Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

by H. Sutherland Edwards

Whatever the Opera may have been under the Reign of Terror, it was conducted infinitely better in one important respect than under the ancient régime.

In the days of the old monarchy, as we learn from Bachaumont, a girl once inscribed on the books of the Opera was released from all control on the part of her parents. She might present herself for engagement of her own accord, or her name might be entered on the list by anyone who had succeeded in leading her away from her parents. In neither case {89} had her family any further power over her. Lettres de cachet were issued, commanding the person named in the order to join the Opera, and many young girls were thus victimised. It can scarcely be supposed that the privileges granted to the Opera were intended, in the first instance, to be turned to such evil account as they afterwards were. Indeed, young men equally with young women could be seized and committed to operatic control wherever they were found. “We wish, and it pleases us,” says King Louis XIV., in the letters-patent granted to the Abbé Perrin, first director of the Académie Royale de Musique (1669), “that gentlemen (gentilshommes) and ladies may sing in the said pieces and representations of our Royal Academy without being considered, for that reason, to derogate from their titles of nobility, or from their rights and immunities.” Many aristocrats of both sexes profited by this permission to appear either as singers or as dancers at the Opera. Young girls, amateurs, male and female, whose voices had been remarked, could be arrested and forced to perform at the Opera; and in the case of young girls it was evidently to the interest of the Académie Royale de Musique that it should be able to profit by their talents without interference on the part of parents, who might well object to see their children condemned to such service. Besides being liberated from all parental restraint, the pupils and associates of the Academy enjoyed the right of setting creditors at defiance. The salaries of singers, dancers, and musicians belonging to the Opera were explicitly liberated from all liability to seizure for debt. Of the freedom conferred by an engagement at the Opera, the young woman who enjoyed it would probably have been the last to complain; for, side by side with operatic conscription, a system of operatic privileges was in force. It was not the custom for young ladies in good society to visit the Opera before their marriage; but a brevet de dame could be obtained, and the fortunate holder of such a document could without infringing any law of etiquette, {90} attend all operatic performances. “The number of these brevets,” says Bachaumont, in his Mémoires Secrets, “increased prodigiously under Louis XVI., and very young persons have been known to obtain them. Thus relieved from the modesty and retirement of the virginal state, they gave themselves up with impunity to all sorts of scandals. Such disorder has opened the eyes of the Government, and it is now only by the greatest favour that one of these brevets can be obtained.”

It has been seen that, according to Mercier and, after him, Castil Blaze, the extreme revolutionists among the Terrorist party desired that the Opera House in the Rue Richelieu might meet with the ordinary fate of theatres, in the hope that flames or flaming embers blown from the conflagration might reach the National Library, just opposite. This does not accord with the fact that the Convention did its utmost to encourage learning, literature, and art. The free system of the University, the College or Gymnasium at from eight to ten francs a month, and the Conservatoire de Musique, with its endowments, its scholarships, and its free tuition, all date from the first days of the Republic of 1789. As to the formal demolition of the Opera House, whose destiny was supposed to be fire, it happened in this way:—

On the 13th February, 1820, which was the last Sunday of the Carnival, an unusually brilliant audience had assembled at the Opera House, or Académie Royale, as it now once more was called. The Duke and Duchess of Berri were present; and before the performance had been brought to an end, the duke, struck by an assassin, was a dead man.

The circumstances of the murder were very dramatic, not only by their theatrical surroundings (for the performance still went on while the duke was expiring in the manager’s private apartments), but also by the remarkable way in which his whole life—with his double marriage and his two families—reproduced itself in the last few hours of his existence. The opera or operetta of the evening was at an end, and a portion of the ballet had been played, when the duke accompanied the duchess to her carriage, intending to return to his box to see the remainder of the performance. Then it was that the assassin grappled with him and pierced him to the heart. The duke was carried to the director’s room, and in accordance with the practice of the day, was at once bled in both arms. The internal hemorrhage was still so great, that it was thought necessary to widen the orifice.

“There,” says a contemporary writer, “lay the unhappy prince on a bed hastily arranged, and already soaked with blood, surrounded by his father, brother, sister, and wife, whose poignant anguish was from time to time relieved by some faint ray of hope, destined soon to be dispelled. When Dupuytren, accompanied by four of his most eminent colleagues, arrived, it was thought for a moment that the duke might yet be saved. But it soon became evident that the case was hopeless. The duke’s daughter had now been brought to him, and after embracing her several times, he expressed a desire to see the king, Louis XVIII. Then arrived two other daughters, the children of the union he had contracted in England. The duchess, seeing them now for the first time, received them with the greatest kindness, and said to them: ‘Soon you will have no father, and I shall have three daughters.’ In a neighbouring room the assassin was being interrogated by the Ministers Decaze and Pasquier, with the bloody dagger on the table before them; while on the stage the ballet of ‘Don Quixote’ was being performed in presence of an enthusiastic public. In the course of the night the king arrived, and his nephew expired in his arms at half-past six the next morning, begging that his murderer might be forgiven, and entreating the duchess not to give way to despair.”

The theatre on whose steps the crime had been committed was now demolished. The other Paris theatres were not indeed pulled down, but they were shut up for ten days, and there was general mourning in France, not only because a prince of the blood had been murdered, but also because the direct line of succession had to all appearance been brought to an end. It was not until more than seven months after the tragic scene at the Opera that the prince who was to have saved France, the “Enfant du Miracle,” was born.

The arrival of the two daughters born and brought up in England has been differently regarded by writers of different political views. Alexandre Dumas, in his Memoirs, and Castil Blaze, in his Histoire de l’Académie de Musique, represent the incident as a purely domestic one. M. Mauroy, in his recently published works, Les Secrets des Bourbons and Les derniers Bourbons, lays stress on the fact that these children were treated with a consideration not shown to other {91} children of the duke’s, who were certainly born out of wedlock, and thus derives an argument in support of his proposition that the Duke of Berri contracted in England with the mother of these girls a regular marriage, invalid only in so far as it had never been sanctioned by the head of his house. Chateaubriand, as a royalist, would not allow the character of legitimate children to the two girls brought to the bedside of their dying father, and entrusted by him to the care of his wife, the duchess.

“The Duke of Berri,” writes Chateaubriand, in the Mémoires d’outre-Tombe, “had had one of those liaisons which religion reproves, but which human frailty excuses. It may be said of him as the historian has said of Henri IV.: ‘He was often weak, but always faithful, and his passions never seemed to have enfeebled his religion.’ The Duke of Berri, seeking vainly in his conscience for something very guilty, and finding only a few weaknesses, wished, so to say, to collect them around his death-bed, to prove to the world the greatness of his contrition and the severity of his penance. He had a sufficiently just opinion of the virtue of his wife to confess to her his faults, and to fulfil, beneath her eyes, his desire to embrace those two innocent creatures, the daughters of his long exile. ‘Let them be sent for,’ cried the young princess; ‘they are my children also.’ When the Viscountess de Gontaut, who had not been told beforehand, seemed astonished, Madame (i.e. the Countess of Artois) noticed it, and said to her: ‘She knows everything; she has been sublime!’”