Champmeslé, supported patiently the numerous infidelities of the lady, "so long as he believed them to be passing fancies and that he was still beloved." But when the actress embarked upon a more serious love-affair with the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, and a wit wrote--

"À la plus tendre amour elle fut destinée Qui prit longtemps Racine dans son coeur: Mais, par un insigne malheur, Le _Tonnerre_ est venu, qui l'a _déracinée_"--

he was so bitterly mortified that he left her never to return.

The brothers Parfaict and d'Allainval assert that disgust at his treatment at the hands of Mlle. de Champmeslé was the immediate cause of Racine's retirement from dramatic authorship, at the age of thirty-eight, at the height of his talent, in the heyday of his success; for after _Phèdre_ he wrote but two more plays, _Esther_ and _Athalie_, which were performed by the young girls of Saint-Cyr, and were not seen upon the Paris stage until many years after his death. This, however, is very unlikely, and it is quite possible, as M. Larroumet suggests, that Racine, instead of abandoning the theatre, because Mlle. de Champmeslé had discarded him, discarded the actress, because he had abandoned the theatre. The poet's retirement indeed seems to have been attributable to several different motives: disgust at the shameful cabal against _Phèdre_ and the various annoyances to which it gave rise; the fear that a repetition of such tactics might jeopardise his position as the greatest tragic dramatist of his time; weariness of a dissipated life, and, above all, the awakening, after a sleep of many years, of the religious sentiments with which his old teachers of Port-Royal had inspired him in youth. Indignation at Mlle. Champmeslé's conduct may, of course, have had something to do with the positive antipathy to the theatre which he manifested in his last years;[54] but to assert that it was the cause of his renunciation of a profession which had brought him fame and fortune is to credit him with a capacity for sincere affection which he certainly never possessed.

With Racine departed not a little of the immense popularity which the theatre had enjoyed during the past half-century, for though of capable actors there was, fortunately, no lack, dramatists of even moderate ability were few and far between. In place of _Andromaques_ and _Iphigénies_ and _Phèdres_, Mlle. de Champmeslé had to resign herself to appear in such deservedly-forgotten plays as the _Achille_ of Thomas Corneille, the _Argélie_ of the Abbé Abeille, and the _Troade_ of Pradon. Nevertheless, despite the barrenness of the field in which she laboured, she contrived to gather fresh laurels, and her masterly impersonation of Queen Elizabeth in Thomas Corneille's _Comte d'Essex_ (January 1678) was enthusiastically received, and secured for a mediocre play a success out of all proportion to its merits. "One might have said of her," remarks M. Noury, "as a critic said of Adrienne Lecouvreur, after seeing her in the same part, 'I have seen a queen among actors.' She possessed, in fact, majesty."

At Easter 1679, in consequence of some dissensions with their colleagues, Mlle. de Champmeslé and her husband quitted the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where they had played for nineteen years, for the Théâtre Guénégaud, which, by a contract dated April 12, awarded them, "in gratitude," in addition to a full share of the profits, an annual allowance of one thousand livres. All her contemporaries are agreed that this defection was the principal cause of the fusion of the two troupes in the following year. Deprived of the services of the famous actress, the Hôtel de Bourgogne was no longer able to cope with its powerful rivals in the Rue Mazarine.

On the formation of the new company, the Champmeslés figured at the head of the list of the twenty-seven players nominated by Louis XIV., and Mlle. Champmeslé was at once recognised as the mainstay of the theatre in tragedy, as Mlle. Molière--or rather Mlle. Guérin, as she had now become--was in comedy. Her husband, too, proved himself well worthy of his place, not only as an actor, but as a playwright. His _Parisien_ (produced February 5, 1682), as we have said elsewhere, provided Mlle. Guérin with one of her greatest triumphs, and he secured another success in his _Fragments de Molière_, an amusing piece, in which various characters from Molière's plays were introduced.

Mlle. de Champmeslé's successes did not make her forget her relatives. Her brother, Nicolas Desmares, was at this time acting at Copenhagen, in the troupe subsidised by Christian V. That monarch held the actor and his wife, Anne d'Ennebaut, in high esteem, and, in 1682, in imitation of Louis XIV.'s conduct in regard to Molière, he and his queen stood sponsors to their little daughter, Christine Antoinette Charlotte Desmares, destined, in years to come, to emulate the triumphs of her famous aunt. Three years later, Mlle. de Champmeslé persuaded her brother to return to France, and obtained from the King permission for him to be received into the Comédie-Française, "_sans début_." For an actor to be admitted a member of so famous a company without being required to give proofs of his capabilities, was a privilege which had never yet been accorded, and the playgoing public was up in arms at what it was pleased to consider a scandalous piece of nepotism. So great was the indignation that when Desmares made his first appearance, on May 7, 1685, in _Téramène_, an angry scene was apprehended; but the new _sociétaire's_ acting was so admirable that the hisses were soon drowned in a storm of applause.

When, in 1689, the Comédie-Française, ousted from the Rue Mazarine, migrated to its new home in the Rue Neuve-des-Fossés-Saint-Germain, Mlle. de Champmeslé, in spite of advancing years, continued her triumphant career, her remarkable talents and enthusiasm enabling her to secure some measure of success for even the most insipid tragedy. Apart from revivals of the great masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, perhaps her most notable success was gained in the part of Judith in the Abbé Boyer's tragedy of that name, produced in March 1795, when she was in her fifty-fourth year. This play had a singular history. For some time it created a perfect _furore_, and the theatre could with difficulty accommodate the crowds which presented themselves nightly at the doors. "The seats on the stage," says Le Sage, "had to be given up by the men to the women, whose handkerchiefs were spread upon their knees, to wipe away the tears to be called forth by touching passages. The usual occupants of the seats had to be content with the wings. In the fourth act, there was a scene which proved particularly moving, and, for that reason, was called the '_scène des mouchoirs_.' The pit, where laughers are always to be found, made itself merry at the expense of these impressionable ladies, instead of weeping with them."

