CHAPTER SIX

ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR

THE "ACTRESS HEART QUEEN"

She was an ex-laundress, and the daughter of a hatter.

He was an ideal dime-novel hero, and the son of a king. She was all spirit. He was all body. And their love story is, perhaps, the strangest of its sort in the sad annals of hearts.

(Their great-great-granddaughter, by the way, was George Sand--a four-generation throwback of the nameless super-woman trait.)

Having thus rhapsodied with the hope of catching the reader's attention, one may bring up the curtain on a romance whose compelling interest cannot be spoiled by the most bungling writing.

She was Adrienne Lecouvreur; and like the bulk of history's super-women, she sprang from the masses. Her childhood was spent in beating against the bars behind which her eagle spirit was locked. At fourteen she joined a road company; and within a few years she was acclaimed as the greatest actress the world had thus far known.

As a comedienne she was a failure. It was in tragedy that she soared to untouched heights. And her life, from cradle to unmarked grave, was one long, sustained tragedy of love. Or, rather, of loves. For she had divers harsh experiences before the last great love flashed upon her.

It was at Lille, while she was still in her apprenticeship as an actress, that Adrienne met a young baron; a captain in the local garrison. He loved her, and he was her first love. It was not the custom of the early eighteenth century for a French noble to propose marriage to a former laundress who was playing utility parts in a third-rate road show. Probably there was no precedent for it. And such a proposal would have been a waste of windy words, at best. For neither the king nor the man's parents would have allowed it to lead to marriage.

Yet--or perhaps because of it--the baron asked Adrienne Lecouvreur to be his wife. She was in the seventh paradise of first love. It was all turning out the way it did in plays. And plays were, thus far, Adrienne's chief guidebook of life. So the prettily staged engagement began; with roseate light effects.

Before Adrienne had time for disillusionment, the baron died. In the first grief--she was at an age when every tragedy is absolutely permanent and irrevocable--the luckless girl tried to kill herself. Her kindly fellow actors took turns in watching her and in abstracting unobtrusively any lethal weapons that might chance to be within her reach. And at last Youth came to the rescue; permanent heartbreak being too mighty a feat for sixteen.

Adrienne fell to referring to the baron's death as her life tragedy, not yet realizing that the affair was but an insignificant curtain raiser.

By and by another nobleman crossed her horizon. He was Philippe le Ray. And for the moment he fascinated Adrienne. Once more there was a hope--or she thought there was--of a marriage into the aristocracy. Then, just as everything seemed to be along smoothly, she threw away her possible chances with both hands.

Into the road company came a new recruit, Clavel by name. You will not find him in the shining records of the French stage, nor under the "Cs" in any encyclopedia. His name has been picked in history's museum solely from the fact that he jilted Adrienne Lecouvreur.

Philippe le Ray was promptly shelved for the new love. And with him Adrienne sacrificed all her supposed chances of wealth, rank, and ease; for the sake of a penniless actor, and for love.

She became engaged to Clavel. They planned to marry as soon as their joint earnings would permit, and to tour France as co-stars. Or, if the public preferred, with Clavel as star, and with Adrienne as an adoringly humble member of the cast.

Early in the affair, Clavel found a better-paying position in another company. Adrienne urged him to accept it, for the temporary parting promised to bring nearer the day of their marriage. And Clavel, to please her, took the offer.

So, again, Adrienne found herself alone. But it was a loneliness that vibrated with hope. It was at this time that she chose for herself a motto, which thereafter emblazoned her letters and lingerie.

It was, "~Que Faire Au Monde Sans Aimer?~" ("What is living without loving?") She was soon to learn the grim answer to the challenge-query she so gayly hurled at fate.

Clavel's letters grew few. They waned in warmth. Odd rumors with which the theater world has ever been rife began to reach Adrienne. And at last she wrote her absent lover a missive that has been numbered by ~cognoscenti~ among the great love letters of the ages. Here it is, in part--a halting translation:

I scarce know what to believe, from your neglect. But be certain always that I love you for yourself a hundred times more dearly than on my own account. Oh, love me, dear, as I shall forever love you! That is all I ask from life.

But don't promise to, unless you can keep your word. Your welfare is far more precious to me than my own. So always follow the course that seems most pleasant to you. If ever I lose you and you are still happy, I shall have the joy of knowing I have not been a bar to your happiness.

