Part 11 (1/2)
It would be difficult to paint the contrast between two characters in fewer words. In 1845, when Mdlle. Sylvanie Plessy seceded from the Comedie-Francaise, Regnier wrote a kind epistle, recommending her to come and explain matters either personally or by letter. ”Let your letter be kind and affectionate, and be sure that things will right themselves better than you expect.”
Samson also wrote, but simply to say that if she did not come back _at once_ all the terrors of the law would be invoked against her. Which was done. The Comedie-Francaise inst.i.tuted proceedings, claiming two hundred thousand francs damages, and twenty thousand francs ”a t.i.tre de provision.”[25] The court cast Mdlle. Plessy in six thousand francs _provision_, deferring judgment on the princ.i.p.al claim. Two years later Mdlle. Plessy returned and re-entered the fold. Thanks to Samson, she did not pay a single farthing of damages, and the Comedie bore the costs of the whole of the lawsuit.[26]
[Footnote 25: Damages claimed by one of the parties, pending the final verdict.--EDITOR.]
[Footnote 26: Curiously enough, it was emile Augier's ”Aventuriere” that caused Mdlle. Plessy's secession, just as it did thirty-five years later, in the case of Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt.--EDITOR.]
Both Samson and Regnier were very proud of their profession, but their pride showed itself in different ways. Regnier would have willingly made any one an actor--that is, a good actor; he was always teaching a great many amateurs, staging and superintending their performances. Samson, on the other hand, had no sympathy whatsoever with that kind of thing, and could rarely be induced to give it aid, but he was very anxious that every public speaker should study elocution. ”Eloquence and elocution are two different things,” he said; ”and the eloquent man who does not study elocution, is like an Apollo with a bad tailor, and who dresses without a looking-gla.s.s. I go further still, and say that every one ought to learn how to speak, not necessarily with the view of amusing his friends and acquaintances, but with the view of not annoying them. I am a busy man, but should be glad to devote three hours a week to teach the rising generation, and especially the humbler ones, how to speak.”
In connection with that wish of Samson, that every man whose duties compelled him, or who voluntarily undertook to speak in public, should be a trained elocutionist, I remember a curious story of which I was made the recipient quite by accident. It was in the year '60, one morning in the summer, that I happened to meet Samson in the Rue Vivienne. We exchanged a few words, shook hands, and each went his own way. In the afternoon I was sitting at Tortoni's, when a gentleman of about thirty-five came up to me. ”Monsieur,” he said, ”will you allow me to ask you a question?” ”Certainly, monsieur, if it be one I can answer,” I replied. ”I believe,” he said, ”that I saw you in the Rue Vivienne this morning talking to some one whose name I do not know, but to whom I am under great obligations. I was in a great hurry and in a cab, and before I could stop the cabman both of you had disappeared.
Will you mind telling me his name?” ”I recollect being in the Rue Vivienne and meeting with M. Samson of the Comedie-Francaise,” I answered. ”I thought so,” remarked my interlocutor. ”Allow me to thank you, monsieur.” With this he lifted his hat and went out.
The incident had slipped my memory altogether, when I was reminded of it by Samson himself, about three weeks afterwards, in the green-room of the Comedie-Francaise. I had been there but a few moments when he came in. ”You are the man who betrayed me,” he said with a chuckle. ”I have been cudgelling my brain for the last three weeks as to who it could have been, for I spoke to no less than half a dozen friends and acquaintances in the Rue Vivienne on the morning I met you, and they all wear imperials and moustaches. A nice thing you have done for me; you have burdened me with a grateful friend for the rest of my life!”
And then he told me the story, how two years before he had been at Granville during the end of the summer; how he had strolled into the Palais de Justice and heard the procureur-imperial make a speech for the prosecution, the delivery of which would have disgraced his most backward pupil at the Conservatoire. ”I was very angry with the fellow, and felt inclined to write him a letter, telling him that there was no need to torture the innocent audience, as well as the prisoner in the dock. I should have signed it. I do not know why I did not, but judge of my surprise when, the same evening at dinner, I found myself seated opposite him. I must have scowled at him, and he repaid scowl for scowl.
