Who was minister in England the year Shakespeare wrote Othello? Who was gonfalonier in Florence when Dante wrote his Inferno? Who was minister to King Hiero when the author of Prometheus came to beg protection from him? Who was archon of Athens when the divine Homer died on one of the Sporades, towards the middle of the tenth century B.C.?
To answer such queries one must needs be my neighbour,—my neighbour who knew so many things, who could recognise Elzevirs, who knew where vampires were to be found, who knew the origin of hired applauders and who had been put out of the theatre for whistling at the prose of MM.... for no name was ever printed on the Vampire pamphlet, published by Barba, who ostentatiously put below his name: Publisher of the Works of Pigault-Lebrun.
Let us return to Madame Allan-Dorval, as she was called at that period. As I advance with these Memoirs there are many men and women, literary or political comedians whom we shall meet with, who made a name for themselves in their day, and I shall do for these personages what I am just about to do for poor Marie Dorval. When she died I undertook to raise a monument over her grave—a literary monument in my writings, a sepulchral monument in stone. The stones were to be paid for by my literary labours, and it pleased me to think of being the architect of both monuments.
Unluckily, I began the erection of my literary monument in the Constitutionnel. At the second article, I referred to Antony and the old Constitutionnel. M. Véron's susceptibility took fright: the literary monument was arrested at its first attempt. And as the sepulchral monument depended on the literary monument, the sepulchral monument was never begun.
Some day we will take up this matter again, among many others we have been compelled to drop, and with God's help, and in spite of the ill-will of men, we will finish them.
The age of artistes is ever a problem that is never solved until after their death. I never learned Dorval's age until she died. She was born on Twelfth Night in the year 1798; so in 1823, when I was twenty, she was twenty-five. She did not call herself Marie Dorval then: those two names, so easy to pronounce that they seem always to have belonged to her, were not then linked to each other by the golden chain of genius. Her real name was Thomase-Amélie Delaunay: she was born close to the théâtre de Lorient and her earliest steps were patters across its boards. Her mother was an actress who took the part of leading singer. Camille ou le Souterrain was then the comic opera in vogue. The little maiden was rocked on the stage to these lines, which her mother could hardly sing save with tears in her eyes:—
"Oh! non, non, il n'est pas possible
D'avoir un plus aimable enfant!"
Directly she could talk, her lips stammered out the prose of Panard and Collé, Sedaine and Favart; at seven, she passed into what was called the emploi des Betsy. Her most popular air was in Sylvani—
"Je ne sais pas si mon cœur aime."
An artist at Lorient painted her portrait at that time—that is to say, in 1808. In 1839, Madame Dorval returned to Lorient, her native town. The day following a striking success, an old white-haired man came to call upon her to pay her his tribute. His offering was this painting of her as a child: a third of a century had passed by and the woman could not be recognised in it. To-day both painter and Madame Dorval are dead, but the portrait still continues to smile. It hung in Madame Dorval's bedroom. I saw it, for the first time, when I helped to close her eyes. It was a melancholy contrast, I need hardly say, to see the face of the rosy child in the picture confronting the livid face on the death-bed opposite. How many joys, hopes, disappointments and sorrows had passed between that childish smile and the death-agony! At twelve years of age little Delaunay left Lorient with the whole company. That was in 1810, when diligences did not traverse France in every direction: in those days railways had not yet carved their way through the valleys or tunnelled the mountains; if you wanted to go to Strassbourg—that is to say, to cross France from west to east—you had to club together and buy a large wicker carriage, and it took six weeks to go from the Ocean, to the Rhine.