CHAPTER XXI

GUIMARD THE GRAND: 1743-1816

For some thirty of Madeleine Guimard’s seventy-three years of life she was the idol of Paris, having risen from obscurity to power, and returned again from a joyous life set in high places to a lonely death in obscurity.

Authorities differ, as authorities so often do over the advent of new stars in the firmament of life, as to the date of Guimard’s birth. One says the 2nd, and another the 10th, and yet a third the 20th of October. Edmond de Goncourt--not infallible on other points--gives the date of her baptism correctly as December 27th, 1743.

She made her _début_ before the Parisian public when she was about sixteen, at the Comédie Française. She was received into the Academy in 1762, at the age of nineteen, and at a salary of six hundred livres.

In face she was not beautiful; some have described her even as ugly. She certainly had not Sophie Arnould’s shrewish wit, though she had humour; but her gestures, her face, above all her expressive eyes spoke eloquently, her dancing seemed ever the true and spirited expression of sentiments really felt, and in whatsoever _rôle_ she was always brilliant, entrancing. She had that glamour which makes up for lack of looks, and had, too, caprice of mood and a commanding manner, both qualities which susceptible men find adorable.

Her historians have not always been kind. A contemporary wrote: “_La Guimard a des caprices entre nous. On ne peut compter sur elle.... Son arrogance n’a pas de nom.... Ce que la Guimard veut, bon gré, mal gré, il faut qu’on le veuille._” And there you have it! “What Guimard wishes, willy-nilly one must wish.” That is a touch that tells; the words ring true. Intriguing, capricious--masterful! What wonder, then, that she came to rise by her own buoyancy, of manner and morals, and sought the rarefied, but, in the days of Louis XV, far from inaccessible atmosphere of Court circles.

Guimard made her _début_ at the Opera in May, 1762, as Terpsichore in a ballet called “Les Caractères de la Danse,” and achieved a triumph. From that time until she retired from the stage she was practically without a rival in the affections of the Parisian audiences. One testimony to her popularity is found in the promptitude with which she was nicknamed. Guimard, if not beautiful in face, had, nevertheless, a beautiful figure, was quite unusually graceful, carried herself nobly, was altogether a commanding and magnetic personage, but for all her beauty of figure Guimard was amazingly slim.

Seeing her in a classical ballet dancing as a nymph between two fauns--impersonated by the celebrated male-dancers Vestris _père_ and Dauberval--Sophie Arnould said it reminded her of “two dogs fighting for a bone.” Another of her footnotes on Guimard was her description of her as “Le Squelette des Grâces,” which also had the saving grace of being partly a compliment, and it was by this nickname that Madeleine was generally known throughout Paris.

To judge from this insistence on Madeleine’s thinness one might imagine that she could not be as attractive, certainly hardly as graceful as has been said. But such nicknames are, though emphasising some special characteristic, usually only marks of popularity, and that Guimard really was graceful can be gathered from the summing-up of Noverre who had seen her dance for years and knew, as only a great ballet-master could, what he was talking about when he said that “... from her _début_ to her retirement she was always graceful, naturally so. She never ran after difficulties. A lovable and noble simplicity reigned in her dance; she designed it with perfect taste, and put expression and sentiment into all her movements.”

Of her performance in Gardel’s ballet, “La Chercheuse d’Esprit,” in which she played the title-_rôle_, a contemporary wrote that “her eloquent silences surpassed the vivid, easy and seductive diction of Mme. Favart;” and he mentions one point that is of interest when he remembers that the struggle that Noverre had had to achieve some reform of costume on the opera-stage, namely, that Guimard, “following the example of Mme. Favart, discarded the panniers and the cuirasse of conventional costume.”

In the ballet of “Les Fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour,” in 1766, Guimard had the misfortune to have one of her arms broken by a piece of falling scenery. Such was her place in public regard even at this time, that a Mass was said at Notre-Dame for her recovery.

