When I saw Talma come on to the stage I uttered a cry of astonishment. Oh yes I it was indeed the impassive mask of the man I had seen pass in his carriage, his head bent low on his breast, eight days before Ligny, whom I saw return the day following Waterloo. Many have tried since, with the aid of the green uniform, the grey overcoat and the little hat, to reproduce that antique medallion, that bronze, half Greek, half Roman; but not one of them, O Talma I possessed your lightning glance, with the calm and imperturbable countenance upon which neither the loss of a throne nor the death of thirty thousand men could imprint one single line of regret or trace of remorse. Those who have never seen Talma cannot imagine what he was: in him was the combination of three supreme qualities which I have never found elsewhere combined in one man—simplicity, power and poetry; it was impossible to be more magnificent, with the perfect grace of an actor; I mean that magnificence which has in it nothing personal attaching to the man, but which changes according to the characters of the heroes he is called upon to represent. It is impossible, I say, to find any actor so endowed with this type of magnificence as was Talma. Melancholy in Orestes, terrible in Néro, hideous in Gloucester, he could adapt his voice, his looks, his gestures to each character. Mademoiselle Mars was but the perfection of the graceful; Mademoiselle Rachel was but the imperfection of the beautiful; Talma was the ideally great. Actors lament that nothing of theirs survives themselves. O Talma! I was a child when on that solemn evening I saw you for the first time, as you came upon the stage and your gestures began, before that row of senators, your clients; well, of that first scene, not one of your actions is effaced from my memory, not one of your intonations is lost.... O Talma! I can see you still, when these four lines are uttered by Catiline:—
"Sur d'obscurs criminels qu'pargne ta clémence,
Je me tais; mais mon zèle eclaire ma prudence;
Le nom de Clodius sur la liste est omis,
C'est le plus dangereux de tous tes ennemis!"
I can see you still, Talma!—may your great spirit hear me and thrill with pleasure at not being forgotten!—I can see you still as with scornful smile upon your lips you slowly diminish the distance that separates you from your accuser; I can see and hear you still as you place your hand upon his shoulder, and, draped like one of the finest statues in Herculaneum or Pompeii, you utter these words to him, in the vibrating voice which could penetrate to the very depths of one's being:—
"Je n'examine pas si ta haine enhardie
Poursuit dans Clodius l'époux de Valérie;
Et si Catiline, par cet avis fatal,
Pretend servir ma cause ou punir un rival."
O Talma! your incisive and sonorous intonation took root in the hearts of all who heard you. It was indeed a fearfully ungrateful and barren soil which at that unpoetical period of the Empire was left you to cultivate, for, had you been disheartened by its sterility, there would have been nothing great, or fine, or wide-spreading, during all those thirty years in which you wore the Roman sandal or the Greek. Is it that the spirit of genius, with all its absorbing power, is mortal like that of the upas tree or the manchineel?
I should like to continue speaking of Sylla to the end of the play in order to render tribute to the prodigious talent Talma possessed, and to follow him in the twofold development of his creation of the rôle of Sylla and the details of that rôle. But what would be the good? Who is interested in these things nowadays? Who amuses himself by recalling thirty years after its extinction the intonation of an actor as he declaimed line or hemistich or word? What does it matter to M. Guizard, to M. Léon Faucher, to the President of the Republic, in what manner Talma replied to Lænas, when he was sent by the Roman populace to learn from Sylla the number of the condemned, and asked him—
"Combien en proscris-tu, Sylla?"
What matters it to those gentlemen to know how Talma uttered his
"Je ne sais pas!"
At the most, they can only remember the cadence of voice with which General Cavaignac pronounced those four words when he was asked how many people he had transported untried out of France. And let us remember that it is now but two years since the Dictator of 1848 uttered these four words, which richly deserve to hold a place in the annals of history beside those of Sylla. But though Talma was by turns simple, great, magnificent, it was in the abdication scene that he rose to actual sublimity. It is true that the abdication of Sylla recalled that at Fontainebleau, and, we repeat, we have no doubt that the resemblance between the modern and the ancient Dictator produced an immense impression upon the vulgar public. This opinion was held by the Censorship of 1821, which cut out these lines because they were supposed to refer in turn to Bonaparte, first consul, and Napoleon, the emperor.