Pale, lean and stooping, as he rises to speak he resembles some sad, nocturnal crane. He seems like one who nursed his melancholy and lived during his waking hours in the moonlight.
As a young man he descended nightly from the heights of Montmartre, where he lived, to join a circle of bohemians at the Cabaret de la Bosse. Here he came into recognition by the recitations of his poems and soliloquies.
The verses of Rictus dwell in misanthropic bitterness upon the misery of poverty. They are filled with the soliloquies of a pessimist and a misanthrope. The bitter misery of his earlier years through which he was forced to struggle, has no doubt taken the sunlight out of his heart, and yet beneath the varnish of a crude and bourgeois vocabulary lies the timber of true genius. What if the grain is fantastically distorted by a weird imagination! It is prized all the more by the connoisseurs.
Poster by Dillon
JEHAN RICTUS
Another veteran of the cabarets is Louise France.
There is something suggestive of old Paris in this short, squat woman with her puffy haggard face and her tangled hair.
In the days of the Terror just such a one might have headed a mob gathered by her songs and her verses. It requires very little make-up to transform Louise France into her rôle of Frochard in “The Two Orphans” or into “Eva la Tomate” in “Mademoiselle Fifi.” Paris has not yet forgotten her famous characterization of the concierge in “La Voix du Peuple.”
Louise France has played at the Théâtre Libre, at the Porte St. Martin, and the Grand Guignol, the characters she knew, and she played them to the life with wonderful skill.