It was not long after success came to her that Guimard accepted the protection of the notorious Prince de Soubise. One of her first acquisitions, in 1768, was a superb residence at Pantin, just outside Paris, which was decorated by Fragonard. It was visited by everybody who _was_ anybody, for, apart from the charms of its mistress, there was a theatre in the mansion, where entertainments of a very special kind were staged, little poetic trifles or risky comedies, which while delighting a circle of appreciative connoisseurs would not have been staged in the ordinary way, as being caviare to the general.

The place at Pantin, however, did not suffice the exigent Madeleine, and a town-house was taken also in the Chaussée d’Antin,--next to that of Sophie Arnould by the way--where another theatre was built and where even more festive entertainments were provided, a theatre which could seat five hundred persons (only present by invitation) which received the name of The Temple of Terpsichore. It was designed by the architect Ledoux, decorated by Fragonard, who did numerous lovely panels in which Guimard appeared; and by David, then a youthful assistant, whom Madeleine’s generous aid is said to have sent to Rome for the furtherance of his art education.

Here in the course of time all Paris came. Here Guimard held her famous receptions--three a week, to the first of which were invited members of the Court circles, the aristocracy of the aristocracy; to the second--artists, actors, actresses, musicians, poets, the aristocracy of the world of intellect; to the third--all the polished rakes and roués, with their attendant Phrynes, the aristocracy of vice.

There seem to have been wild times in the Chaussée d’Antin Hôtel, and some of Madeleine’s private theatrical productions must have been worthy of tottering Rome. Well might discreet Abbés, and reputedly virtuous ladies of the Court hide behind the curtains of the darkened and mysterious boxes with which her theatre was provided. Not be seen while seeing was their only chance to retain a virtuous reputation! It was now doubtless that after having long danced _le genre sérieux_, Guimard abandoned it as one record says for the _genre mixte_, and was “inimitable” in “les ballets Anacréontiques!”

One example of the sort of dramatic fare Madeleine was giving her guests on occasion at Pantin, or at the Chaussée d’Antin residence, will suffice. In 1721 at the Château of St. Cloud, in the presence of the Duc d’Orléans as Regent, there had been given a ballet called “Les Fêtes d’Adam.” Some of her friends suggested that Madeleine should go one better and produce a ballet on a classic subject with herself as Venus rising from the sea. But the Archbishop of Paris got news of the affair and managed to nip the suggestion in the bud. Perhaps it was never seriously intended; it may have been “merely a suggestion--nothing more.”

One of her first lovers was Delaborde the financier, poor only as an amateur musician, who directed her theatre at Pantin till it was closed in 1770; and only of greater importance in her life, financially, was Soubise. But Madeleine had a particular _penchant_ for bishops it seems, and incidentally some of her later and most devoted friends were De Jarente, Bishop of Orleans, De Choiseul, the Archbishop of Cambrai, and Desnos, Bishop of Verdun.

The first-named of these clerical worthies had the disposal of a whole sheaf of livings, that is to say, he was supposed to have, but it was really Madeleine who allotted them--abbeys, priories, chapels and so forth. She did not forget her friends, and De Jarente found himself unable to resist. “What Guimard wishes one must wish!” It was this allotment of the bishops’ _feuille des bénéfices_ which drew from Sophie Arnould the whimsical remark that “_Ce petit ver à soie_ (Guimard) _devrait être plus gras. Elle ronge une si bonne feuille._”

Another favour which, through the Prince de Soubise, Madeleine was able to dispense among her friends was permission to hunt in the Royal forests, and it led to trouble on more than one occasion--her friends were so much of a _genre mixte_.

But if men were weak where Guimard was concerned, there is no need to consider her as infamous. There is so often a tendency among chroniclers to consider that because a pretty woman, with every inducement to succumb to temptation, had a “protector,” all her men friends found her equally ready to receive their attentions. Nothing could be more unjust. There may have been reasons why Madeleine did not marry sooner than she did, and she may not have been quite that paragon of virtue our present time prefers, but in an age notorious for its callousness and cruelty as well as for its moral laxity she was distinguished as a woman not merely of fascination but of good heart and generous impulses.

