Part 5 (2/2)

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 Sevigne 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 Champmesle) and all the Despreaux 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, Despreaux. We lead him a sad life. Ye G.o.ds, what folly! Ye G.o.ds, what folly!”

From the above pa.s.sages, it would appear that Racine and his friend Boileau were not exactly in the odour of sanct.i.ty with their contemporaries; indeed, both were evidently regarded as corrupters of youth by anxious mothers like Madame de Sevigne.

Three weeks later, we learn that M. de Sevigne is not prospering in his love-affairs; Ninon has dismissed him, and Mlle. de Champmesle is on the point of following her example: ”A word or two concerning your brother.

Ninon has given him his _conge_. 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 G.o.d, 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 Champmesle) has not broken with him, but she will soon, I believe....

The poor Chimene 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 G.o.d and hurtful to his own soul. Ninon told him that he was a _pompion frica.s.seed in snow_. See what it is to keep good company! One learns such elegant expressions.”

Then, on April 17, Madame de Sevigne 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 pa.s.sionate; he wept, he died; he believed it all while he was writing it, and laughed at it a moment afterwards. I a.s.sure 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 Champmesle, 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 pa.s.se_), Racine, though deeply in love with Mlle. de Champmesle, supported patiently the numerous infidelities of the lady, ”so long as he believed them to be pa.s.sing 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--

”a la plus tendre amour elle fut destinee Qui prit longtemps Racine dans son cur: Mais, par un insigne malheur, Le _Tonnerre_ est venu, qui l'a _deracinee_”--

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

The brothers Parfaict and d'Allainval a.s.sert that disgust at his treatment at the hands of Mlle. de Champmesle was the immediate cause of Racine's retirement from dramatic authors.h.i.+p, at the age of thirty-eight, at the height of his talent, in the heyday of his success; for after _Phedre_ 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 Champmesle 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 _Phedre_ and the various annoyances to which it gave rise; the fear that a repet.i.tion 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. Champmesle'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 a.s.sert 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 _Iphigenies_ and _Phedres_, Mlle. de Champmesle had to resign herself to appear in such deservedly-forgotten plays as the _Achille_ of Thomas Corneille, the _Argelie_ of the Abbe 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'Ess.e.x_ (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 Champmesle and her husband quitted the Hotel de Bourgogne, where they had played for nineteen years, for the Theatre Guenegaud, which, by a contract dated April 12, awarded them, ”in grat.i.tude,” 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 princ.i.p.al cause of the fusion of the two troupes in the following year. Deprived of the services of the famous actress, the Hotel de Bourgogne was no longer able to cope with its powerful rivals in the Rue Mazarine.

On the formation of the new company, the Champmesles figured at the head of the list of the twenty-seven players nominated by Louis XIV., and Mlle. Champmesle was at once recognised as the mainstay of the theatre in tragedy, as Mlle. Moliere--or rather Mlle. Guerin, 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.

Guerin with one of her greatest triumphs, and he secured another success in his _Fragments de Moliere_, an amusing piece, in which various characters from Moliere's plays were introduced.

Mlle. de Champmesle'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 Moliere, 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 Champmesle persuaded her brother to return to France, and obtained from the King permission for him to be received into the Comedie-Francaise, ”_sans debut_.” 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 _Teramene_, an angry scene was apprehended; but the new _societaire's_ acting was so admirable that the hisses were soon drowned in a storm of applause.

When, in 1689, the Comedie-Francaise, ousted from the Rue Mazarine, migrated to its new home in the Rue Neuve-des-Fosses-Saint-Germain, Mlle. de Champmesle, 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 Abbe 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 pa.s.sages. 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 '_scene 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 _Phedre_, was, in truth, a most mediocre play, which clearly owed its phenomenal success to the religious nature of the subject and Mlle. de Champmesle's brilliant impersonation of the Judaean heroine. The indignation of the public against the unhappy abbe, 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 Champmesle, 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 Abbe Boileau.'”[55]

Mlle. de Champmesle 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 pa.s.sion 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 _Medee_, 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 a.s.serts ”drew as many tears as the _Iphigenie_ 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 Deshoulieres; 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 Champmesle.

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