PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY
A. S. A. I. Madame la princesse Mathilde,
sonnet improvisé
sur des rimes données sur un sujet choisi
LA VERANDAH
Sous cette verandah, peinte en vert d'espérance, On arrive et l'on part avec un souvenir Si doux, qu'on y voudrait aussitôt revenir Sous les fleurs des tropiques et les plantes de France.
Une main de déesse y guérit la souffrance, Au mérite modeste elle ouvre l'avenir. Elle sait couronner comme elle sait punir. Pour le génie elle est pleine de déférence.
Devant elle enhardi, l'esprit prime-sautier, Ainsi qu'Euphorion dansant sur la prairie, Peut, entre terre et ciel, se montrer tout entier.
Pour que son œil pétille et que sa lèvre rie Et que de toute humeur sa lèvre soit guérie, Il suffit d'un bon mot de son bouffon Gautier.
—THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.
The late Princess Mathilde Bonaparte meant many things to many people. Her ancestry, her marriage to Prince Demidoff, her political power at the Tuileries, her sympathetic patronage of artistic folk, her personal beauty, love affairs, and feminine caprices—all these serve the world as pleasing material for anecdotes. The Princess was fond of the theatre, and fonder still of a première when the play was written by one of her intimate circle. She was surrounded by a distinguished group of poets, painters, dramatists, novelists, and diplomats. De Morny called her "the man of the family." She was good to gaze upon, and she had intellect. After the death of Sainte-Beuve, the publication of her correspondence with that celebrated critic gave us a portrait of his friend. It occurs in Lettres de la Princesse:—
"The Princess has a high, noble forehead, and her light golden hair, leaving uncovered on each side broad, pure temples, is bound in wavy masses on the full, finely shaped neck. Her eyes, which are well set, are expressive rather than large, gleam with the affection of the thought of the moment, and are not of those which can either feign or conceal. The whole face indicates nobleness and dignity, and, as soon as it lights up, grace united to power, frankness, and goodness; sometimes, also, it expresses fire and ardour. The head, so finely poised and carried with such dignity, rises from a dazzling and magnificent bust, and is joined to shoulders of statuesque smoothness and perfection."
That description should cover a multitude of indiscretions, such as the publication of the letters. She had already given Taine his congé for his criticism of Napoleon in the Revue des Deux Mondes, She was the daughter of Jerome and Caroline of Wurttemberg and was as proud as Napoleon. She never forgave an offence, and Taine's conception of the First Consul as a superior bandit closed her doors upon him.
She stood with forced equanimity the first two of his masterly studies; at the third she exclaimed with true feminine finesse of cruelty:—
"Ah, I know what I shall do! I owe Mme. Taine a call. I shall leave my card with P.P.C., which will mean that I take leave of him forever. I cannot allow a friend to attack violently the head of my family, the man without whom I should perhaps be nothing but a little orange-vender on the bridge at Ajaccio." She put her threat into execution. Taine, shocked by the rupture, called on Renan. After hearing the tale without any comment but a sweet, ironical smile, Renan answered:—
" Cher ami, I have quarrelled with a much greater lady than the Princess Mathilde."
"With whom, then?"
"The Church," answered Renan, dryly.
Mathilde did not respect rank more than genius. She set her face against the free and easy democratic manners, and because of this disliked the American invasion—few of our countrymen crossed her doors. One night Edmond About was invited to her house, and during the trying moments before dinner he amused her with his wit. Suddenly the Count Nieuwerkerke appeared. "Go away," cried the novelist, "and let us be alone, you jealous fellow." The Princess arose, rang, and instructed the servant: "Conduct M. About to his carriage. He is not dining here to-night." And the man of the Broken Ear went away, his temper much ruffled.
In 1847 the Princess settled in Paris permanently. She had been divorced from the handsome, profligate Demidoff, and her allowance, a big one, had been given her by a decree from the Czar. Over Napoleon III she wielded great influence. Of him the De Goncourts said, "The Emperor would be an excellent somnambulist if only he had intervals of lucidity;" while Flaubert declared him to be clever because, knowing his ignorance, he had the wisdom to hold his tongue. The Empress Eugénie was always jealous of Mathilde's power with her imperial cousin. That she was at the latter's funeral is an illustration of life's topsy-turvy tricks. Eugénie was jealous also of the Castiglione, and the De Goncourts do not fail to register Constance's spiritual mot about the Emperor.
"If I had only resisted, to-day I should have been an Empress!"
This recalls the delightful answer made by Alfred de Musset to a famous actress of the Théâtre Français—is it necessary to give the name? Once the lady had said:—
"Monsieur de Musset, I hear you have boasted of being my lover." "I beg your pardon," answered the friend of Rachel and George Sand; "I have always boasted to the contrary."
