From the time Antoine reached the city in 1702 until his death in 1721 there were four marked opportunities for stage influence, namely, the legitimate and royally patronised French comedians; the Opera, still flushed with Lulli’s magic, and not despicably illumined by Campra; the Ballet, then finding wings to soar; and finally, the Theatres of the Fair, which, with their gay quarrel against authority, with their reckless parodies and splendid spectacles, have been strangely neglected by Watteau’s biographers as a contributory influence on his choice of subject.
Let us consider first the Theatres of the Fairs. The fairs themselves, of St. Germain and St. Laurent, were of ancient institution, and from early times they had their side-shows of tumblers, rope-dancers, trained animals, such as performing bears, monkeys, and white mice, as well as balladists and marionettes, which were the chief attraction by the middle of the seventeenth century.
Towards the end of the century each Fair had one or more troupes of actors, especially Italian, who played improvised pieces in dumb-show, as well as written farces, vaudevilles and parodies in Italian, French, and sometimes a mixture of both languages. These troupes were quite apart from those which from time to time had been brought from Italy by special invitation from the French Court.
It was the Royal Troupe only that was expelled in 1697, for its performance of “La Fausse Prude”; and it was really their expulsion which aroused the Theatres of the Fair to a new and more vigorous life.
The Departure of the Italian Comedians, 1697
(From an engraving by L. Jacob of Watteau’s picture).
Pierrot and Arlequin in the early 18th Century
(From Riccoboni’s “Histoire du Théâtre Italien”).
The Fair of St. Germain was open from February 3rd to Easter Sunday; the Fair of St. Laurent began at the end of June and closed in October, so that for the greater part of the year both offered opportunities for amusement of a less expensive and more popular sort than did the aristocratic Comédie Française and Comédie Italienne; in fact, so popular were they that, on suppression of the Comédie Italienne, the aristocracy themselves patronised the foreign troupes of the Theatres of the Fair.
From the dawn of the eighteenth century, however, this very popularity became a source of worry to the managers of the troupes at the Fairs, for it involved the jealousy of the Comédie Française and the still youthful Opera; and the attempts of grandiose Authority to smother these minor theatres (which had public sympathy wholly on their side) and the amazing resource shown by their managers in meeting each fresh legal thunderbolt by some new and more hilarious evasion, is a veritable comedy in itself, but must not detain us now. All we need to consider at the moment is that, despite attempts to suppress them there were these troupes, at the Theatres of the Fair, from before 1702, when Watteau came to Paris, until after 1721, the date of his death.