“The curtain rises; Réjane makes her appearance, with her arms as red as those of a kitchen-girl. In the ball gown of a servant-maid she is indeed amazing. This little scene she plays well, and wins applause. In the scene of the fortifications, some of the hissers are in evidence before she enters; and then Réjane, so prettily modest, plays her idyllic scene so well that the delighted audience breaks into cries of ‘Bravo!, and the curtain is raised and raised again.... In one of the following scenes, some of the audience refuse to listen to Mme. Crosnier; she becomes confused, loses her head and begins over again. Some cry aloud, some laugh, some hiss. Without Réjane the piece will go on the rocks. A gesture, a poignant, sincere cry, and Réjane has the house with her again. They applaud her, they recall her again and again. During the entr’acte, there is a stormy time. Antoine is indignant over the sneering of his neighbors and calls them scoundrelly imbeciles. There is shaking of fists, challenges are exchanged, some hiss, others applaud. It is in this atmosphere that the scene in the creamery begins. Then it was that she quite won the house. She is again recalled again and again, applauded by the whole audience. She is acclaimed again, after the fall of the curtain in the scene of the Rue du Roiher. The ladies were completely upset; they wept, they clapped their hands. Even without Réjane, the two last scenes finished themselves somehow. After that, de Goncourt’s play was to live more than one night; and after that Réjane was assuredly a great comédienne.”
Two years later, when Ma Cousine, a comedy in three acts by Henri Meilbac, was produced, Paris saw that Réjane had again made extraordinary progress. “Playing,” says M. Huret, “in a vast auditorium, a rôle that demanded large dramatic power, she responded to that demand, and, exhibited new poise, control of voice, and exactness of articulation. She who had heretofore almost expired of apprehension at each new impersonation, was now calm, sure of herself, almost indifferent. She sensed the authority that had come to her; she held the audience in her hand. In Décoré, in Monsieur Betsy, she had been one of a remarkable trio of actresses; now, in Ma Cousine, she outshone her confrères at all points. The author had set her the difficult task of playing an act three quarters of an hour long without rising from her couch. But she was equal to the occasion, and, by the intelligence and sprightliness of her inflections, gestures and facial expression, she made that chair itself a miniature theatre.” It was in Ma Cousine that Réjane introduced on the boards of the Variétés, after careful study, a bit of dancing like that on view at the Elysée-Montmartre; “she seized on and imitated the grotesque effrontery of Mlle. Grille-d’Egout.” In other words the sprightly Gabrielle performed a veritable can-can.
A little later M. Meunier, who was not remarkable for his kindness in print to the dean of his craft, wrote: “Sarcey’s exultation knew no bounds when, in 1890, Réjane again appeared in Décoré. Time, that had metamorphosed the lissom critic of 1875 into a round and inert mass of solid flesh, cruel Father Time, gave back to Sarcey, for this occasion only, a flash of youthful fire, which stirred his wits to warmth and animation. He shouted out hardly articulate praise; he literally rolled in his stall with pleasure; his bald head blushed like an aurora borealis. ‘Look at her!’ he cried, ‘See her malicious smiles, her feline graces, listen to her reserved and biting diction; she is the very essence of the Parisienne! What an ovation she received! How they applauded her! and how she played!’ From M. Sarcey the laugh spreads; it thaws the skepticism of M. Jules Lemaître, engulfs the timidity of the public, becomes unanimous and universal, and is no longer to be silenced.”
The day of Réjane’s greatest and most lasting success came with the production, in 1893, of Madame Sans-Gêne, by Sardou, the latest of the Parisian dramatists to answer the call of the great comédienne in their midst.
“Just as the first dressmakers of Paris measure Réjane’s fine figure for the costumes of her various rôles, so the best writers of the French Academy now make plays to her measure,” wrote M. Meunier in 1894. “They take the size of her temperament, the height of her talent, the breadth of her acting; they consider her taste, they flatter her mood; they clothe her with the richest draperies she can covet. Their imagination, their fancy, their cleverness, are all put at her service. The leaders in this industry have hitherto been Messrs. Meilhac and Halévy, but now M. Victorien Sardou is ruining them. Madame Sans-Gêne is certainly, of all the rôles Réjane has played, that best suited to bring out her manifold resources. It is not merely that Réjane play the washerwoman, become a great lady, without blemish or omission; she is Madame Sans-Gêne herself, with no overloading, nothing forced, nothing caricatured. It is portraiture; history.