The worthy Clavel took Adrienne at her word. He proceeded to "follow the course that seemed most pleasant to him"--by breaking the engagement and marrying a lesser woman who had a dot of several thousand francs. He explained his action by saying that he must look out for his own future, and that Adrienne had no prospects of success on the stage.

And thus the thrifty actor passes out of history. Thus, too, he lost a future chance to handle the funds of Europe's richest actress, and of starring as her husband. Peace to his puny soul!

Adrienne Lecouvreur no longer clamored to die. She was older now--nearly twenty. And the latest blow hardened instead of crushing her. By this time the girlish chrysalis had been shed and a gloriously beautiful woman had emerged. Already she was hailed as the "Actress Heart Queen." Men were straining the vocabulary of imbecility to coin phrases for her.

And for the first and last time in her career, Adrienne resolved to capitalize her charms. It was the one adventuress-moment in all her story. And the Hand that ever guided her course picked her up and set her back, very hard and very promptly, in the destined path of tragedy from which she had tried to stray.

Stinging and heart-dead from Clavel's desertion, she listened to the vows of the Comte de Klinglin. He was rich; he was a soldier of note; and Adrienne was no longer the world-innocent child of her first engagement days. She played her cards with the skill of a perfect actress. From mere flirtation, the count advanced to the point of worshiping her.

De Klinglin besought her to marry him. And with seeming reluctance, she yielded. She even pointed out a way by which they might evade royal and family law by emigrating for a time to some other country, and then, by judicious bribery, arranging a return and a reinstatement. De Klinglin entered eagerly into the plan.

Then, on the very eve of their proposed wedding, the count deserted her and married an heiress. Decidedly, the Hand was guiding Adrienne against every effort or desire of her own.

This latest blow to pride and to new-born ambition was the turning point in Adrienne Lecouvreur's road. It changed her from a professional beauty into an inspired actress.

She threw herself into her work with a tragic intensity bred of her own sorrows. She turned her back on social distractions, and on everything that came between her and success. Her acting as well as her beauty became the talk of the provinces. Word of her prowess drifted to Paris, the Mecca of eighteenth-century actor-folk. A Paris manager came to see her act, and he at once engaged her.

In 1717, when she was twenty-three, she burst unheralded upon the French metropolis. In a night, Paris was at her feet. Almost at once, she was made a leading woman of the ~Comedie Francaise~; where, for thirteen years, she reigned, undisputed sovereign of the French stage.

Never before had such acting been witnessed or even imagined. It was a revelation. Up to this time French actors had mouthed their words noisily and grandiloquently, reciting the Alexandrine or otherwise metrical lines--wherein practically all the classic plays of the period, except some of Moliere's, were written--in a singsong chant that played sad havoc with the sense.

Incidentally, the costuming--as you may see from contemporary cuts--was a nightmare. And when a character on the stage was not declaiming or dramatically listening, he usually stood stock-still in a statuesque attitude, staring into blank space, with the look of an automaton.

All this seems ridiculous to us; but it had come straight down as an almost inviolable "classic tradition" from the ancient Greek drama, which had been more a series of declamations than a vital play.

Yes, Adrienne Lecouvreur was a revelation to Paris. On the stage her voice was as soft and musical as it was penetrating. Instead of intoning a pompous monologue, she spoke her lines as people in real life spoke. Her emotions were keenly human. Every syllable and every shade of voice meant something.

Without sacrificing the poetry of the rhymed couplets, she put the breath of life and of conversational meaning into them. She dressed the characters she played in the way such persons might reasonably have been supposed to dress. She made them a joy to the eye instead of an insult to the intelligence. And when she was not speaking, she was forever acting; introducing a million bits of byplay to replace the old statuesque poses.

She had lived. And she put the breath of that life into her work. This seems simple enough to us in these days of stage realism. But it was a wonder-breeding novelty to France. Adrienne revolutionized acting, diction, and costuming. Paris acclaimed her as a genius; which abused term was for once well applied.

Men of rank clamored for introductions to her. They plotted, and sighed, and bribed, and killed one another for her favor. But for them all she had one stereotyped answer; an answer that waxed historic through many firm repetitions:

"Love is a folly which I detest!"

Which, in conjunction with her motto, "What is living without loving?" throws a sidelight on Adrienne's ideas of life at the moment.