It appears that he was living at the hotel temporarily, while his wife and child were away. I need not tell you the high opinion our judges have of themselves, and I dare say he thought it the height of impertinence that I, a simple mortal, should stare at him. I soon came to the conclusion, however, that if I wanted to spare my fellow-creatures such an infliction as I had endured that day, I ought not to arouse the man's anger. So I looked more mild, then entered into conversation with him. You should have seen his face when I began to criticize his tone and gestures. But he evidently felt that I was somewhat of an authority on the subject, and at last I took him out on the beach and gave him a lesson in delivering a speech, and left him there without revealing my name. Next morning I went away, and never set eyes on him again until three weeks ago, when he left his card, asking for an interview. He is a very intelligent man, and has profited by the first lesson. During the three days he remained in Paris I gave him three more. He says that if ever I get into a sc.r.a.pe, he'll do better than defend me--prosecute me, and I'm sure to get off.”
I have never seen Samson give a lesson at the Conservatoire, but I was present at several of Regnier's, thanks to Auber, whom I knew very well, and who was the director, and to Regnier himself, who did not mind a stranger being present, provided he felt certain that the stranger was not a scoffer. I believe that Samson would have objected without reference to the stranger's disposition; at any rate, Auber hinted as much, so I did not prefer my request in a direct form.
I doubt, moreover, whether a lesson of Samson to his pupils would have been as interesting to the outsider as one of Regnier's. Of all the gifts that go to the making of a great actor, Regnier had naturally only two--taste and intelligence; the others were replaced by what, for want of a better term, one might call the tricks of the actor; their acquisition demanded constant study. For instance, Regnier's appearance off the stage was absolutely insignificant; his voice was naturally husky and indistinct, and, moreover, what the French call nasillarde, that is, produced through the nose. His features were far from mobile; the eyes were not without expression, but these never twinkled with merriment nor shone with pa.s.sion. Consequently, the smallest as well as largest effect necessary to the interpretation of a character had to be thought out carefully beforehand, and then to be tried over and over again materially. Each of his inflections had to be timed to a second; but when all this was accomplished, the picture presented by him was so perfect as to deceive the most experienced critic, let alone an audience, however intelligent. In fact, but for his own frank admission of all this, his contemporaries and posterity would have been never the wiser, for, to their honour be it said, his fellow-actors were so interested in watching him ”manipulate himself,” as they termed it, as to never breathe a word of it to the outside world. They all acknowledged that they had learned something from him during rehearsal.
For instance, in one of his best-known characters, that of the old servant in Madame de Girardin's ”La Joie fait peur,”[27] there is a scene which, as played by Regnier and Delaunay, looked to the spectator absolutely spontaneous. The smallest detail had been minutely regulated.
It is where the old retainer, while dusting the room, is talking to himself about his young master, Lieutenant Adrien Desaubiers, who is reported dead.
[Footnote 27: There are several English versions of the play, and I am under the impression that the late Tom Robertson was inspired by it when he adapted ”Caste.” I allude to that scene in the third act, where George d'Alroy returns unexpectedly and where Polly Eccles breaks the news to her sister.--EDITOR.]
”I can see him now,” says Noel, who cannot resign himself to the idea; ”I can see him now, as he used to come in from his long walks, tired, starving, and shouting before he was fairly into the house. 'Here I am, my good Noel; I am dying with hunger. Quick! an omelette.'” At that moment the young lieutenant enters the room, and having heard Noel's last sentence, repeats it word for word.
Short as was the sentence, it had been arranged that Delaunay should virtually cut it into four parts.
At the words, ”_It is I_,” Regnier s.h.i.+vered from head to foot; at ”_Here I am, my good Noel_,” he lifted his eyes heavenwards, to make sure that the voice did not come from there, and that he was not labouring under a kind of hallucination; at the words, ”_I am dying with hunger_,” he came to the conclusion that it was a real human voice after all; and at the final, ”_Quick! an omelette_,” he turned round quickly, and fell like a log into the young fellow's arms.
