As ill-luck would have it, not long afterwards, Mlle. Guimard herself arrived on the scene, accompanied by a party of friends, who had come to pass judgment on the work of the new painter. Her indignation and disgust at finding herself thus disfigured may be readily imagined, but the more angry did she become, the more striking was the resemblance between herself and the portrait, a fact upon which, we may be very sure, the wittier members of the party did not fail to comment.
The little theatre, of which we have already spoken, was inaugurated on December 8, 1772, before even the house itself was completed. The pieces selected for the occasion were La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV., and that exceedingly gay comedy, La Vérité dans le vin, both by Collé, Mlle. Guimard’s favourite dramatist; and great was the competition in fashionable circles to obtain tickets of admission. It will be remembered that the performance of the former play by the members of the Comédie-Française, at Pantin, at Christmas 1768, had been forbidden by the Gentlemen of the Chamber; but now, thanks to the good offices of the Prince de Soubise, the prohibition, though repeated, was annulled by Louis XV. himself. A new difficulty, however, arose, through the opposition of Christophe de Beaumont, the austere Archbishop of Paris, who objected to the opening of the theatre, on account of the licentious character of La Vérité dans le vin, and, to pacify the metropolitan, it was found necessary to substitute for this comedy a pantomime entitled Pygmalion, a parody of Collé’s little play of that name. On the great night, Mlle. Guimard must have been a proud woman indeed, since the most distinguished members of the beau monde and the demi-monde had congregated in the “Temple of Terpsichore,” to do honour to its mistress: two Princes of the Blood, the Duc de Chartres and the Comte de Lamarche, and a select assortment of the most fascinating courtesans in Paris, “all radiant with diamonds.”
In June 1773, the Prince de Soubise, ordinarily the most complacent of lovers, who had, up to that time, accepted with an almost marital indifference the division of Mlle. Guimard’s favours between M. de la Borde and himself, suddenly developed a violent attack of jealousy and insisted on the lady giving the farmer-general his congé. Poor La Borde was in despair and straightway fell into a condition of the deepest melancholy, which even his beloved music was powerless to dissipate. At length, he determined to act on his own maxim: “On combat l’amour par la fuite et la colère par le silence,”[84] and departed on a course of foreign travel, visiting, amongst other places, Ferney, with a commission from Madame du Barry to kiss its owner on both cheeks.
Nothing seems to have delighted Mlle. Guimard more than scandalising the devout, and it must be admitted that the entertainments which she gave in her two theatres at Pantin and the Chaussée-d’Antin contributed very effectively to that end. In the early spring of 1776, she conceived the idea of organising “a picnic of scandalous immorality, a picnic such as French society had never yet beheld.” There was to be a play, needless to say of a very free and easy kind, in which Mlle. Guimard herself was to take part, and the famous courtesan, Mlle. Duthé, to dance. Then Mlle. Dervieux was charged to order from a fashionable traiteur a sumptuous supper. And the play and the supper were to be followed by a ball, gambling for colossal stakes—it is to be presumed the ladies did not intend to risk their own money—and “everything which could accompany an orgy of this nature.”
The fête, originally fixed for the Carnival, had been postponed to the first Thursday in Lent, in order, say the Mémoires secrets, to render it more singular and more celebrated.
All was arranged, the play staged, the supper prepared, when, on the complaint of Mlle. Guimard’s enemy, the Archbishop of Paris, the King interfered and sent an order prohibiting play, ball, and supper. The Comte d’Artois and the Duc de Chartres, both of whom were to assist at the entertainment, did everything in their power to obtain a reversal of the order, but without success; and the commandant of the watch received instructions to post men in the streets leading from the traiteur’s shop to the Chaussée-d’Antin, to intercept the supper on its way to Mlle. Guimard’s hôtel.
Under these circumstances, the danseuse and her friends decided that the only thing to be done was to abandon the proposed entertainment, and send the supper to the curé of Saint-Roch, for distribution among the sick poor of his parish. And, as each of the subscribers to the prohibited picnic had contributed the sum of five louis, the wits named it, “le repas des Chevaliers de Saint-Louis.”
Nevertheless, in spite of the archbishop and the dévots, the theatre of the Chaussée-d’Antin continued to flourish and to number amongst its patrons Princes of the Blood, grands seigneurs of the Court, and courtesans of the highest distinction. The parody of Ernelinde, composed by the dancer Despréaux, performed there in September 1777, enjoyed an immense success, and was commanded to be represented before the Court at Choisy, the following month, when the young King, who had hitherto shown but little taste for the theatre, laughed so immoderately throughout the three acts, that he bestowed a pension on the dancer.
Mlle. Guimard’s life of gallantry and extravagance did not cause her to neglect her profession. No more assiduous student of her art ever pirouetted across a stage, and her career was a series of almost unbroken triumphs. In the ballet of La Chercheuse d’esprit, by Gardel the elder, played before the Court in 1777, and produced at the Opera the following year, her dancing and pantomime, in the part of Nicette, were generally allowed to have been inimitable.
“The difficulty of pantomime,” writes Lefuel de Méricourt, in his journal Le Nouveau Spectateur, “is the power of expressing by means of gesture what seems to require the assistance of words. It was difficult, for example, in the person of the Chercheuse d’esprit to supply it in the verse,