[CHAPTER XIII]
Collaboration—A whim of Bocage—Anicet Bourgeois—Teresa—Drama at the Opéra-Comique—Laferrière and the eruption of Vesuvius—Mélingue—Fancy-dress ball at the Tuileries—The place de Grève and the barrière Saint-Jacques—The death penalty
During the interval which had elapsed between the construction of Richard Darlington its first performance, I had blocked out another play entitled Teresa. I have said what I thought of Charles VII.; I hope that my collaborator Anicet will allow me to say the same in the case of Teresa. I have no wish to defer expressing my opinion upon this drama: it is one of my very worst, as Angèle, also done in collaboration with Anicet, is one of my best. The evil of a first collaboration is that it leads to a second; the man who has once collaborated is comparable to one who lets his finger-end be entrapped in a rolling press: after the finger the hand goes, then the arm and, finally, his whole body! Everything is drawn in—one goes in a man and one comes out a bit of iron wire.
One day Bocage came to see me with a singular idea in his head. As he had just played a man of thirty, in the character of Antony, he had got it into his head that he would do well to play an old man of sixty; it mattered little to him what manner of man it might be. The old man in Hernani and in Marion Delorme rose up before him during his sleep and haunted him in his waking hours: he wanted to play an old man, were it Don Diègue in the Cid, Joad in Athalie or Lusignan in Zaïre. He had found his old man out at nurse with Anicet Bourgeois; he came to fetch me to be foster-father. I did not know Anicet; we became acquainted on this matter and at this time. Anicet had written the plan of Teresa. I began by laying aside the written sketch and begging him to relate me the play. There is something more living and lifelike about a told story. To me a written plot is like a corpse, not a living thing; one may galvanise it but not give it life. Most of the play as it stands to-day was in Anicet's original plan. I was at once conscious of two things, the second of which caused me to overlook the first: namely, that I could never make Teresa anything more than a mediocre play, but that I should do Bocage a good turn. And this is how I did Bocage that service.
Harel, as we have said, had gone from the management of the Odéon to that of the Porte-Saint-Martin. He had Frédérick, Lockroy, Ligier: Bocage was no use to him. So he had broken with him, and, in consequence of this rupture, Bocage found himself without an engagement. Liberty, in the case of an actor, is not always a gift of the gods. Bocage was anxious to put an end to this as soon as possible, and, thanks to my drama, he hoped soon to lose his liberty. That is why he treated Teresa so enthusiastically as a chef d'œuvre. I have ever been less able to resist unspoken arguments than spoken ones. I understood the situation. I had had need of Bocage; he had played Antony admirably, and by so doing had rendered me eminent service: I could now do him a good turn, and I therefore undertook to write Teresa. Not that Teresa was entirely without merit as a work. Besides the three artificial characters of Teresa, Arthur and Paolo, there were two excellent parts, those of Amélie and Delaunay. Amélie is a flower from the same garden as Miranda in The Tempest, Thekla in Wallenstein and Claire in Comte d'Egmont; she is young, chaste and beautiful, and, at the same time, natural and poetic; she passes through the play with her bouquet of orange blossom at her side, her betrothal veil on her head, in the midst of the ignoble incestuous passion of Arthur and Teresa, without guessing or suspecting or understanding anything of it. She is like a crystal statue which cannot see through others but lets others see through it. Delaunay is a fine type, a little too much copied from Danville in the École de Vieillards, and from Duresnel in the Mère et la Fille. However—one must be just to everyone, even to oneself,—there are two scenes in his part which reach to the greatest heights of beauty to be met with on the stage: the first is where he insults Arthur, when the secret of the adultery is revealed to him; the second is where, learning that his daughter is enciente, and not desiring to make the mother a widow and the child an orphan, he makes excuses to his son-in-law. The drama was begun and almost finished in three weeks or a month; but I made the same condition with Anicet which I have always made when working in collaboration, namely, that I alone should write the play. When the drama was completed, Bocage took it, and we did not trouble our heads further about it. For three weeks or a month I did not see Bocage again. At the end of that time he came to me.
"Our business is settled," he said.
"Good! And how?"