Later Queens of the French Stage

by H. Noel Williams

were greeted with cries of dissent and uproarious laughter. The words,

“De l’austère pudeur les bornes sont passées...”

were answered with shouts of “C’est vrai! c’est vrai! il y a longtemps!” While when she came to the passage in which Phèdre, in an agony of remorse, exclaims,

“Et moi, triste rebut de la nature entière...”

the ironical cheering, La Harpe tells us, seemed as if it would never cease. “Neither her beauty nor her sex,” writes Grimm, “could protect her any longer, and never did the public go so far in forgetfulness of its own dignity.”

For these disgraceful scenes, the Duc de Duras seems to have been, in no small measure, responsible. In his anxiety to secure a hearing for Mlle. Raucourt, this well-meaning but maladroit nobleman had foolishly endeavoured to overawe the opposition by trebling the guard and “filling the pit with policemen,” who pounced upon and conducted to prison the most prominent of the disturbers. Such tactics naturally had the effect of exasperating the malcontents to the last degree and of alienating many whose sympathies had hitherto lain with the persecuted actress. “While the Comte d’Estaing is fighting the English, to make them recognise the independence of America,” it was bitterly said, “the Duc de Duras imprisons Frenchmen for refusing to applaud Raucourt!”

Nevertheless, fair-minded persons appear to have been practically unanimous in condemning the conduct of the pit. “Nothing,” writes La Harpe, “can prove more clearly that the spirit of the parterre is changed. The excesses in which it indulges, unknown until now, show how badly composed it is. Never would an assembly of respectable persons permit itself to say to a woman, whatever she might be, that she was ‘le rebut de la nature entière.’ One can decline to listen to her, but it is shocking and abominable to go to such lengths as this.” He adds that, in his opinion, the disturbance was organised by the elder Mlle. Sainval, “who knows better than any one how to set to work the crowd of venal ruffians who compose to-day a third of the parterre, and sometimes make themselves its masters”; and declares that so disgusted is he with the cabals and acrimonious quarrels which divide the theatrical and literary worlds, that he has determined to abandon dramatic criticism altogether, and has, accordingly, resigned his post on the Mercure.[118]

In the face of such bitter hostility as she was called upon to encounter, Mlle. Raucourt might well have been pardoned if she had withdrawn a second time from the stage. That she declined to bow to the storm proves her to have possessed courage and pertinacity of an unusually high order. Indeed, her firmness on the night of Phèdre, when, at each hostile manifestation, she had slowly and deliberately repeated the line which had evoked it, had undoubtedly contributed to exasperate the baser kind of her persecutors. A little reflection, however, sufficed to assure her that, if she wished to regain the indulgence of the public, she must have recourse to other methods, and, accordingly, she addressed to the Journal de Paris the following letter:

“September 13, 1776.

“Unusual circumstances having placed me in the position of occupying at the Comédie a different emploi from the one I intended for myself, permit me, through the medium of your journal, to inform the public that I have no other ambition than to fill it to the best of my ability; that I do not purpose playing parts of any other kind, except when it is absolutely indispensable for the service of the Comédie; that, far from desiring to deprive my comrades of anything, my only wish is to understudy them; too happy if, by my zeal, my exactitude, and my efforts, I succeed in convincing the public of my respect and of my anxiety to please them.