Not only did she revolutionize the stage, but she was the first actress to be taken up by society. Not only the foremost men in France, but their wives as well, threw open to her the magic doors of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Old Philippe the Regent was misgoverning France just then; and to say that his court was morally rotten would be gross flattery. The unapproachable Lecouvreur was thus a freak, as well as a delight. Like the good, old, overworked "breath of mountain air in a slum," this loveless genius swept through the palaces of Paris and Versailles. A hundred nobles longed for her favor. Not one could boast that he had so much as kissed her lips. Here is her picture, sketched from the ~Mercure~, of 1719:

Without being tall, she is exquisitely formed and has an air of distinction. No one on earth has greater charm. Her eyes speak as eloquently as her lips, and often they supply the place of words. In brief, I can compare her only to a flawless miniature. Her head is well poised on shapely shoulders. Her eyes are full of fire; her mouth is pretty; her nose slightly aquiline. Her face is wonderfully adapted to express joy, tenderness, pity, fear, sorrow.

And Adrienne? Her opinion of all this adulation is summed up in one sentence from a letter she wrote:

I spend three-fourths of my time in doing what bores me.

Among her maddest admirers was a wizened, monkey-faced youth who even then was writing anarchistic doctrines that one day were to help shake France's worm-eaten old monarchy to its fall.

He was Francois Marie Arouet. But for reasons best known to himself, he preferred to be known simply as "Voltaire"--a name to which he had no right whatever, but by which alone history remembers him. Voltaire was Adrienne Lecouvreur's adoring slave. She treated him only as a dear friend; but she loved to hear his vitriolic anathemas on government, the aristocracy, and theology. He was in the midst of one of these harangues, at her rooms one evening, when the Chevalier de Rohan--bearer of the proudest name in all Europe--sauntered in. He eyed the monkey-like Voltaire in amused disfavor; then drawled, to no one in particular:

"Who is this young man who talks so loud?"

"A young man, sir," retorted Voltaire, "who is not forced to stagger along under a name far too great for him; but who manages to secure respect for the name he has."

De Rohan's tasseled cane swung aloft. Adrienne tactfully prevented its fall by collapsing in a stage faint. But the incident did not close there. Next day Voltaire was set upon by ruffians in Rohan's pay, and beaten half to death.

The victim did not complain. There was no justice for a commoner, in France at that time, against a member of the ~haute noblesse~. So Voltaire contented himself by going to a fencing master and practicing for a year or more in the use of the small-sword.

At the end of that period, he challenged Rohan to mortal combat. Rohan professed to regard the challenge as a piece of insolence, and, through royal favor, had Voltaire, sent, by ~lettre de cachet~, to the Bastille. There was no chance for redress. And, on his release, Voltaire prudently let the feud drop.

At the perihelion of Adrienne's Dianalike sway over French hearts, a new social lion arrived in Paris. He was Maurice, Comte de Saxe, born of a morganatic union between a German countess and Augustus the Strong, King of Poland. (Augustus, by the way, was the parent of no less than one hundred and sixty-three children--an interesting record even in those days of large families, and one that should have gone far toward earning for him the title of "Father of his Country.")

Saxe came to Paris crowned with laurels won as a dashing military leader, as a fearless duelist, and as an irresistible heart breaker. He had won, by sheer bravery and strategic skill, the rank of Marshal. He was of the "man on horseback" type over whom crowds go wild.

The new hero was a giant in stature, strikingly handsome, and so strong that in one hand he could crush a horseshoe into a shapeless lump. He was a paladin--Ajax, Don Juan, Tamerlane, Mark Antony, Baldur, all rolled into one. He was a glorious animal, high of spirits and of hopes, devoid of fear and of the finer feelings. A Greek god--or whatever you will. And about him hung the glamour of countless conquests on the battlefield and in love.

That such a man should have turned Paris' head was inevitable. Equally natural was it that Paris women should make fools of themselves over him. But why so gross and unintellectual a wooer should have made the very slightest impression on a character like Adrienne Lecouvreur's must be relegated to the "mystery of choice" collection of riddles.

Yet, at sight, she, who for years had scoffed at passion, and who had so often declared her heart was dead, felt that she had met the love of her life.

She gave her revivified heart and her whole soul into Maurice de Saxe's keeping, forever and ever. There were no reservations. Hers was a love that could die only with her life. The former affairs were to her as half-forgotten dreams. Saxe, and Saxe alone, held her love; held it as no other man had been able to.

