Regnier was chagrined. “Malfaiteurs,” he called the judges. And some of the newspaper comment showed a recognition of unusual merit in the young Réjane. Sarcey, the reigning king of the Paris critics, had again been present, and Le Temps rang with his praises of her. And his praises were perhaps better than official prizes. A score of years later, M. Meunier wrote:
“To-day, as then, though twenty years have passed, there is no possibility of success, no chance of getting an engagement, for a pupil on leaving the Conservatoire, unless a certain all-powerful critic, supreme judge, arbiter beyond appeal, sees fit to pronounce a decision confirming the verdict of the Examining Jury.... He smiles or frowns, the Jury bows its head. The pupils tremble before this monstrous Fetich—for the Public thinks with him, and sees only through his spectacles; and no star can shine till his short sight has discovered it. This puissant astronomer is Monsieur Francisque Sarcey....
“Monsieur Sarcey smiled upon and applauded Réjane’s début at the Conservatoire. He consecrated to her as many as fifty lines of intelligent criticism; and I pray to Heaven they may be remembered to his credit on the Day of Judgment. Here they are, in that two-penny, half-penny style of his, so dear to the readers of Le Temps:
“‘I own that, for my part, I should have willingly awarded to the latter (Mlle. Réjane) a first prize. It seems to me that she deserved it. But the Jury is frequently influenced by extrinsic and private motives, into which it is not permitted to pry. A first prize carries with it the right of entrance into the Comédie Française; and the Jury did not think Mademoiselle Réjane, with her little wide-awake face, suited to the vast frame of the House of Molière. That is well enough; but the second prize which it awarded her authorized the director of the Odéon to receive her into his company; and that perspective alone ought to have sufficed to dissuade the Jury from the course it took.... Every one knows that at present the Odéon is, for a beginner, a most indifferent school.... Instead of shoving its promising pupils into it by the shoulders, the Conservatoire should forbid them to approach it, lest they should be lost there. What will Mademoiselle Réjane do at the Odéon? Show her legs in La Jeunnesse de Louis XIV, which is to be revived at the opening of the season? A pretty state of things. She must either go to the Vaudeville or to the Gymnase. It is there that she will form herself; it is there that she will learn her trade, show what she is capable of, and prepare herself for the Comédie Française, if she is ever to enter it.... She recited a fragment from Les Trois Sultanes.... I was delighted by her choice. Les Trois Sultanes is so little known nowadays.... What wit there is in her look, her smile! With her small eyes, shrewd and piercing, with her little face thrust forward, she has so knowing an air, one is inclined to smile at the mere sight of her. Does she perhaps show a little too much assurance? What of it? ’Tis the result of excessive timidity. But she laughs with such good grace, she has so fresh and true a voice, she articulates so clearly, she seems so happy to be alone and to have talent, that involuntarily one thinks of Chenier’s line: “Sa bienvenue au jour lui rit dans tous les yeux.”... I shall be surprised if she does not make her way.’”
Second prize or first, it mattered not, really; for she had, almost at once, offers from three theatres: the Odéon, the government theatre that by the conditions of the award had a right to her services, and also from the Vaudeville and the Gymnase. M. Duquesnel of the Odéon proposed, as Sarcey had predicted, that she take a part in the impending La Jeunesse de Louis XIV. Réjane, however, declined to cut short her studies at the Conservatoire, which had yet a few weeks to run.
Her choice fell to the Vaudeville, as the theatre best suiting her methods and sympathies. Also, the pay there was to be four thousand francs per year, and costumes, as against one hundred and fifty francs per month at the Odéon. With the directors of the Vaudeville she signed a provisional contract, by the terms of which she was to join their forces if the Odéon did not press home its claim to her. Weeks passed, the October openings came round, and still there was no summons. In her anxiety she went to the office of the Minister of Fine Arts and from him obtained a letter releasing her, in two days’ time, from her obligations to the Odéon. Before the two days were up, however, she received from Duquesnel a summons to a rehearsal of La Jeunnesse. Réjane hastened to see him. “Well,” he said, “we shall rehearse to-morrow at one.” Réjane replied that she had one at the Vaudeville at the same hour. Duquesnel objected to the loss of his promising recruit and showed an official letter bestowing her services upon the Odéon. Gabrielle in turn showed the letter from the Minister. Duquesnel was forced to yield, but afterwards lodged a suit in which the Odéon was awarded damages. “So,” said Réjane to Jules Huret, “if the Odéon can to-day boast its velvet chairs, it has me to thank for them.”
And so Réjane began her career, when she was less than eighteen, with a two years’ engagement at the Vaudeville. Her first few rôles[98] were unimportant, and in them she attracted no particular notice, but in September (1875) she appeared in Madame Lili, a one-act play in verse, to such good purpose that Sarcey wrote of her: “Mademoiselle Réjane is charming, with her roguery, her ingenuousness, her tenderness. This pretty and piquant girl is spirited to her fingertips. What a piece of good luck it is that she cannot sing; for if she had a voice operetta would gobble her up.”
Yet Regnier wrote to her in the following April, on the day following her appearance in Le Premier Tapis (in which she sang an interpolated song by Lecocq): “I was really astonished by your singing. You had better cultivate this talent, which I didn’t know you had.” Offenbach also heard her in this piece, and liked her singing so well that he offered her twenty thousand francs a year for her signature to a contract at the Variétés. Luckily she made no attempt to break her contract with the Vaudeville.
That contract she renewed again and again until she had played eight seasons at the theatre of her first choice. The best guide to her growing art, and to the beginnings of her fame, are found in her letters from Regnier, who followed her career with loving watchfulness, and often with frank, kindly comment on her work. Their correspondence forms a charming chapter of her youth.
Regnier’s birthday fell on the first of April. Every year Réjane wrote to him on March 31 and sent him some small gift. In the year when she was beginning her work at the Vaudeville he wrote her: