It was as a dancer she had the good fortune to please the King who, always a generous patron of the arts—with the nation’s money!—gave her for one dance she performed before him and the Queen, a pension of six thousand livres a year, giving at the same time a pension of one thousand a year to the man who danced with her, Despréaux, who later became her husband. This pension came to her the year following her appearance in “Le Premier Navigateur,” in 1786, apparently just at a time she was much in need of money. One may believe that Madeleine’s impulsive generosity had helped to bring about that need, as well as her known extravagance. For one thing, apart from her being ready to assist less fortunate artists, she had been the prime mover in an act of wholesale renunciation.
The Prince of Soubise, in the manner of his King, a generous patron of the arts, had been allowing a handsome annual pension to a number of dancers at the Opera, as well as treating them all to periodical supper-parties of most sumptuous kind. Suddenly the supper-parties ceased, the Prince was no longer seen among the audiences at the Opera and it came to be known that his son-in-law, the Prince de Gueméné, had become bankrupt, disastrously so, and that the entire family were doing their best to meet the creditors honourably. When this was known all the dancers foregathered in Madeleine’s loge at the Opera and a stately, kindly, tactful letter was drawn up and signed by all the pensionnaires, some thirty or more, headed by Guimard. The length of it precludes entire quotation in a chapter all too short to cover Madeleine’s crowded seventy-three years, but after referring to their regret at the Prince’s absence, to a delay in approaching him due to fear lest they be thought wanting in consideration, and to the urgent motive which had overcome such delicate scruples on hearing the news of the bankruptcy confirmed on all sides, the writers of the letter proceed that, finding there can be no prospect of the position improving, they feel they would be guilty of ingratitude were they not to imitate the Prince’s exemplary renunciations on behalf of his relative, and restore the pensions with which his generosity had provided them. “Apply,” the letter continues, “these revenues, Monseigneur, to the relief of so many old soldiers, poor men of letters, and such unhappy retainers as the Prince de Gueméné draws with him in his downfall. As for us, other resources remain. We shall have lost nothing, Monseigneur, if we retain your esteem. We shall even have gained if in refusing to-day your kindly gifts we force our detractors to acknowledge that we were not unworthy of them. We are, with deep respect, Monseigneur, your Serene Highness’s very humble servants, Guimard, Heinel, Peslin, Dorival, etc., etc.” The letter is dated 6th December, 1782.
It was now that Guimard was paying periodical summer visits to London for the Opera seasons. Edmond de Goncourt in his monograph on the dancer gives two very interesting letters written by Guimard apropos to these London sojourns, one to Perregaux the Banker, dated 20th June, 1784, the other to M. de la Ferté, Director of the Académie, dated 26th May, (1786) and both addressed from No. 10, Pall Mall.
In the former she gives a spirited and amusing account of the way in which Gallini and Ravelli, then directing the Opera in London, had sought to take advantage of a fire at the old Opera House in order to break through the contract with Guimard by which she was to receive six hundred and fifty guineas for the season. The fire seemed at first likely to put a closure on the season, but Covent Garden was placed at the disposal of the Opera. Gallini, making alleged losses the excuse, tried to persuade Madeleine to lower her terms for the rest of the season. Finding she would only agree to providing her own costumes—no light consideration—he pretended satisfaction and departed. Ravelli, however, followed and, evidently by arrangement, informed her that Gallini was several kinds of idiot, and that he had been deposed in favour of Ravelli who, as the new stage-manager, came to offer her fresh terms—twenty-five louis a performance, on behalf of Gallini.
Guimard smiled and expressed astonishment that Ravelli should make such propositions from Gallini since the latter was no longer in power, and added that she held them to her contract. When she turned up at rehearsal with a couple of witnesses and having consulted solicitors, Ravelli “looked green” and Gallini “stupefied.” They offered fresh proposals and tried hard to wriggle out of their contract but Guimard won, of course, and the more so in that though her chief friends among the English aristocracy, notably the Duchess of Devonshire, were out of town, enough were left to make things uncomfortable for Gallini, who found his conduct the talk of the town.
The second letter, to M. la Ferté, is mainly good advice on the direction of the Opera and encouragement of rising talent, and for this giving of counsel she begs that he will excuse her since it is out of friendship for him and also on account of her desire, in her own words, “ne pas voir détruire entièrement la belle danse, que j’ai vu exister à l’Opéra.” In both letters she sends—in the inevitable postscript!—charming messages to the wives of her correspondents and mentions some little commissions with which they had entrusted her.
That she did not have a bad time in London may be gathered from the fact that she excuses herself for not having written sooner because since she arrived in town she had not been left a minute to herself by “les plus grandes dames,” and principally by the Duchess of Devonshire with whom she spent most of the time that she had away from the theatre; and of the London audiences generally she remarks: “Ils m’aiment à la folie, ces bons Anglais!” Not the first time a charming foreign dancer has been beloved of “ces bons Anglais!”
But with all the friendship of the great and the love of the populace and her six hundred and fifty guineas for the London season, Guimard’s financial position was not what it had been. The Soubise pension had been relinquished; that she received from the King in view of twenty years’ service at the Opera hardly sufficed her rather magnificent requirements, and the time came, in 1786, when she found it convenient to dispose of her mansion in the Chaussée d’Antin. This she did by arranging, without police sanction, a lottery, the tickets for which numbered two thousand five hundred, at a hundred and twenty livres each, a total sum of three hundred thousand livres. There was a fierce demand for the tickets, and twice the number could have been sold. The drawing took place in a salon of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, Rue Bergère, on the 1st of May, 1786, and Madeleine’s mansion with all its furniture went to the Comtesse du Lau, who, by the way, had only taken one ticket!
It is worth noting now that Madeleine had reached the age of forty-three, that she had never been pretty and that she was marked with smallpox, with which—a current danger at those times—she had been attacked in 1783. To a clever and magnetic personality age matters not, nor do looks mean everything since in any case they are bound to alter in the course of a few decades; and even smallpox is not fatal to fascination. But these things, nevertheless, have to be admitted when one comes to years of discretion, and forty-three may be accounted such. One wonders whether Madeleine, who was eminently a woman of sense, began about now to face facts and the future, and whether the doing so, or else mere circumstances, political and social, impelled her to the next step in her career.