The actor may be a hero to the susceptible matinée girl, who sees him as Othello, Hamlet, Romeo, Henry V., d'Artagnan, or some other romantic swashbuckler, but he is no hero to the woman who dwells in the dressing-room next to his, and who knows that he is putting on his wig, smearing his face with grease-paint, making-up his eyes, and covering his face with violet-powder with a puff, which he handles in ladylike manner. The actor loses in the eyes of an actress all the prestige which is due to mystery and imagination, and which constitutes the primary and fundamental element of the attraction of one sex for the other. I have never met actresses of standing who had admiration for actors as men, much as they might praise them as members of their profession.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the marriage of an actress is a mistake, a remorse, or an act of folly. An actress, in order to interpret the works of dramatists, should love, love passionately, dream, suffer even terribly, in order to be able to incarnate love, voluptuousness, suffering, and despair. The drama is the reflection of humanity; the art of the actress should be the reflection of all the different passions that have stirred her own heart and soul.
Another thing: The public takes a greater personal interest in a woman who is not married than in one who is. Actresses know this so well that, when they are married, they insist on having their names put on the bills as Miss So-and-So. When they do not, managers make them do it.
For art's sake, for her own sake, and, remembering the remark of the magistrate, I will add, for her husband's sake, an actress should not marry.
CHAPTER XVI
A MATRIMONIAL BOOM
There is quite a boom in the French matrimonial market just at present, and not marriages of convenience either, but real good love matches. Young girls elope with respectable young men holding good positions in order to compel their parents to give their consent. Sons now inform their fathers and mothers that they have, without their help or even their meddling, chosen wives for themselves. It is an open state of rebellion against the old state of affairs in France.
Hitherto there were practically only two kinds of marriages among the upper classes and the good bourgeoisie of France: the marriage of convenience from which love was excluded, and the marriage for love, which, nine times out of ten, was a mésalliance. And, to do justice to the old system, let me say that, as a rule, the marriages of convenience turned out to be much happier than mésalliances, which generally consisted in marrying mistresses—that is to say, according to Balzac, in changing tolerably good wine into very sour vinegar. However, in these marriages of convenience, arranged by families, the social position of the bridegroom and the dot of the bride were the first considerations, and these couples, after being married, often discovered they were made one for the other, and more than one husband won his wife by courting, and really fell in love with her. In cases of mésalliance, after the hours of passion had gone, the husband discovered that all his prospects in life were destroyed through being married to a woman he would never be able to make acceptable to the people of the set he belonged to, and often despair followed disgust, for woe to married people if either of them has the slightest cause for being ashamed of the other!