At Marseilles, the first city of importance which she visited, and where she gave no less than twenty-three representations, it was resolved to organise a magnificent fête in her honour. Cannon thundered salutes, the vessels in the harbour were decorated with flags, and, in the evening, the entire city was illuminated. An eight-oared gondola, lined throughout with satin and furnished with velvet cushions, had been prepared for the occasion, in which the prima donna embarked, arrayed in a Greek costume of the most extravagant richness, the gift of the ladies of Marseilles. The gondola was then rowed out to sea, escorted by more than one hundred vessels of various kinds, including several barges filled with musicians. Aquatic sports were held, the victors in which had the felicity of being crowned by the heroine of the day.
On her return to land, the cannon again fired salutes; the whole population had flocked to the quays. The diva was conducted, through an avenue of illuminated pavilions, to a pleasure-house, where she rested for a while in a salon of verdure lighted by coloured lanterns. Then she entered a tent, in which a temporary theatre had been constructed, where an allegorical play was performed in her honour, and Apollo crowned her with laurel as the “tenth” Muse. A ball followed, during which Madame Saint-Huberty occupied a seat on a daïs between Melpomene and Thalia. Finally, a splendid supper, to which sixty of the principal inhabitants of Marseilles sat down, was served in a room protected by a wooden grill, to guard the idol against the too-pressing attentions of her worshippers. At dessert, Madame Saint-Huberty sang several couplets in the Provençal patois, the people joining in the chorus. The enthusiasm of the city on this memorable night was indescribable, and spread far into the country.
When, at length, the prima donna contrived to tear herself away from her admirers at Marseilles, an extra horse had to be harnessed to her post-chaise, to draw the trophies of her twenty-three performances, which included more than a hundred crowns.
At Toulouse, if the fêtes were less splendid, there was no diminution in the enthusiasm of the public. In the third act of Didon, the performance was suddenly stopped, while twelve young girls, dressed in white, advanced towards Madame Saint-Huberty. They carried a basket of flowers surmounted by a crown, which their leader begged the singer to accept, as “the tribute of a grateful country.”
At Strasburg—her birthplace and the town where she had made her first appearance on the stage—which she visited in the summer of 1787, the ovations continued. There, amongst a thousand other compliments in verse, of various degrees of merit, she received the following gallant madrigal:
“Romains qui vous vantez d’une illustre origine,
Voyez d’où dépendait votre empire naissant:
Didon n’eut pas de charme assez puissant
Pour arrêter la fuite où son amant s’obstine;
Mais si l’autre Didon, ornement de ces lieux,
Eût été reine de Carthage,
Il eût, pour la servir, abandonné ses dieux,
Et votre beau pays serait encore sauvage.”
These verses have been ascribed by Edmond de Concourt, Gaboriau, and several other writers to no less a personage than Napoleon Bonaparte, then a young officer of artillery. But they are in error, for M. Adolphe Jullien, who has carefully investigated the matter, points out that Napoleon passed the whole of the year 1787 not at Strasburg, but in Corsica.
Space forbids us to give more than a very brief account of the remaining triumphs of this truly great artiste, who, no matter how unfavourable the verdict of the public and the critics might be in regard to some of the works in which she appeared, was always herself assured of applause and commendation. In the title-part of the Chimène of Sacchini, as Délie, in the Tibulle et Délie of Fuzelier and Mlle. de Beaumesnil, as Hypermnestre, in that superb opera of the Danaïdes, which made the name of Salieri worthy to rank with those of Gluck, Piccini, and Sacchini, she astonished and delighted the musical world scarcely less than she had in Piccini’s masterpiece. And such was her passionate love of her art and her amazing capacity for hard work that all these four most difficult and most varied rôles—Didon, Chimène, Délie, and Hypermnestre, of which three at least are among the most beautiful figures to which the lyric art has lent life—were studied, mastered, and represented within the space of some seven months: from October 16, 1783 to April 26, 1784.[200]
Two years after the great success of their Didon, Marmontel and Piccini reappeared on the stage of the Opera with Pénélope. Unfortunately, the vogue which the preceding work had obtained had aroused too many expectations in regard to this new essay—author and composer, so to speak, were the victims of their own excellence—and though Pénélope was, in its way, a fine opera, it was received in comparative silence. All the critics, however, were agreed that Madame Saint-Huberty, in the part of the virtuous wife of Ulysses, was superb, and that she had seldom been heard to more advantage than in the two airs: “Je le vois, cette ombre errante,” and “Il est affreux, il est horrible,” and in the scene where Telemachus comes to announce the return of her husband.
It was Madame Saint-Huberty again who, in May, 1786, rescued from complete disaster the Thémistocle of Philidor, which, after a tolerably good reception by the Court, had been greeted, at first, by the town with marked disfavour; and it was not one of her least successes to have invested with life the inanimate figure of the heroine, Mandane.