"Considering that these gentlemen corrupt the public mind by the pieces they represent;
"Considering that they exercise a fatal influence on the revolution;
It is decreed that the Siege of Thionville shall be represented gratis and solely for the amusement of the sans culottes, who, to this moment have been the true defenders of liberty and supporters of democracy."
Soon afterwards it was proposed to shut up the Opera, but Hébert, the ferocious Hébert, better known as le père Duchèsne, undertook its defence on the ground that it procured subsistence for a number of families, and "caused the agreeable arts to flourish."
It was thereupon resolved "that the Opera should be encouraged and defended against its enemies." At the same time the managers Cellérier and Francœur were arrested as suspects. Neither of them was executed.
THE "MARATISTES" AGAIN.
The Opera was now once more placed under the direction of a committee chosen from among the singers and dancers, who were selected this time, not by reason of their artistic merit, but solely with reference to their political principles. Lays, one of the chief managers, was a furious democrat, and on one occasion insisted on Mademoiselle Maillard (Gluck's "Armida!") appearing in a procession as the Goddess of Reason.
Mademoiselle Maillard having refused, Chaumette was appealed to. The arguments he employed were simple but convincing. "Well, citoyenne," he said, "since you refuse to be a divinity, you must not be astonished if we treat you as a mortal." Fortunately for the poor prima donna, Mormoro, a member of the Commune of Paris, and a raging "Maratiste" (which has not quite the same meaning now as in the days of the "Todistes") claimed the obnoxious part for his unhappy wife. The beautiful Madame Mormoro was forced to appear in the streets of Paris in the light and airy costume of an antique Goddess, with the thermometer at twenty degrees below freezing point! "Reason" not unreasonably wept with annoyance throughout the ceremony.
Léonard Bourdon, called by those who knew him Léopard Bourdon, used all his influence, as a distinguished member of the Mountain, to get a work he had prepared for the Opera produced. His piece was called the Tomb of the Impostors, or the Inauguration of the Temple of Truth. It was printed at the expense of the Republic, but never brought out. In the first scene the stage represents a church, built with human skulls. In the sanctuary there is to be a fountain of blood. A woman enters to confess, the priest behaves atrociously in the confessional, &c., &c. The scenes and incidents throughout the drama are all in the same style, and the whole is dedicated in an uncomplimentary epistle to the Pope. Léopard tormented the directors actors, and actresses, night and day, to produce his master-piece, and threatened, that if they were not quick about it, he would have a guillotine erected on the stage.
This threat was not quite so vain as it might seem. A list of twenty-two persons engaged at the Opera (twenty-two—the fatal number during the Reign of Terror), had been already drawn up by Hébert, as a sort of executioner's memorandum. When he was in a good humour he would show it to the singers and dancers, and say to them with easy familiarity; "I shall have to send you all to the guillotine some day. Two reasons have prevented me hitherto; in the first place you are not worth the trouble, in the second I want you for my amusement." These reasons were not considered quite satisfactory by the proscribed artists, and Beaupré, a comic dancer of great talent, contrived by various humorous stratagems (one of which, and doubtless the most readily forgiven, consisted in intoxicating Hébert), to gain possession of the fatal list; but the day afterwards the republican dilettante was always sufficiently recovered from the effects of his excessive potations to draw up another one exactly like it.