I repeat, the whole of the scene had been timed to the fraction of a second; nevertheless, on the first night, Regnier, nervous as all great actors are on such occasions, forgot all about his own arrangements, and, at the first sound of Delaunay's voice, was so overcome with emotion that he literally tumbled against the latter, who of course was not prepared to bear him up, and had all his work to do to keep himself from falling also. Meanwhile Regnier lay stretched at full length on the stage, and the house broke into tumultuous applause.
”That was magnificent,” said Delaunay after the performance. ”Suppose we repeat the thing to-morrow?”
But Regnier would not hear of it; he stuck to his original conception in four tempi. He preferred trusting to his art rather than to the frank promptings of nature.
That is why a lesson of Regnier to his pupils was so interesting to the outsider. The latter was, as it were, initiated into all the resources the great actor has at his command wherewith to produce his illusion upon the public. Among Regnier's pupils those were his favourites who never allowed themselves to be carried away by their feelings, and who trusted to these resources as indicated to them by their tutor. He was to a certain extent doubtful of the others. ”Feelings vary; effects intelligently conceived, studied, and carried out ought never to vary,”
he said. Consequently it became one of his theories that those most plentifully endowed with natural gifts were not likely to become more perfect than those who had been treated n.i.g.g.ardly in that respect, provided the vocation and the perseverance were there. The reverse of Samson, who was proudest of Rachel, Regnier was never half as proud of M. Coquelin as of others who had given him far more trouble. Augustine Brohan explained the feeling in her own inimitable way: ”Regnier est comme le grand seigneur qui s'enamourache d'une paysanne a qui il faut tout enseigner; si moi j'etais homme, j'aimerais mieux une demoiselle de bonne famille, qui n'aurait pas besoin de tant d'enseignement.”
Mdlle. Brohan exaggerated a little bit. Regnier's pupils were not peasant children, to whom he had to teach everything; a great many, like Coquelin, required very little teaching, and all the others had the receptive qualities which make teaching a pleasure. The latter, boys and girls, had to a certain extent become like Regnier himself, ”bundles of tricks,” and, what is perhaps not so surprising to students of psychology and physiology, their features had contracted a certain likeness to his. At the first blush one might have mistaken them for his children. And they might have been, for the patience he had with them.
It was rarely exhausted, but he now and then seemed to be waiting for a new supply. At such times there was a frantic clutch at the shock, grey-haired head, or else a violent blowing of the perky nose in a large crimson chequered handkerchief, its owner standing all the while on one leg; the att.i.tude was irresistibly comic, but the pupils were used to it, and not a muscle of their faces moved.
Those who imagine that Regnier's courses were merely so many lessons of elocution and gesticulation would be altogether mistaken. Regnier, unlike many of his great fellow-actors of that period, had received a good education: he had been articled to an architect, he had even dabbled in painting, and there were few historical personages into whose characters he had not a thorough insight. He was a fair authority upon costume and manners of the Middle Ages, and his acquaintance with Roman and Greek antiquities would have done credit to many a professor. He was called ”le comedien savant” and ”le savant comedien.” As such, whenever a pupil failed to grasp the social or political importance of one of the _dramatis personae_ of Racine's or Corneille's play, there was sure to be a disquisition, telling the youngster all about him, but in a way such as to secure the attention of the listener--a way that might have aroused the envy of a university lecturer. The dry bones of history were clothed by a man with an eye for the picturesque.
”Who do you think Augustus was?” he said one day when I was present, to the pupil, who was declaiming some lines of ”Cinna.” ”Do you think he was the concierge or le commissionnaire du coin?” And forthwith there was a sketch of Augustus. Absolutely quivering with life, he led his listener through the streets of Rome, entered the palace with him, and once there, became Augustus himself. After such a scene he would frequently descend the few steps of the platform and drop into his armchair, exhausted.
Every now and then, in connection with some character of Moliere or Regnard, there would be an anecdote of the great interpreter of the character, but an anecdote enacted, after which the eyes would fill with tears, and the ample chequered handkerchief come into requisition once more.