CLOCHES DE GORNEVILLE
with a large G. Its inventive power is limited to the substitution of this one letter. And the individuals who appear upon the stages of the booths to sing the “trial d’operette” are also the refuse of the café concerts. They can only impose upon an unsophisticated audience. For this reason the forain opera is no longer found in the suburban fairs of Paris or other large cities. It is confined to country fairs and provincial festivities.
But the variety houses are on quite a different scale. The most flourishing and the best known at the present time are the establishments kept by Marquette and Emile Cocherie, who styles himself on his programmes, “Head of the fêtes of Paris.” At the commencement of each campaign, that is to say before the Fair du Trône, Emile Cocherie gives an audience in his villa at the Porte de Montrouge to all the [p090] artists who aspire to enter his troupe. In his presence the candidates must all jouent le canevas, i.e. improvise a scene with dialogue upon a given subject. The same old themes are used which have served ever since the origin of the open-air [p091] stage; all the situations of the Italian comedies and Gallic farces which amused the crowd even in the time of the escholiers. A new topic is not prohibited, but there are very few “patterers” who can speak outside as well as inside, as the terms of the engagements run.
Still clever actors who can improve the performance receive extra salaries. The illustrious Clam, who is called the last of the merry-andrews, earned as much as five hundred francs a month at the forain theatres. I asked M. Cocherie, who was left inconsolable by the departure of this whimsical performer, why he did not try to replace him by some young student of comedy who had passed creditably through the Conservatoire.
“He would not suit me,” replied the experienced manager. “I have tried them, and still have one in my show, but he does not succeed. The lads have not effective voices, they are not merry and, above all, they have no gift for improvisation. A commercial traveller who can push a sale well, a hawker from the street, would be much more in my line than M. Coquelin aîné.”
And it is quite true, this Clam is a splendid clown. I do not recommend you to make his acquaintance in the Clamiana, a collection of jokes which seem very dull when they are read, printed with old type in a small newspaper. Clam should be heard outside the show in the tumult of smacks and kicks which accompanies his improvised dialogue with his butt.
I begged this important personage to give me a few notes on his life, and I now publish them as they were given to me. The last of the red-tails belongs to literary history. [p092]
“At noon, on the 5th June, 1837, a baby uttered its first cry. The son of the actor Chanet entered the world in the native place of Casimir Delavigne! Brought up in more than poverty and naturally delicate, my childhood was passed in an asylum at Havre, about the time of the great cholera epidemic, which spared my life; later on, I sold [p093] checks at the theatre door, and considered myself lucky if I occasionally managed to see one act.