“Many a time has Réjane appeared in cap, cotton frock, and white apron; many a time in robes of state, glittering with diamonds; she has worn the buskin or the sock, demeaned herself like a gutter heroine, or dropped the stately curtsey of the high-born lady. But never, except in Madame Sans-Géne, has she been able to bring all her rôles into one focus, exhibit her whole wardrobe, and yet remain one and the same person, compress into one evening the whole of her life.”
What sort of woman presented herself to the gaze of her Parisian admirers—and soon to American eyes—at this, the time of her greatest triumph? Whatever other gifts she brought to her work, sheer beauty was not one of them. “Is it her beauty?” asked M. Filon, seeking the source of her power, and of her perfect understanding with her audiences. “Certainly not. She is not pretty; one might even say ... but it is more polite not to say it. To quote a famous mot, ‘She is not beautiful, she is worse.’”[99]
Though Réjane never had the least claim to Mr. Vance Thompson’s rhapsodic description of her as “amazingly and diabolically beautiful,” she really has no quarrel with the fate that made her as she is. Comedy was to be her mission, and if Wilde was right in his dictum that “what serves its purpose is beautiful,” beautiful she is, after all. For plain though it be, her face is a true comedy mask. “There is comedy in every line of her face, in the arched eyebrows, the well opened, dancing eyes, the tip-tilted nose, and the wonderful, mobile, expressive mouth,” says William Archer. “This mouth is unquestionably the actress’ chief feature; it conditions her art. With a different mouth she might have been a tragedian or a heroine of melodrama, which would have been an immense pity. It is not a beautiful feature from the sculptor’s point of view; even from the painter’s it is not so much a rose-bud as a full-blown rose. It has almost the wide-lipped expansiveness of a Greek mask, but it is sensitive, ironic, amiable, fascinating.”
To others, her eyes have been her chief charm. They are large and gray, changeful with the flexibility of Réjane’s whole nature, surmounted by extraordinarily lofty and expressive brows, and often half covered by eyelids almost languorous. Her hair is, or at least was, golden brown. She is not tall. She is by no means commanding in figure. There is nothing of the imposing stage queen about her; yet, in figure, as in face, she has been perfectly equipped for her work as comédienne de Paris. Being just that, she makes her hands and her body means to her histrionic ends. Those who have repeatedly studied her art have found the subtlety, the distinction, and the perfect command of her gestures and her poses more than a match for even the brightness, or the sadness or the tenderness of her face. In every critique of Réjane there crops out a pointed reference to her wonderful fluency and flexibility of style, her fertility of invention of expressive detail, the naturalness of her transitions of mood. “Elasticity, dexterity and rapidity she has in a superlative degree, and with them grace and geniality, together with simple pathos and honest heat of temper. And of course she possesses that peculiar fineness of taste which belongs to her nation and which is very apparent in Madame Sans-Gêne, whose heroine may be crude and uncultivated, but is never boorish or clownish, is awkward but not ugly. Her voice is clear and pleasant, but her elocution is less distinct than that of many other French artists, although her tones mark unmistakably the spiritual and intellectual differences which fluctuate through her speeches. She has an unfailing regard for the proportions of her scenes, and never obtrudes herself into a prominent place just because she is the star of the company.”[100]
We have heard much of the comic finesse of Réjane’s Madame Sans-Gêne. Now listen to one acute observer (Arthur Symons) of another side of her genius: “Réjane can be vulgar, as nature is vulgar; she has all the instincts of the human animal, of the animal woman, whom man will never quite civilize.... Réjane, in Sapho or Zaza for instance, is woman ... loving and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable, horribly human thing, whose direct appeal, like that of a sick animal, seizes you by the throat at the instant in which it reaches your eyes and ears. More than any actress she is the human animal without disguise or evasion; with all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements. In Sapho or Zaza she speaks the language of the senses, no more.... In being Zaza, she is so far from being herself (what is the self of a great actress?) that she has invented a new way of walking, as well as new tones and grimaces. There is not an effect in the play which she has not calculated; only, she has calculated every effect so exactly that the calculation is not seen.”