Did not one writer say of her that “_En quittant le théâtre, cette virtuose emporta le genre agréable avec elle_?” Did not Marmontel, referring to her well-known acts of charity, write of her the poem beginning:

“Est-il bien vrai, jeune et belle damnée Que, du théâtre embelli par tes pas, Tu vas chercher dans le froid galetas, L’humanité plaintive abandonnée?”

Did not a preacher speak of her in the pulpit as “Magdalen not yet repentant, but already charitable?” and add, too, that “The hand which gives so well will not be refused when knocking at the gates of Paradise?” And why? Because all who were in trouble had but to turn to Guimard for help--poor players, artists, poets, all. Because, though every year she received a handsome present from Soubise, one year, in 1768, when the winter had dealt cruelly with the Paris poor, she begged that instead of sending her jewellery, the Prince would send her the equivalent in money, and when she received it she added more, and herself went to all the poor folk in her neighbourhood and fed the starving; went unostentatiously, from simple good-heartedness and sympathy; and it was the populace who spoke of it, not she.

She had her foibles, her little vanities perhaps, as when at Longchamps one summer she appeared in an equipage most gorgeously embellished with somewhat startling arms--mistletoe growing out of a gold mark, which glowed in the middle of a shield, the Graces serving as supports, with a group of Cupids as a crown.

Guimard could be jealous on occasion. A Mlle. Dervieux, appearing as a singer at the Academy without success, had the audacity to reappear as a dancer and triumph. This Madeleine would possibly not have minded, but her own pet poet Dorat celebrated Mlle. Dervieux’s success in verse, and this poetic infidelity was more than Madeleine could stand, with the consequence that all the pamphleteers of Paris were forthwith ranged on sides and a paper war took place between the rival supporters of the two fair dancers, characters were torn to rags, and in the course of time the battle burnt itself out, as such usually do, without anyone being seriously the worse.

Strangely enough it was just at this time that Guimard herself elected to make an appearance as a singer. When there was a revival of some of the old pieces in the repertoire of the Royal Academy, including “Les Fêtes d’Hébé ou les Talents Lyriques,” for which Rameau had written the music, Guimard appeared in this as Aglaia, one of the three Graces--“with song and dance,” as one might say to-day. But it was, as so often the case in modern days, only the charm of the dance that made it possible to forgive the disillusion of the song, for Madeleine’s voice was thin and hard.

It was as a dancer and always as a dancer that Guimard excelled. It was as a dancer she won her chief successes in the ballets “La Chercheuse d’Esprit” (1778), “Ninette à la Cour” (1778), “Mirza” (1779), “La Rosière” (1784) and “Le Premier Navigateur” (1785), all of which, by the way, were by Maximilien Gardel. Of her work in these one historian has written: “Her dance was always noble, full of life, light, expressive and voluptuous; her acting naïve, gay, piquante, tender and pathetic.” Connoisseurs reproached her at times for having grown a little “mannered,” but she always preserved in her dance that finish, even preciosity, and those delicate _nuances_ of style of which later times have proved the rarity.

It was as a dancer she had the good fortune to please the King who, always a generous patron of the arts--with the nation’s money!--gave her for one dance she performed before him and the Queen, a pension of six thousand livres a year, giving at the same time a pension of one thousand a year to the man who danced with her, Despréaux, who later became her husband. This pension came to her the year following her appearance in “Le Premier Navigateur,” in 1786, apparently just at a time she was much in need of money. One may believe that Madeleine’s impulsive generosity had helped to bring about that need, as well as her known extravagance. For one thing, apart from her being ready to assist less fortunate artists, she had been the prime mover in an act of wholesale renunciation.