Adrienne at first dazzled Saxe--as a tropic butterfly might dazzle a champion bulldog. The dazzle soon wore off; but it left behind a comfortable feeling of affection, of admiration, of gratified vanity that he alone had been chosen by her, out of all the world of suitors.

With the deft hands of a sculptor, Adrienne Lecouvreur molded Saxe's rough nature. She refined him; taught him to replace the ways of the camp by those of civilization; made him less of a beast and more of a man; showed him how to think.

All of which added to the man's popularity with other women; which was the sole reward Adrienne reaped for her educative efforts.

Saxe was notoriously untrue to her. In his rages he berated her as a cabby might have scolded his drunken wife. He used his power over her to raise himself in others' esteem. In short, he was wholly selfish throughout, and he gruffly consented to accept Adrienne's worship as his just due.

But Adrienne's love merely waxed stronger and brighter under such abominable treatment. She lived for Saxe alone.

The Duchy of Courland lost its duke. His place was to be filled by election. And with the dukedom went the hand of a Russian princess, whose face Saxe unchivalrously compared to a Westphalia ham.

Saxe's ambition awoke. In his veins ran royal blood. He wanted to be a duke and the husband of a princess. He entered as candidate in the contest. Lack of money, for judicious bribes to the free and incorruptible electors, stood in his way. He went, as ever in trouble, to Adrienne. And, as ever, she rose to the occasion.

She knew that, as Duke of Courland, he could not see her again, or be within several hundred miles of her. She knew, too, that, by helping him with the dukedom, she was helping to give him to another woman. A lesser love than hers would have rebelled at either possibility.

But Adrienne's love for Saxe was that which not only casts out fear, but casts out self along with it. She sold every piece of jewelry and every costly dress and stick of furniture in her possession, borrowed money right and left, and mortgaged her salary at the ~Comedie Francaise~.

The net result was fifteen thousand dollars, which she gladly handed over to Saxe for the expenses of his campaign. With these sinews of war, Saxe hastened to Courland. There he remained for a year; working hard for his election; making love to the ham-faced princess; fighting like a Norse berserker in battle after battle.

He was elected duke. But Russia refused to sanction the election. At the head of a handful of fellow adventurers, Saxe went on fighting; performing prodigies of personal valor and strength in conflicts against overwhelming odds. But at last he was hopelessly beaten in battle, and still more hopelessly outpointed in the game of politics. And back he came to Paris--a failure.

Adrienne used every art and charm to make him forget his misfortunes and find happiness once more in her love. He treated her overtures as a surly schoolboy might treat those of an over-affectionate little sweetheart.

He consented to be petted and comforted by the woman who adored him. But he wreaked in her the ill-temper bred of his defeat. For example, he professed to believe her untrue to him. He was furiously jealous--or pretended to be. And he accused her of the infidelity he had himself a thousand times practiced.

Poor Adrienne, aghast at such insane charges, vainly protested her innocence and her utter love for him. One of her letters to Saxe, during this dark hour, has been preserved. It begins:

I am worn out with grief. I have wept this livelong night. It is foolish of me; since I have nothing wherewith to reproach myself. But I cannot endure severity from you. I am suspected, accused by you. Oh, how can I convince you--you who alone can wound my heart?

In the midst of this wretched misunderstanding came a crumb of comfort to the luckless woman--albeit the incident that caused it led also, indirectly, to her death.

Francoise de Lorraine, Duchesse de Bouillon, fell violently in love with Saxe, and did not hesitate to tell him so. Saxe laughed in her face, and hinted that he cared too much for Adrienne Lecouvreur just then to be interested in any one else. It was not the truth, for his love for Adrienne had never served as an obstacle to any other of his myriad amours. But it served to rebuff the duchesse, who did not interest him, and to make Adrienne very, very happy when he repeated to her the conversation. As a by-product, it threw the duchesse into a frame of mind described by Congreve in his line about the Gehenna-like fury of a woman scorned.

A few days after this--in July, 1729--Adrienne received an anonymous note asking her to be at a certain corner of the Luxembourg Gardens at eleven o'clock the following morning. Being quite without fear, and not at all without curiosity, she went.

No, she was not set upon by masked assassins. She found awaiting her nothing more formidable than a pale and badly scared young man in clerical garb.

The clerical youth introduced himself as the Abbe Bouret, a hanger-on of the Bouillon household. Bouret told Adrienne that the duchesse had bribed him heavily to send her rival a box of poisoned bonbons, with a note saying the candies were the gift of an unknown and humble admirer.

