“Dlle. Guimard.—Première danseuse de demi-caractère. Her talent is known to every one; on the stage she still retains a very youthful appearance; if she has not a great deal of execution in her dancing, she possesses, by way of compensation, much grace; she is very good in ballets d’action and in pantomime; she has much zeal and works hard; but she is an enormous expense to the Opera, where her wishes are followed with as much respect as if she was its director. Following her example, the other actresses demand the most costly dresses and equipments.”
But enormous expense or not, the directors of the Opera seemed to have been possessed by an ever-present dread lest Mlle. Guimard should take it into her head to retire or transfer her services to some foreign stage. After the destruction of the Opera by fire in June 1781, and while the new Opera of the Porte Saint-Martin was in course of erection, the minds of many of the homeless singers and dancers “turned towards the shores of Great Britain and the guineas of Drury Lane,” and, in spite of the most stringent precautions on the part of the Government, several of them succeeded in emigrating.[89] Although Mlle. Guimard’s fortune placed her in a position, where, according to the expression of La Ferté, “she had very little need to trouble herself about England,” the anxious Intendant was only half-reassured and wrote to the Minister of the King’s Household, begging him to use every inducement possible to keep the lady in France.
Mlle. Guimard remained faithful and reaped the reward of her fidelity in the spring of the following year, when she demanded and obtained a pension of 2500 livres, which, with an annual gratification of 1500 livres and her salary of 2000 livres, brought her professional income up to 6000 livres.
In the fire at the Opera-house, referred to above, Mlle. Guimard had a very narrow escape of her life. The fire broke out at the end of the third act of Orphée, happily after the majority of the audience had quitted their seats. Mlle. Guimard was in her loge at the time, and, not daring to leave it, would probably have been stifled, had not a scene-shifter come to her assistance and, wrapping her in the curtains—for she was half-undressed—carried her through the smoke and flames to a place of safety.
This was not the only time the danseuse was in danger during the course of her professional career. In June 1784, while appearing at the Opera-house in the Haymarket, in London, then under Gallini’s management, the theatre was completely destroyed by fire. Boaden, in his Life of John Kemble, thus alludes to the catastrophe:
“On the 17th of June 1784, I was, on my return from a visit, crossing the Park from Buckingham Gate to Stable Yard, St. James’s, when this most tremendous conflagration burst upon me; it seemed to make the long line of trees wave in an atmosphere of fire.... The fire had commenced in the flies and burst through the roof in a column of confirmed fierceness, that evinced its strength to have been irresistible, even when it was first perceived. In the theatre, about two o’clock, they had been rehearsing a ballet, and the first alarm was occasioned by the sparks of fire which fell upon the heads of the dancers. Mme. Ravelli was with difficulty saved by one of the firemen; Mme. Guimard lost a slipper, but escaped in safety.”
A few years after her first appearance at the Opera, an accident occurred which might have been attended with serious consequences to Mlle. Guimard. One night in January 1766, during a performance of Les Fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour, a heavy piece of scenery fell upon her, throwing her to the ground and breaking her arm. Had it struck her upon the head, she would certainly have been killed.
At the end of the year 1782, came the bankruptcy of the Prince de Guéménée, whose wife, gouvernante to the children of Louis XVI., was the daughter of the Prince de Soubise: a catastrophe which involved more than three thousand people, many of whom were completely ruined. Mlle. Guimard’s tender relations with the Prince de Soubise had come to an end some years earlier—she had been succeeded in his affections and the enjoyment of the two thousand écus a month, by her niece and pupil, Mlle. Zacharie, a damsel of fifteen summers—but she still remained on excellent terms with her former lover and received a handsome pension, as the reward of her not very faithful services. This pension she now determined to renounce, in favour of the creditors of the Prince de Guéménée, and having persuaded several other ladies of the ballet, who, like herself, had once basked in the smiles of the “Sultan of the Opera” and had been similarly provided for, to follow her example, they met one day in her dressing-room and drew up a letter to the prince setting forth their wishes, copies of which they caused to be distributed among the habitués of the theatre.
Letter of Mlle. Guimard and other danseuses of the
Opera to M. le Prince de Soubise.
“Monseigneur,—Accustomed, my comrades and myself, to have you in our midst at each performance of the Théâtre-Lyrique, we have observed with the most bitter regret, that not only were you weaned from the pleasures of the play, but that none of us have been summoned to those frequent petits soupers, at which we had, in turn, the happiness of pleasing and amusing you. Rumour has only too well informed us of the cause of your retirement and of your just grief. Up to the present, we have feared to trouble you, making our sensibility yield to our respect; we should not even dare to break silence, without the pressing motive which our delicacy is not able to resist. We flattered ourselves, Monseigneur, that the bankruptcy (for one must needs employ a term with which the foyers, the clubs, the gazettes, France, and the whole of Europe resound), that the bankruptcy of M. le Prince de Guéménée would not be on so enormous a scale as was announced. But the derangement of his affairs has reached such a point that no hope remains. We have come to this conclusion from the generous sacrifices to which, following your example, the principal chiefs of your illustrious house have resigned themselves.