The Prince of Soubise, in the manner of his King, a generous patron of the arts, had been allowing a handsome annual pension to a number of dancers at the Opera, as well as treating them all to periodical supper-parties of most sumptuous kind. Suddenly the supper-parties ceased, the Prince was no longer seen among the audiences at the Opera and it came to be known that his son-in-law, the Prince de Gueméné, had become bankrupt, disastrously so, and that the entire family were doing their best to meet the creditors honourably. When this was known all the dancers foregathered in Madeleine’s _loge_ at the Opera and a stately, kindly, tactful letter was drawn up and signed by all the _pensionnaires_, some thirty or more, headed by Guimard. The length of it precludes entire quotation in a chapter all too short to cover Madeleine’s crowded seventy-three years, but after referring to their regret at the Prince’s absence, to a delay in approaching him due to fear lest they be thought wanting in consideration, and to the urgent motive which had overcome such delicate scruples on hearing the news of the bankruptcy confirmed on all sides, the writers of the letter proceed that, finding there can be no prospect of the position improving, they feel they would be guilty of ingratitude were they not to imitate the Prince’s exemplary renunciations on behalf of his relative, and restore the pensions with which his generosity had provided them. “Apply,” the letter continues, “these revenues, Monseigneur, to the relief of so many old soldiers, poor men of letters, and such unhappy retainers as the Prince de Gueméné draws with him in his downfall. As for us, other resources remain. We shall have lost nothing, Monseigneur, if we retain your esteem. We shall even have gained if in refusing to-day your kindly gifts we force our detractors to acknowledge that we were not unworthy of them. We are, with deep respect, Monseigneur, your Serene Highness’s very humble servants, Guimard, Heinel, Peslin, Dorival, etc., etc.” The letter is dated 6th December, 1782.

It was now that Guimard was paying periodical summer visits to London for the Opera seasons. Edmond de Goncourt in his monograph on the dancer gives two very interesting letters written by Guimard apropos to these London sojourns, one to Perregaux the Banker, dated 20th June, 1784, the other to M. de la Ferté, Director of the Académie, dated 26th May, (1786) and both addressed from No. 10, Pall Mall.

In the former she gives a spirited and amusing account of the way in which Gallini and Ravelli, then directing the Opera in London, had sought to take advantage of a fire at the old Opera House in order to break through the contract with Guimard by which she was to receive six hundred and fifty guineas for the season. The fire seemed at first likely to put a closure on the season, but Covent Garden was placed at the disposal of the Opera. Gallini, making alleged losses the excuse, tried to persuade Madeleine to lower her terms for the rest of the season. Finding she would only agree to providing her own costumes--no light consideration--he pretended satisfaction and departed. Ravelli, however, followed and, evidently by arrangement, informed her that Gallini was several kinds of idiot, and that he had been deposed in favour of Ravelli who, as the new stage-manager, came to offer her fresh terms--twenty-five louis a performance, on behalf of Gallini.

Guimard smiled and expressed astonishment that Ravelli should make such propositions from Gallini since the latter was no longer in power, and added that she held them to her contract. When she turned up at rehearsal with a couple of witnesses and having consulted solicitors, Ravelli “looked green” and Gallini “stupefied.” They offered fresh proposals and tried hard to wriggle out of their contract but Guimard won, of course, and the more so in that though her chief friends among the English aristocracy, notably the Duchess of Devonshire, were out of town, enough were left to make things uncomfortable for Gallini, who found his conduct the talk of the town.

The second letter, to M. la Ferté, is mainly good advice on the direction of the Opera and encouragement of rising talent, and for this giving of counsel she begs that he will excuse her since it is out of friendship for him and also on account of her desire, in her own words, “_ne pas voir détruire entièrement la belle danse, que j’ai vu exister à l’Opéra_.” In both letters she sends--in the inevitable postscript!--charming messages to the wives of her correspondents and mentions some little commissions with which they had entrusted her.

