Most diminutive of them all is the “Théâtre des Capucines,” whose auditorium is no larger than a private salon. This intime playhouse is frequented by the most exclusive audience to be found in Paris. Before the curtain rises it resembles a drawing-room filled with a society gathering for amateur theatricals. The walls of yellow brocade, with a delicate decoration of nasturtiums, gives it even more the air of a private drawing-room, and the tiny stage seems to have been erected for the occasion. Only when the curtain rises is the illusion dispelled, for at the Capucines the short comedies are rendered by many of the most celebrated players of the French stage.
Here the great Gémier plays “Daisy,” in which his portrayal of a race-track thief, jealous over his sweetheart Léa (Mademoiselle Carlier), is a masterpiece of character acting.
Other little comedies, like “Au Temps des Croisées,” by Guy de Maupassant, with Gallo in the principal rôle, and Viviane Lavergne and Max Dearly in “Chonchette,” with charming Thérèse Berka, leave little to wonder that the tiny Théâtre des Capucines is crowded nightly with the most intelligent of Parisian society.
I found my old friend the Baron after the play at Pousset’s beginning his midnight supper of “écrevisses” and beer, alone and in a grumbling mood.
“Ah! Ah! tant mieux! It is you, mon ami,” he cried. “Good, we shall have supper together. It is fortunate that I find you. Do you know,” he continued, motioning me to a seat beside him, “I have this evening been to such a bad play, Diable! It is a relief to get here. To rinse the eyes, as we say, from such a gloomy histoire! One goes to the theater to laugh, is it not, eh? Not to have what you call him—zee, zee blues.
“For three hours, my friend,” he continued, frowning at the memory of it, “for three hours, imaginez-vous, I have been following a lot of unhappy people into the horrors of Siberia. Those who survived until the last act were finally put to death or separated brutally from those dear to them. Many of them were blind. The heroine was forced to betray her lover, who was finally led to execution before her eyes. Sapristi!” and the Baron pounded his great fist on the table. Then, choking with laughter over the humorous side of it so that he dropped his monocle, he continued:
“It is to this I go to be amused, mon Dieu! I would rathzair be at a funeral!”
Here the garçon interrupted us with the cognac.
“Tell me, Baron,” I said, as we lighted our cigars, “what, in your opinion, has made the bouis-bouis become so popular with you Parisians? I have just come from the Capucines. It was not gloomy there, I assure you; the little house was as gay as a tulip patch and bubbling over with merriment.”
“Listen,” replied the Baron, putting his forefinger to his forehead impressively. “The success of the little theaters with short plays comes from the fact that nowadays a crisis has been reached in theatrical affairs. The public, as it is after all for them that plays are given, have put the author at his wits’ end to invent something new. The old actors who are too sure of themselves have become careless, and the young ones, in trying to create a personal genre, end in attaining a pose which, through its affectation, is always lacking in art.