I have often seen Adrienne Lecouvreur acted, since that evening whose events I am recalling, with a tremor of the heart simply at the remembrance of the anguish I felt while Camille was performing this mad action. I have always noticed that the audience are gripped by this scene. As regards myself, both before and after the performance by Camille upon the improvised stage at Bonnivet’s house, this scene has always moved me so that I found the action indicated by the book quite natural—I had the curiosity to consult it. Adrienne continues to advance towards the princess, to whom she points with her finger, remaining some time in this attitude, while the ladies and gentlemen who have followed her movements rise as if in affright. It was without any doubt a similar effect on the audience of terror, for ever dishonouring to her rival, that the despised mistress had, in a flash of blind passion, resolved to produce at the risk of the most terrible consequences.
I awaited this terrible effect with as frightful a certainty as if I could see in Camille’s hand a loaded weapon pointed at Madam de Bonnivet. To-day, when my mind goes back to those moments in which my heart leapt with apprehension, I cannot help smiling. Every one of the audience without doubt knew Adrienne Lecouvreur if not like I did, at least well enough to recall the situation which was so dramatic as to be easily intelligible. Every one had trembled at the Théâtre Français when they saw Sarah Bernhardt or Bartet advance towards the Princess de Bouillon as Camille advanced towards Madam de Bonnivet. But, except those who were directly interested in this scene, not one of the audience appeared to understand the young actress’ sinister intention.
No one, I am certain, instituted, between the scene being enacted before them at that moment and the one they had seen acted ten or twenty times at the theatre, a comparison which would have been a revelation. The actress herself, stupefied at what she had dared to do and the results, mechanically continued the tirade as if in a dream. Automatically, too, the tones of Sarah Bernhardt came back to her as she concluded. She stopped amid a most flattering murmur from all sides, the discreet applause of the fashionable before a wonderful feat marvellously executed. One could hear such phrases as: “Very lifelike! Shutting your eyes you would think you were listening to Sarah! How gifted the little one is! It is not given to every one to possess talent like that!”
Madam de Bonnivet, who had been the first to clap, had got up and gone to Camille, to whom she said with a smile, the amiability of which was her crowning insolence—
“Exquisite, mademoiselle, exquisite. I am very grateful to you. Was it not exquisite, Molan? Will you give Mademoiselle Favier your arm and take her to the buffet?”
Really I am not suspected of sympathy for the audacious woman whose abominable coquetry had exasperated the poor actress to the extent of this astounding insult. But I must do her the justice to admit that she had really a majestic way of thus bringing to naught Camille’s justice. I distinctly heard her voice pronounce the phrase in spite of the hum of conversation and the noise of the moving of chairs and couches, and I saw Camille look at her with a somnambulist’s look, and also give her arm to Jacques in quite a passive and subdued way. Her astonishment at daring what she had dared and at nothing happening had left her incapable of reply, feeling or thought. She was like a murderess who had fired at her victim and seen the bullet rebound from his forehead, without even inflicting a scratch. She had not, nor had I, a mind sufficiently disengaged to perceive in what had taken place a proof among a thousand that an irreducible difference separates the life presented upon the stage from the life which is really lived. She was the victim of an attack of nerves which first showed itself in this astonishment, or rather bewilderment, and almost immediately afterwards by a fit of half convulsive laughter which wounded me severely.
I gladly left the spot where she was with Jacques surrounded by men who knew her and were paying her compliments. I came across Bonnivet directly. His forehead was red, its veins swollen, his eyes were clear and at the same time flaming, and these things with the tremors through his whole body suddenly caused the fear I had felt a few minutes before to return to me. Even if to the rest of the audience the insult hurled in the fashionable lady’s face by the actress had passed unnoticed, a circumstance which was explained by the fact that they had no notion of Jacques’ position between his two mistresses, the husband himself had perceived this insult, and it required all his self-control to swallow the affront as he had done. He listened, or pretended to listen, to Senneterre, whose volubility showed that he, too, had understood the significance of the scene acted by Camille, and that he was trembling with fear lest Bonnivet also understood. The husband was automatically curling his moustache with his right hand, while I felt sure he was digging the nails of his left, which was hidden, into his chest.
I was not the only one to feel that this man was in a fury, nor to notice his forehead, eyes and gestures, which displayed the obvious signs, to a painter, of a formidable moral tempest. I saw the group of gentlemen near which I was dissolve to make room for Madam de Bonnivet, who was approaching her husband. In the same way that a little while before she had found a smile of supreme contempt, with which to congratulate Camille Favier and reply to the insult of an atrocious allusion by the insult of an implacable indifference, now she found a tender and affectionate smile to reply to her husband’s suddenly aggravated suspicions. She brought him in her gracious and affectionate smile an indisputable proof of her clear conscience. The sensation of her presence was necessary to this man at the moment and she had realized this, and also that the physical reality of her voice, of her look, of her breath, the evidence, too, of her tranquillity would impose upon her jealous husband a suggestion of calmness. Serenely radiant in her sumptuous white toilette, her eyes clear and gay, a half smile upon her pretty mouth, and fanning her lovely face with a gentle little motion which hardly disturbed the golden hair upon her brow, she walked towards him, hypnotizing him with her look. I could see at her approach the unhappy man’s face relax, while Bressoré, whom I knew, took my arm and whispered in my ear—
“How smart she is! But, La Croix, as you are a friend of Favier’s, I hope you will make her understand that her way of conducting herself this evening is very bad for me and for all of us! Why this is a house where we are received like swells, and yet because she is jealous of the mistress of the house and Molan, she behaves like a fool and treats her as Adrienne Lecouvreur did! I saw it coming and I saw it pass, and now I have not a dry stitch of clothing on me. It did not strike home, it is true, but it might have done so. But then if the audience did not understand, the husband and wife did. I tell you this house is closed to us for the future. They have had their fill of acting at home by this time. Frankly, put yourself in their place, it would not do at all, would it? I am not more straight-laced than most, and I have my fancies, but I always behave in a gentlemanly way.”
The comic plaint of the old actor, who was trembling for his social status, put a note of buffoonery into the adventure. I soothed the old man to the best of my ability, assuring him that he was mistaken, though without hope of convincing him. What a fine picture he would have made, with his mobile blue eyes looking out piercingly from his clean-shaven face, over which seemed to float an everlasting grimace! He had so much and such astounding good fortune that his glance upon the real bad side of life was like that of a diplomat. His countless mistresses had so well instructed him in the particulars of Parisian fashionable and gay life that he was no longer the dupe of any one or anything. He nodded his head incredulously at my protests and replied to me with the inherent familiarity of his profession, in spite of the principles of breeding he had just professed with such solemnity.