That she did not have a bad time in London may be gathered from the fact that she excuses herself for not having written sooner because since she arrived in town she had not been left a minute to herself by “_les plus grandes dames_,” and principally by the Duchess of Devonshire with whom she spent most of the time that she had away from the theatre; and of the London audiences generally she remarks: “_Ils m’aiment à la folie, ces bons Anglais!_” Not the first time a charming foreign dancer has been beloved of “_ces bons Anglais!_”

But with all the friendship of the great and the love of the populace and her six hundred and fifty guineas for the London season, Guimard’s financial position was not what it had been. The Soubise pension had been relinquished; that she received from the King in view of twenty years’ service at the Opera hardly sufficed her rather magnificent requirements, and the time came, in 1786, when she found it convenient to dispose of her mansion in the Chaussée d’Antin. This she did by arranging, without police sanction, a lottery, the tickets for which numbered two thousand five hundred, at a hundred and twenty livres each, a total sum of three hundred thousand livres. There was a fierce demand for the tickets, and twice the number could have been sold. The drawing took place in a salon of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, Rue Bergère, on the 1st of May, 1786, and Madeleine’s mansion with all its furniture went to the Comtesse du Lau, who, by the way, had only taken one ticket!

It is worth noting now that Madeleine had reached the age of forty-three, that she had never been pretty and that she was marked with smallpox, with which--a current danger at those times--she had been attacked in 1783. To a clever and magnetic personality age matters not, nor do looks mean everything since in any case they are bound to alter in the course of a few decades; and even smallpox is not fatal to fascination. But these things, nevertheless, have to be admitted when one comes to years of discretion, and forty-three may be accounted such. One wonders whether Madeleine, who was eminently a woman of sense, began about now to face facts and the future, and whether the doing so, or else mere circumstances, political and social, impelled her to the next step in her career.

People had wondered how Guimard had managed to keep exactly the same appearance for so many years. This was the secret! When she was twenty she had a portrait painted that was true to life and afterwards, for some twenty years or so, every morning she would study this and make herself up to resemble it exactly; and neither lover nor friend was ever admitted to this toilette.

This was an ingenious idea, but it could not last for ever. It is all the more interesting then to note the next important incident in Guimard’s career. Ninon de l’Enclos, acting on the principle that it’s never too late to have a lover, flirted when she was ninety. Guimard gave up lovers when she was past forty and took a husband, a man, moreover, whom she had known for years.

In 1789, Guimard retired from the Opera; in 1789 she married Jean Despréaux, dancer and poet; and in 1789 the gathering storms of Revolution broke and Paris, smitten first by famine, became for the next few years a hell, in which strangely enough, there was still a demand for entertainment lighter and less fervid than massacre.

When Guimard and Despréaux--comrades for at least twenty-five years--married, they settled down, on a fairly comfortable income, derived from their pensions and acquired property, at Montmartre and one of Jean’s poems gives a charming picture of their retreat in those troubled times. But during the Revolution, State finances were in disorder, and pensions were curtailed or discontinued and all the old favourites of the Opera were more or less involved in difficulties. In 1792, the city of Paris having confided the care of the Opera to Francoeur and Celerier, they nominated Despréaux director of the theatre and a member of the administrative committee, but this did not last. The following year Francoeur and Celerier were imprisoned, the actors were authorised to manage the theatre themselves and Despréaux--whose father, by the way, who had been leader of the orchestra at the Opera, killed himself the same year from despair at the general ruin around him--was allotted some part in the management of the public fêtes.

In 1796--the year of the establishment of the Directory--Madeleine made a reappearance at a benefit given on January 23rd for the veteran performers at the Opera who had all suffered grievous losses in the Revolution. In 1807, three years after the crowning of Napoleon, by which time the national ferment had begun to settle down a little and the languished arts to take hope again, an Imperial decree dated July 29th, reduced the number of theatres in Paris to eight, and the Académie Impériale de Musique--as it was now called--had for Director, Picard, the comic poet, and for “inspecteur”--Despréaux.

But these casual and precarious employments were not enough to remedy the losses that husband and wife sustained in the lean and fevered years from 1789, when they settled down in their high-perched nest overlooking all Paris in Montmartre until 1807, when Despréaux became again attached to the Opera, and that this employment too did not last we know from a letter which Madeleine wrote to a friend in 1814 imploring him to use his influence with people at Court to obtain from Louis XVIII some position for her husband, a letter in which she mentions the loss of their entire fortune owing to the Revolution and pleads that “_nos besoins sont bien urgents_.”