The rupture of Mathilde Bonaparte and Sainte-Beuve took place in 1869. The brothers De Goncourt heard its details from the Princess. They found her still trembling from the stormy interview. "I shall never see him again—never again! I, who fell out with the Empress on his account!... He has gone over to the Temps, our personal enemies! Ah! I said to him, 'Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, listen! I am sorry you did not die last year, for I should then have mourned a friend.'"
She must have been difficult at times. She had a good opinion of her birth, wealth, position, and beauty. "Yes, I had a peculiar and most extraordinary complexion. I remember in Switzerland, when I was fourteen, they put a Bengal rose leaf on my cheek, and were unable to distinguish between the two."
On one occasion, when Edmond de Goncourt was openly rude to her at her Château Saint-Gratien, she, with her guests, sat stupefied. Later he apologized, tears in his eyes—he was a gallant, handsome gentleman—and he relates most ingenuously, "Suddenly she put her arms around me and kissed me on each cheek, saying, 'Of course I forgive you—you know how truly attached I am to you; I also, of late, have felt quite nervous and upset.'"
It was this passage that caused Henry James to shiver; not because of the fact, but the lack of tact. The De Goncourts were taken up by the Princess in 1862. Jules, the younger brother, died in 1870, literally killed by his devotion to literary art. The chiselling of the De Goncourt phrases was deadly to brain and body. It is little wonder that their novels, one after the other, until Germinie Lacerteux appeared, should have been indifferently received. As Alphonse Daudet, ever receptive and tender in his judgments of original work, wrote: "Novels such as had never been seen before; novels that were neither moulded upon Balzac nor diluted from George Sand, but novels made up of pictures,... with plot scarcely indicated, and great blanks between the chapters; real break-neck ditches for the bourgeois reader. To this add an entirely new style, full of surprises—a style from which all conventionality is banished, and which, by a studied originality of phrase and image, forbids any commonplace in the thought; and then the bewildering boldness, the perpetual uncoupling of words accustomed to march together like oxen dragging a plough, the earnest care in selection, the horror of saying all and anything; considering this, how can one be astonished that the De Goncourts were not immediately greeted by the applause of the common herd?"
The mystery of it is, Why should the De Goncourts have cared for the applause of that same bourgeois public they so despised, reviled, and held up to mockery in their books? Gautier, Zola, Daudet, had to work like galley slaves for a living; the two brothers and Flaubert were rich, as riches go with literary men; why, then, did they care whether they were popular or not? Was it because they were human, notwithstanding their theories of impassibility, perfection, and art for art's sake?
The Château Saint-Gratien was the Princess Mathilde's country home until her death. There she entertained, as entertained George Sand at Nohant, all her friends. Until his death, in 1896, Edmond de Goncourt was her privileged visitor. The work of the two brothers in eighteenth-century chronicles amused and interested her, especially their minute histories of such actresses as Du Barry, Sophie Arnold; and, earlier, great women like Mme. de Pompadour, the Duchess of Châteauroux; great painters, Watteau, Boucher, Latour, Greuze, Lancret, Fragonard; and stage favourites such as Mesdames Saint Huberty, Clairon, and La Guimard.
The brothers introduced Japanese art into France. They were amateurs of the exquisite. Their house at Auteuil was truly "la maison d'un artiste au XIX siècle." And consider the labour, acute, agonizing, and enormous, involved in the writing and production of their novels: Germinie, Madame Gervaisais, Renée Mauperin, Manette Salomon (which was the first novel of studio life, excepting Fromentin's Domenique, in France, and one that influenced Zola greatly in his L'œuvre and De Maupassant in his Strong as Death), Charles Demailly—a wonderful study of journalism in Paris, a true continuation of Balzac's Lucien Rubempré; Sœur Philomène; and, written by Edmond after the death of Jules, La Fille Elisa, Les Frères Zemganno, La Faustin, and Chérie. In addition, there are the nine volumes of the journal, a study of Gavarni, the master caricaturist; vaudevilles, pantomimes, letters, portraits, several plays, histories, études, an early novel En 18—, and miscellany amounting in all to over forty volumes. Yet this fraternal pair, because of their wealth and birth, are still contemptuously alluded to as "amateurs." Yes, amateurs, indeed, in the fullest sense of a misinterpreted word, amateurs of beautiful sensations, amateurs in their devotion to an ideal hopeless of attainment, amateurs who might well be patterned after in this age of hasty production, vulgar appeal to the sentimental, to the cheap and obvious. Aristocrats were the De Goncourts, yet their white fingers never faltered when they held the burin and engraved in indelible letters that first great naturalistic novel, Germinie Lacerteux, the tale of an unhappy servant.