Intoxicated by his success, the Gascon poet, in an evil hour for himself, determined to allow his work to be printed, and it was published during the Easter recess. It was, of course, eagerly bought, but no sooner did people begin to read the book, than they made the discovery that this tragedy, which the author's indiscreet admirers had been comparing to _Polyeucte_ and _Phèdre_, was, in truth, a most mediocre play, which clearly owed its phenomenal success to the religious nature of the subject and Mlle. de Champmeslé's brilliant impersonation of the Judæan heroine. The indignation of the public against the unhappy abbé, who, it seemed to consider, had perpetrated a kind of fraud at its expense, knew no bounds, and it was forthwith decided that _Judith_ must be driven with ignominy from the boards. Accordingly, when the curtain rose on Quasimodo Sunday--the usual evening for the reopening of the theatre--the players, whose appearance for so many nights had been the signal for prolonged applause, were received with a storm of hisses and derisive laughter. "Then," continues Le Sage, "Mlle. de Champmeslé, actress worthy of eternal remembrance, astonished to hear such a symphony, when her ears were accustomed only to applause, addressed the pit as follows: 'Gentlemen, we are rather surprised that you should receive so badly to-day a play which you applauded during Lent.' To which a voice replied: 'The hisses were at Versailles, at the sermons of the Abbé Boileau.'"[55]

Mlle. de Champmeslé continued on the stage until the end of her life, for, with her, acting would seem to have been not only a profession, but a passion and a delight. As she grew old, however, she naturally began to feel the strain of such constant exertion, and the efforts she was called upon to make in order to secure the success of Longpierre's _Médée_, in February 1694, brought on a somewhat severe illness. She recovered and resumed her place in the company; but, four years later, during the run of the _Oreste et Pilade_ of La Grange-Chancel, which the author modestly asserts "drew as many tears as the _Iphigénie_ of M. Racine," she was taken seriously ill and ordered by the doctors a complete rest. She retired to Auteuil, which was "already sprinkled with fine houses and noted among suburban villages for the purity of its atmosphere." Here Boileau had a villa, with a delightful garden attached, in which he was in the habit of entertaining all the literary celebrities of the day, from Racine to Madame Deshoulières; and in summer the village was a favourite health resort of those Parisians whose means did not permit of a visit to Dieppe.

The air of Auteuil, however, was powerless to cure Mlle. de Champmeslé. She grew gradually worse, and early in May, it was seen that her end was near. Then arose the question of the administration of the last Sacraments; but before speaking of this, it may be as well for us to glance back and see what had been the practice of the Church in regard to the theatrical profession during the quarter of a century which had elapsed since the death of Molière.

* * * * *

If any hopes had existed that the distressing incidents which had accompanied the death of the great actor-dramatist had been merely the outcome of the hostility of the Church towards a particular individual, and, as such, were unlikely to be repeated, they were speedily doomed to disappointment. Henceforth, the penalties denounced against the profession by the early councils were no longer suffered to remain a dead letter, but were enforced with the most merciless severity. The actor found himself excommunicated both in life and death. Marriage, absolution, the Holy Sacrament, baptism, all were denied him; and he was even refused Christian burial. In one way, and in one way only, could he escape this infamous proscription, which was publicly proclaimed every Sunday from every pulpit in Paris, namely, by renouncing his profession, surrendering his means of livelihood, forfeiting, in the case of a member of the Comédie-Française, the pension to which he was entitled after twenty years' service.

In 1684, Brécourt, an actor of the Comédie-Française, died. On his death-bed he sent for the curé of Saint-Sulpice; but that priest refused to administer the Sacraments until the actor had executed a deed formally renouncing his profession, which was signed by him and four ecclesiastics.[56] Shortly afterwards, two other players, Raisin and Sallé, were compelled to subscribe to similar documents, in the presence of a notary.

Two years later, Rosimont died suddenly without having had time to abjure his errors. Notwithstanding a fondness for good liquor, he was a sincerely religious man, having published a translation of the Psalms in verse, and also written, or collaborated in, a _Vie des saints pour tous les jours de l'année_. This fact, however, was not permitted to have any weight with the bigoted curé of Saint-Sulpice, and the remains of poor Rosimont were interred, without any ceremony, in a part of the cemetery reserved for unbaptized children.

It must not be supposed that, outside the capital, the proscription of the actor was general. In the provinces it varied, according to the views of the different bishops and the particular ritual observed, and in some dioceses the penalties were not enforced at all. Moreover, even among the clergy themselves, men of liberal opinions were not wanting to protest vigorously against the folly and injustice of reviving superannuated anathemas, intended to apply to the sanguinary games of the circus and the scandalous performances of the Roman theatre, against the interpreters of the tragedies of Corneille and Racine and the comedies of Molière. In 1694, a Theatine monk, one Père Caffaro by name, published, under the cloak of anonymity, a very able letter, entitled _Lettre d'un Théologien_, wherein he asserted that "the theatre, as it then existed in France, contained only lessons of virtue, humanity, and morality, and nothing to which the most chaste ear could not give its attention." He further pointed out that the highest dignitaries of the Church--bishops, cardinals, and nuncios--had no scruples about visiting the theatre, and, therefore, if it was to be condemned, they must be condemned also, "since they authorised it by their presence"; and concluded by eulogising the exemplary life led by so many members of the proscribed profession, and their abounding charity, "to which magistrates and the superiors of convents could bear ample testimony."