Whilst the Théâtre-Français was waiting for the famous 1st of October, on which Hugo had engaged to provide the unnamed drama at which he was working, in place of Marion Delorme, they decided to rehearse Shakespeare's Othello, translated by Alfred de Vigny, which, in common with Henri III. and Marion Delorme, had been received with enthusiastic acclamation at its reading before the committee.
Alfred de Vigny completed the poetic trinity of the period, although his work was of a lower order: people talked of Hugo and Lamartine, or Lamartine and Hugo, and spoke of Alfred de Vigny as of the next rank. Alfred de Vigny possessed very little imagination, but he had a fine and correct style; he was known by his romance Cinq-Mars, which would only have met with a medium success had it appeared nowadays, but, coming as it did at a time of dearth in literature, it had a great run.
When Hugo read Marion Delorme de Vigny had whispered to his friends—this sort of thing is always said to one's friends—that Didier and Saverny, the two principal characters in the drama, were an imitation of Cinq-Mars and de Thou. But I am convinced that, when Hugo wrote his play, he never even thought of de Vigny's romance.
Besides the novel Cinq-Mars, de Vigny had composed several dainty little poems in the then current manner: Byron had set the fashion for this kind of poem. Among these five or six charming little poems were Eloa and Dolorida. Finally, he had just published an extremely touching elegy on two unhappy young people who had committed suicide at Montmorency, under cover of the noise of the music of a ball.
De Vigny was a very singular man; he was polite and affable and gentle in all his dealings, but he affected the most utter unworldliness—an affectation, moreover, that accorded perfectly with his charming face, its delicate and refined features, encased in long fair curly hair, making him look like a brother of the cherubim. De Vigny never descended to earthly things if he could avoid it; if perchance he folded his wings and rested on the peak of a mountain, it was a concession which he made to humanity, because, after all, it was useful to him when he held his brief intercourse with us. Hugo and I used to marvel greatly at his utter unconsciousness of the material needs of our nature, which many of us, Hugo and I among the number, satisfied not only without any feeling of shame but with a certain sensual enjoyment. None of us had ever surprised de Vigny at table. Dorval, who for seven years of her life had passed several hours a day with him, declared to us with an astonishment almost amounting to terror, that she had never even seen him eat a radish! Now even Proserpine, a goddess, was not so abstemious as that; carried off by Pluto to the lower regions, she had, from the first, in spite of the preoccupation of mind to which her unappetising sojourn had naturally disposed her, managed to eat seven pomegranate seeds! Nevertheless, these characteristics did not prevent de Vigny from being an agreeable companion, a gentleman to his finger-tips, always ready to do you a kindness and totally incapable of doing you a bad turn. Nobody exactly knew de Vigny's age; but, judging approximately, as it was known that de Vigny had served in the guards on the return of Louis XVIII., and supposing he was eighteen at the time he entered the service, say in 1815, he must have been thirty-two in 1829.
It will be observed that all these great revolutionaries were very young and that the revolutionary poets were very much like the three generals of the Revolution of whom I have, I believe, spoken, who commanded the army of Sambre-et-Meuse, and whose combined ages reckoned seventy years: Hoche, Marceau and my father.
The coming representation of Othello made a great stir. We all knew de Vigny's translation, and although we should have preferred to have been supported by national troops and a French general, rather than by this poetical condottiere, we realised that we must accept all the arms we could against our enemies, especially when such arms came from the arsenal of the great master of us all—Shakespeare. Mademoiselle Mars and Joanny were allotted the principal parts. They were powerful auxiliaries, but they were not precisely the kind we wanted. Mademoiselle Mars and Joanny looked a little awkward in the habiliments which (dramatically speaking) were not suitable to their figures. Mademoiselle Mars was a charming woman of the Empire period, refined, light, delicate, graceful, satirical, possessing none of the gentle, innocent melancholy of the Moor's mistress; and Joanny, with his retroussé nose à la Odry and his gestures with no grandeur or majesty in them, did not recall the gloomy and terrible lover of Desdemona. The part of Iago that Ducis had replaced by that of Pezarre, as one replaces a flesh-and-bone leg by a wooden one, fell to the lot of Perrier, and was to make its appearance in full daylight for the first time.
So the representation was looked forward to with much impatience; but, whilst awaiting this solemn occasion, which, as we have mentioned, was to take place at the Théâtre-Français, another production was being prepared at the Odéon which was of special importance to me, namely, the Christine à Fontainebleau by Frédéric Soulié. M. Brault's Christine died a few days after its birth, as I have said in due course, and had disappeared without leaving any trace!