Even their friend De Monselet pronounced it "sculptured slime," and, to the curiously inclined, interesting are the critiques of Brunetière; of Barbey D'Aurevilly?—who hacked away at everybody on general principles; of Renée Doumic, who always follows the lead of Brunetière; of Maurice Spronck, who declared that the brothers were victims of a malady known to psycho-physiologists as Audition colorée. But there were fairer critics. The studies of Zola, Daudet, Henri Ceard, Paul Bourget, Henry James, Emile Hennequin, the friendly words of Turgenev, that gentle Russian giant, the valuable suggestions of Flaubert—these were balm to the sensitive nature of Edmond de Goncourt. He lived to head a school—hitherto rather sterile, it must be confessed—and before his death he dowered an academy. (Ah, if all French literary men had but a moiety of Daudet's humour in the matter of academies!)
But the contribution of the De Goncourts to the novel will be lasting. They have one celebrated disciple, Karl Joris Huysmans, who began under their influence and has traced for himself over the "great highway so deeply dug out by Zola ... a parallel path in the air by which we may reach the Beyond and Afterward, to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic naturalism." In the last analysis Huysmans is an artistic stepson of the epileptic Dostoïevsky, greatest of all psychologists; and while he may have forgotten it, his first artistic springboard was the De Goncourts.
What Henrietta Maréchal accomplished despite its failure, was in the dialogue—modern, picturesque, and of the best style for the stage, because it set forth the particular turn of mind of each talker; and it was also the first attack on that stronghold of French dramatic tradition, the monotonous semi-chanting of the conservatoire-taught actor. Here was an elastic, natural dialogue, charged with turns of phrases taken up from the sidewalk, neologisms, slang—in a word, lifelike talk as opposed to the old stilted verbiage.
The play was a failure, of course, as we shall see, for extraneous reasons. The director of the Théâtre Français, M. Edouard Thierry, put it on, and after the sixth performance, during all of which the actors never heard their own voices because of the organized popular tumult, the play was withdrawn. On its publication in book form it sold better than its author's novels—a fact Zola notes with his accustomed scent for the perversity of mankind.
Yet, as Daudet declared, Henrietta Maréchal was throughout "a fine, bold, and novel production. And a short time after, the same people who had hooted it frantically applauded Heloise Paranquet and the Supplice d'une Femme, plays of rapid action going straight to their issue, like a train at full speed, and of which ... Henrietta Maréchal was the inspiration. And was not the first act, taking place in the opera ball, with its crowd, its abusive chaff, its masks joking and howling in pursuit of each other, that close approach to life and reality, ironic and real as a Gavarni sketch—was it not 'naturalism' on the stage fifteen years before the word 'naturalism' was invented?"
Daudet, with characteristic delicacy and fidelity to the theme, elsewhere describes a reading at Edmond de Goncourt's house of his Les Frères Zemganno—those fraternal heroes of the sawdust.
When the play was read to the members of the Comédie Française, Minister Rouher—who afterward distinguished himself so terribly in the Franco-Prussian War!—suggested to the trembling authors that the valiant girl, who assumes her mother's guilt and is shot dead by her enraged father, be wounded only, and marry her mother's lover! Charming, is it not? The suggestion was frowned down by Marshal Vaillant, an old soldier, who did not fear the smell of stage powder.
Written in 1863, Henrietta Maréchal was not produced until December 5, 1865, at the Comédie Française, and after its speedy withdrawal it was not revived until March 3, 1885, at the Odéon. In the preface to the De Goncourts' Théâtre, Edmond wrote of the painful struggles the pair endured to obtain a hearing. They composed a vaudeville, Sans Titre, which was not heard, and followed this by other attempts, during which they slowly attained some knowledge of dramatic construction, and in 1867 followed Henrietta Maréchal with a five-act prose drama called La Patrie en Danger. This was also read at the Française, in 1868, admired, and dropped. Edmond declared it superior to its predecessor. It deals with the epoch of the French Revolution, and need not concern us now.
Of interest is his declaration that in the novel he is a realist (he is really a modified romantic, with a romantic vocabulary, selecting for subjects modern themes); but in the drama he totally disagrees with Zola and his naturalistic formulas as applied to the theatre. They have dug up a letter he sent over a decade ago to M. Lothar, who made the German translation of La Faustin. It all is to be found in this preface of 1879. De Goncourt, who naturally ranks the drama below the novel as literature, upholds the conventions of the former. The drama is by its nature romantic and limited in scope. The monologues, asides, dénouements, sympathetic characters, and the rest must always endure. He does think, however, that reality may be brought nearer, and that literary language should give place to a style which will reveal the irregularity and abruptness of vital conversation. In this latter particular he has been a benefactor. Unnatural theatrical dialogue he slew with his supple, free, naturally coloured speech in Henrietta Maréchal. Stage talk should be, De Goncourt asserted, flowing and idiomatic—never bookish. The ball scene in Henrietta proves that the brothers could practise as well as preach.