The abbe had seen Adrienne a few nights earlier at the theater. So struck had he been by the gentleness and beauty of her face that he could not carry out his murderous commission. Hence the warning.

Adrienne took the abbe, and the candy, too, straight to the police. A bonbon was fed to a street dog. The animal, screaming and writhing in agony, died within fifteen minutes. This seemed, even to the eighteenth-century Paris police, a fairly good proof of the duchesse's guilt.

Naturally, they did not arrest her grace. But they put certain respectful queries to her. Strangely enough, the duchesse indignantly denied that she had tried to poison Adrienne.

Bouret, cross-examined, stuck determinedly to his story. So, through the Bouillon influence, he was thrown into prison and was kept there in solitary confinement, in a damp and unlighted dungeon, with occasional torture, until he saw the error of his ways, and confessed that his charge had been a lie. Thus was the faultless Duchesse de Bouillon triumphantly cleared of an unjust accusation.

The duchesse celebrated her vindication by attending the theater, one night when Adrienne Lecouvreur was playing in "Phedre." The duchesse sat in a stage box and mockingly applauded her rival.

Adrienne paid no overt heed at first to her presence. But when she came to the scene in which ~Phedre~ expresses to ~OEnone~ her contempt for a certain class of women, Adrienne turned her back on the wondering ~OEnone~, strode to the footlights, and, her blazing eyes seizing and gripping the duchesse's, declaimed directly to her ~Phedre's~ lines:

"I know my own faults; but I am not one of those brazen women who, calm even in the exposure of their crimes, can face the world without a blush."

The duchesse shrank back as if she had been lashed across the face. Shielding her eyes with her hands, she ran, shuddering, from the theater.

Scribe's play, "Adrienne Lecouvreur," and the opera of the same title, make much of this episode. So did eighteenth-century Paris. Folk openly declared that the Duchesse de Bouillon would not long rest impotent under so public an insult. And they were right.

Whether the poison was sent in a bouquet, as contemporary writers declared, or in some other form, Adrienne was suddenly stricken by mortal illness.

Less than half a century had passed since the dying King Charles had "lived a week in spite of the best physicians in England." And the science of medicine had crept forward but few hesitating steps in the past forty-five years. Poor, stricken Adrienne did not even need the best malpractice in France to help her to her grave.

Doctors great and doctors greater--the quacks of the Rive Gauche and the higher-priced quacks of court and Faubourg--all stood in turn at the dying girl's bedside and consulted gravely in Latin; while Saxe raged at them and cursed them for a parcel of solemn nincompoops--which they were.

After a time they all trooped away, these long-faced men of pill and potion. They confessed they could find no remedy. They could not so much as name the ailment. At least, they did not--aloud. For the memory of the first poison scandal and its revealer's fate was still fresh in men's minds.

And after the doctors came the priest; a priest hastily summoned by the infidel Voltaire, who had been crying outside the death-chamber door.

The priest was among the most bigoted of his kind. In his eyes, the victim was not the reigning beauty of Paris, but a sinning creature who had defied God's laws by going on the stage.

Theology in those days barred actors and actresses from the blessings of the Church.

Yet, bigoted as was this particular priest, he was not wholly heartless. The weeping little monkey-like man crouched on the stairs outside the door may have touched his heart; for Voltaire could be wondrous eloquent and persuasive. Or the red-eyed, raging giant on his knees at the bedside may have appealed to his pity; almost as much as did the lovely white face lying so still there among the pillows. At all events, the good priest consented to strain a point.

If Adrienne would adjure her allegiance to the stage and banish all earthly thoughts, he would absolve her and would grant her the rite of Extreme Unction.

"Do you place your hope in the God of the Universe?" he intoned.

Slowly the great dark eyes--already wide with the Eternal Mystery--turned from the priest to the sobbing giant who knelt at the opposite side of her bed. Adrienne Lecouvreur stretched out her arms toward Saxe, for the last of many thousand times. Pointing at her weeping lover, she whispered to the priest:

"~There~ is my Universe, my Hope, my ~God~!"

The good priest scuttled away in pious horror. Adrienne Lecouvreur sank back upon the pillows, dead--and unabsolved.

That night--acting on a strong hint from the Bouillon family, who had heard that Voltaire intended to demand an autopsy--the police carried Adrienne's body away in a cab, and buried it in a bed of quick-lime.

For nearly two long months, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, scarcely looked at another woman.