“There are three kinds of grace: grace of form, grace of attitude, and grace of movement. Grace of form is the gift of Nature; it is rare. That of attitude is a choice of positions of the body, which good taste chooses and indicates. That of movement consists not merely in passing from one attitude to another, in following the cadence of the music, but it requires the expression to be in conformity with the genre that it represents, especially in the danse terre-à-terre, which is very different from the danse sautée. It is in the danse terre-à-terre that Mlle. Guimard charmed, for more than twenty-five years, a critical public, in the gavottes of Armide and in two hundred other dances. She was always new; I do not speak only of her feet, they count for little in comparison with the charm of body and head. It is that which is the perfection of the picture. She played perfectly both comedy and opéra-comique. Her expressive face depicted easily all the feelings that she experienced, or was believed to experience. That was why she displayed the most perfect pantomime in Médée et Jason, in the ballet of Ninette, in Myrza, and in many other ballets. She was always perfect, because grace never forsook her.
“She knew how to distinguish the trivial from what was really comic, and joined to the charm of grace and of harmony of movement facial expression.
“...She did not approve of the present fashion of raising the foot as high as the hip. These exaggerated movements dislocate the body, and are the enemies of grace. Attitudes of this kind have no other effect than to astonish the parterre.”[73]
Madeleine Guimard was not beautiful, she was not even pretty; her complexion was unpleasantly sallow; her thinness so extreme as to earn from her charitable colleagues of the Opera the sobriquets of “the spider,” “the skeleton of the Graces,” and so forth. But she more than atoned for these natural disadvantages by an indescribable charm of manner, which conquered the minds and hearts of all with whom she came in contact. “Love,” says one of her biographers, “is not blind for nothing, and Madeleine Guimard possessed more than any other woman of her time the art of placing a bandage over the eyes of those who regarded her.”
Her triumphs in the sphere of gallantry rivalled those which she obtained upon the stage. Not one among her contemporaries succeeded in achieving a similar notoriety. Princes of the Blood and dancers of the Opera, great noblemen and men of letters, financiers, painters, and—O tempora! O mores!—bishops, nay, even an archbishop![74]—none could resist this nameless charm; all, in turn, were at her feet.
In the early years of her career at the Opera, the reports of the inspectors of the Lieutenants of Police provide us with abundant information in regard to the amorous adventures of the danseuse. To M. Bertin, who, poor man! probably bored Mlle. Guimard as much as he had Sophie Arnould, succeeded M. de Boutourlin, the Russian Ambassador to the Court of Spain, who, during a visit to Paris, lived with her for some time, but, finally, had the bad taste to leave her for Mlle. Lafond of the Comédie-Italienne. Mlle. Guimard, however, speedily turned the tables upon the “Italians,” by detaching the Comte de Rochefort from Mlle. Collette of that theatre, a triumph which enriched her jewel-case by “a diamond collar of great price,” and other acquisitions. In the meanwhile—for the lady, like Mlle. Clairon, was quite capable of carrying on two or three love-affairs at once—a connection of a more durable nature had been formed between the danseuse and the farmer-general Jean Benjamin de la Borde, first valet-de-chambre to Louis XV.
Jean Benjamin de la Borde, celebrated by those two verses of his friend Voltaire,
“Avec tous les talens le destin l’a fait naître
Il fait tous les plaisirs de la société,”
was an ideal lover. He was at this time about thirty years of age, an accomplished courtier, a musician of some little talent, and possessed of considerable literary gifts,[75] and “a frank, loyal, modest, generous, and kind-hearted man.”
From this liaison, in April 1763, was born a daughter, baptized as the child of a father and mother unknown, but formally acknowledged by her parents seven years later. In May 1778, at the age of fifteen, this daughter, who bore her mother’s baptismal name of Marie Madeleine, married one Claude Drais, a goldsmith and jeweller of the Quai des Orfèvres. The girl did not go to her husband empty-handed, for the marriage contract, which is given by M. Campardon, in his L’Académie royale de Musique au XVIIIe siècle, makes provision for a dowry of 125,000 livres; “100,000 livres in cash, which the demoiselle Guimard engages to pay in écus of six livres, within the space of two years,” and 25,000 livres, composed of a trousseau, furniture, diamonds, jewellery, clothes, linen, and lace. The marriage was a sad one, as the young bride died a year later, to the great distress of her mother, who was so prostrated by grief that it was some months before she was able to appear again upon the stage.