It is a mistake, too, to think that their novels and plays are immoral or hinge always on the eternal triangle. Various passions are treated by them in their air-tight receiver; their methods of psychological evisceration recall the laboratory of an analytical chemist. In Germinie it is the degradation of a woman through weakness; in Madame Gervaisais—that Odyssey of a woman's soul—it is the mystic passion for religion; in Manette Salomon, art and woman and their dangers to the impressionable artistic temperament; Charles Demailly pictures the gulfs of despair into which the literary, the poetic soul may be plunged; Sœur Philomène shows the combat between religious vows and nature; and so on through a wide gamut. And these two nervous artists have been mockingly called maniacs, their work has been derided as inutile—that work which practically reconstructed the artistic life of the eighteenth century and discovered to itself the artistic soul of the nineteenth. If they had remained normal units of their class, they would have gambled, shot pigeons, sported mistresses, and dabbled in racing, drinking, and the other sterilities of fashionable life. They preferred art, and they were rewarded in the usual fashion. The singular thing is that they expected, ingenuous souls, encouragement from their world. Fame came only when Jules was dead and Edmond too old and embittered to appreciate it. The survivor saw his ideas appropriated by Zola and the younger crowd, and cheapened and coarsened beyond all likeness to the original. What, then, must have been the dismay and perplexity of the brothers when they heard the hissing, catcalls, groans, and yells of an organized clique sworn to kill Henriette Maréchal? The body of the house was not hostile; but politics, the Republican opposition to the patronage of the Bonapartes, aroused students on the other side of the Seine, and a scandalous scene, only equalled by the Parisian productions of Hernani and Tannhäuser, occurred. Strangely enough, Théophile Gautier, who had figured in the Hernani fracas, had written the prologue to Henrietta Maréchal, and spoke it without opposition from the malcontents, though he was the librarian of Princess Mathilde. Not a word could be heard in any of the scenes, and when Got, the comedian who played in the cast,—the rest were Delaunay, the Lafontaines, Arnould-Plessis, Bressant, and other distinguished artists,—appeared to announce, as was the custom, the authors' names, he stood for ten minutes unable to make himself heard in the terrific hubbub. The Journal of the brothers contains a minute account of the affair, and of their terror as they stood, pale, breathless, peeping out upon a disordered sea of human faces. After all, it is a joy, despite its frequent injustice, to see a community take its drama seriously and not merely as a first aid to digestion.
The De Goncourts had the satisfaction a few weeks later to hear Molière's Précieuses Ridicules hissed by the same mob believing that it was Henrietta Maréchal.
Reading this play to-day one can see that its novelties must have provoked hostility, though such critics as Jules Janin, Gautier, Sarcey, Uhlbach, Nestor Roqueplan, Paul de Saint-Victor, and others wrote impartial and enthusiastic criticisms. The middle-aged woman who loves a young man was not pleasing upon the boards, and her daughter's death at the pistol of her father caused a shudder; for it was the rank side of adultery exhibited without that pleasing gloze of sentiment so dear to the average Gallic playwright and public. Naturally politics caused the row, for Princess Mathilde had steered the play into the notice of M. Thierry. The speeches are too long and the action moves languidly. Perhaps, after he had surveyed the situation in a calmer mood, Edmond de Goncourt was impelled to write his preface espousing the methods of Meilhac and Halévy. He said, among other acute things, that the avarice in Molière's play, L'Avare, was "l'avarice bouffe" when compared with the powerful and compelling study made by Balzac of Père Grandet.
He also records the cynical remark of a well-known actress who, after listening to the æsthetic blague in a well-known literary group, broke forth with this apostrophe, "Vous êtes jeunes, vous autres, mais le théâtre au fond, mes enfants, c'est l'absinthe du mauvais lieu," and to his dying day Edmond de Goncourt called the theatre a place for the exercises of educated dogs or an exhibition of marionettes spouting their tirades. Between these extremes he thought there was a place where artistic spirit might be displayed in a dignified and beautiful style. But he never found that place, despite his poignant finale, when Henrietta declares that her mother's lover is her own.
Contrast this effective, if too heroic, dénouement with the cold cynicism of Maurice Donnay in L'Autre Danger, where a pure girl is forced by cruel circumstances to hear her mother's shame published, to learn the awful news that the man she loves is the lover of her mother, and, to cap this assault upon our nerves, the lover is made to marry the wretched girl so as to divert suspicion from the inhuman mother.
In the grip of his dark pessimism Edmond de Goncourt predicted that in fifty years the book would kill the theatre. It was about nine years later that Ernest Renan, according to Octave Uzanne, said one evening in conversation among friends, "Fifty years hence no one will open a book." Both prophecies are likely to come to naught. Bad books, bad plays, we shall always have with us. Life seems too brief for the larger cultivation of beautiful art.