Non, je ne crois pas, moi,
Que tout soit terminé quand on n’a plus de roi;
C’est le commencement.
As Chevilly concluded these words, he stared in inexpressible surprise at Glatigny, and exclaiming: ‘What, you here!’ shook him cordially by the hand, as if both were in a private room, and not in the presence of a very much perplexed audience. The audience did not get out of their perplexity by finding that Ponsard’s play was altogether forgotten, and that the two players began talking of their private affairs, walking up and down the stage the while, as if they had been on the boulevards or in the gardens of the Tuileries. At length, said Glatigny, ‘I am afraid, that I perhaps intrude?’ ‘Not at all!’ said Chevilly. ‘I am sure I do,’ rejoined Glatigny, ‘so farewell. When you have finished, you will find me at the café, next door.’ The eccentric player had reached the wing, when he returned, saying: ‘By-the-by, before we part, shall we sing together a little couplet de facture?’ ‘With all my heart,’ was the reply; and both of them, standing before the foot-lights, sang a verse from some old vaudeville, on the pleasure of old friends meeting unexpectedly, and which used to bring the curtain down with applause.
At this duet, the public entered into the joke—they could not hiss, for laughing,—and the most joyous uproar reigned amongst them, till Glatigny retired as if nothing had happened, and Chevilly attempted seriously to resume his part in ‘Charlotte Corday.’
There was a serious as well as a comic tinge in Glatigny’s experiences. On one morning in February, 1869, some country folk, returning from the market at Tarbes, saw a man stretched fast asleep on the steps of the theatre. It was early dawn, and snow was gently falling. The peasants shook the sleeper, told him, when half awake, of the danger he was in by thus exposing himself, and asked him what he was doing there? ‘Well,’ said Glatigny, ‘I am waiting for the manager;’ he turned round to go to sleep again, and the country folk left him to his fate. Later in the day, he shook himself, by way of toilet and breakfast, and made his call upon the manager. ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Albert Glatigny. I am a comedian and a poet. At the present moment, I have no money, but am terribly hungry. Have you any vacancy in your company, leading tragedian or lamp-cleaner?’ The manager asked him if he was perfect in the part of Pylades. ‘Thoroughly so!’ was the answer. ‘All the better,’ said the manager; ‘we play “Andromaque,” to-night; my Pylades is ill. You will replace him. Good morning!’
When the evening came, Glatigny put on the Greek costume, and entered on the stage, without knowing a single line of his part. That was nothing. When his turn came, he improvised a little reply to Pyrrhus. Glatigny now and then had a line too short by a syllable or two, but he made up for it by putting a syllable or two over measure in the line that followed. He knew the bearing of the story, and he improvised as naturally as if he were taking part in a conversation. The audience was not aware of anything unusual. The manager who, at first, was ready to tear his hair from his head, wisely let Glatigny take his own course, and when the play was ended he offered the eccentric fellow an engagement, at the stupendous salary of sixty francs a month!
Never was there a man who led a more unstable and wandering life. One day, he would seem fixed in Paris; the week after he was established in Corsica; and after disappearing from the world that knew him, he would turn up again at the Café de Suède, with wonderful stories of his errant experiences. With all his mad ways there was no lack of method in Glatigny’s mind when he chose to discipline it. French critics speak with much favour of the grace and sweetness of his verses, and quote charming lines from his comedy, ‘Le Bois,’ which was successfully acted at the Odéon. Glatigny had a hard life withal. It was for bread that he became a strolling player,—that he gave some performances at the Alcazar, as an improvisatore—and, finally, that he woke up one fine morning, with republican opinions.
Probably not a few play-goers among us who were in Paris in 1849 will forget the first representation of ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur,’ in the April of that year. Among the persons of the drama was the Abbé de Chazeuil, which was represented by M. Leroux, and well represented; a perfect abbé de boudoir, loving his neighbour’s wife, and projecting a revolution by denouncing the fashion of wearing patches! M. Leroux, like Michonnet in the play, was eager to become a sociétaire of the Théâtre Français, but (like poor Firmin, whose memory was not so blameless as his style and genius—and who committed suicide, like Nourrit, by flinging himself out of the window of an upper storey) Leroux was not a ‘quick study,’ and, year by year, he fell into the background, and had fewer parts assigned to him. The actor complained. The answer was that his memory was not to be trusted. He rejoined that it had never been trustworthy, and yet he had got on, in a certain sense, without it. The rejoinder was not accepted as satisfactory. The oblivious player (with all his talent) fell into oblivion. He not only was not cast for new parts, but many of his old ones that he had really got by heart were consigned to other members of the company. Leroux was, before all things, a Parisian, and yet, in disgust, he abandoned Paris. He wandered through the provinces, found his way to Algiers, and there, after going deeper and deeper still, did not forget one thing for which he had been cast in the drama of life—namely, his final exit.
Political feeling has often led to eccentric results on, and in front of, the French stage. With all the Imperial patronage of the drama, the public never lost an opportunity of laughing at the vices of the Imperial régime. When Ponsard’s ‘Lucréce’ was revived at the Odéon, the public were simply bored by Lucretia’s platitudes at home and the prosings of her husband in the camp. But when Brutus abused the Senate, and scathing sarcasm was flashed against the extravagance of the women of the court, and their costume, the pit especially, the house generally, burst forth into a shout of recognition and derision. It is to be observed that the acute Emperor himself often led the applause on passages which bore political allusions, and which denounced tyranny in supreme lords or in their subordinates. When the Emperor did not take the initiative, the people did. At the first representation of Augier’s ‘La Contagion,’ there was a satirical passage against England. The audience accepted it with laughter; but when the actor added: ‘After all, the English are our best friends, and are a free people!’ the phrase was received with a thundering Bravo! from the famous Pipe-en-bois, who sat, wild and dishevelled, in the middle of the pit, and whose exclamation aroused tumultuous echoes. At another passage, ‘There comes a time when baffled truths are affirmed by thunder-claps!’ the audience tried to encore the phrase. M. Got was too well-trained an actor to be guilty of obeying, but the house shouted, ‘Vivent les coups de tonnerre!’ ‘Thunder-claps for ever!’ and the passive Cæsar looked cold and unmoved across that turbulent pit.