There is then every probability that their needs really were urgent. Guimard had never been charged with thrift; and Despréaux was a poet. Both started married life with a fair capital--all things henceforth held in common of course, according to the law--but fortune was against them, and though they might perhaps have weathered the storm had they been twenty years younger, it was almost inevitable that, their pensions gone, their capital diminishing, they should find the struggle growing yearly harder and their chances of replenishing their coffers less and less. De Goncourt gives what one cannot but feel is a too idyllic picture of the last years of the old couple, mainly on the basis of Jean’s poems (and _he_ was ever an optimist!) but he also gives us one true, interesting, and poignant glimpse of Madeleine as an old lady who, with her toy theatre, would, for the amusement of friends who chanced to drop in, go through the scenes of former splendour and with her frail fingers perform the steps that had made her famous in many a ballet of the past.

Apparently Madeleine’s appeal to friends at Court must have had some success for Despréaux. In the following year, 1815, he was appointed inspector-general of the Court entertainments, and professor “_de danse et de grâces_” at the Conservatoire. But it is probable that only the last three or four years of their married life brought them any return of fortune.

Madeleine died on May 4th, 1816, and, for years out of sight of a public which had long had other and less gracious objects for thought, her death passed almost unnoticed by the populace for whose amusement she had worked so loyally in her prime. Four years later, on March 26th, 1820, Despréaux followed her who had been his adored comrade for the greater portion of their lives. He had seen her, as little more than a child, win her earliest triumphs at the Opera, had seen her growing splendour as a woman of fashion, watched her through many years, danced with her, written for her and about her, seen her worst and best, and loved her well enough all through to wait till she would consent to marry him and with him retire from the stage they had so long adorned; and through the years, troublous for no fault of theirs, which followed their marriage, he cheered and consoled her for all she had relinquished, for the public worship all foregone, and for the neglect of the rising generation.

He it was who, though their means can hardly have permitted it, instituted the little _déjeuners_ and supper-parties of kindred spirits, where songs were written and ballads sung in praise of love and wine and “la Gloire”--the one cry of the French Romanticists; all, one may well think, to cheer his beloved whose charm and goodness, poet himself, he never ceased to sing.

All this could not have been had not Guimard, with all her faults had more reserves of goodness than her earlier circumstances can have given opportunity for developing. Guimard had been grand; Guimard had been gay; but through it all Guimard must have been good in heart, full of sympathy and courage and generous charities of mind and soul; and Despréaux, gentle, wise, humorous, idealistic, honest, must have found her so, to speak and write of her as he always did, with ardour and a kind of boyish awe, even after she had passed away. No note of discord marred their married years, and when Guimard came to make her exit from the stage of life, silently, with nothing but ghostly memories of applause, her comrade, well we may be sure, waited only with impatience for his cue to follow her.

GUIMARD SPEAKS

(Ætat. 70)

“Yes, ye may laugh at Mère Guimard, Laugh well, my girls, while laugh ye may! But none of ye will fare as far As I, who long have had my day. Time was when Paris all did pray Because I broke my arm! And yet Who now recalls my queen-like sway O’er those whom Death did not forget?

“Time on my visage many a scar Hath graven deep. No longer gay My voice, that once could make or mar The Minister who failed to pay Just tribute to my charms. Decay My once slim, rounded limbs doth fret; And scarce my feet could tread their way O’er those whom Death did not forget.

“Yet ere I dance to where they are, Take heed, my girls, the words I say! I had a power none might bar, A court that rivalled the array Of aught Versailles could best display, For at my Court Versailles was met! And still I triumph, old and grey, O’er those whom Death did not forget.

ENVOI

“‘Squelette des Grâces’ they called me! Yea, and now? Sans-graces! A mere ‘Squelette!’ But grace I _had_, and have, to-day O’er those whom Death did not forget.”