When Molière’s company of comedians left the theatre of the Palais Royal in 1673, Lulli’s “Academy” was established in their place, and the Palais Royal Theatre became the Royal Opera House until 1787, with an interval caused by the rebuilding after the fire of 1763. In 1697 the Italians were forbidden to perform any more in Paris, and French opera enjoyed a monopoly of royal favour, until the Regent recalled the Italians in 1716.
The Académie de Musique, or French Opera, subsequently migrated to the Salle d’Opéra, at the Hôtel Louvois, on the site of the present Square Louvois. It was in this house that the Duke of Berri was assassinated in 1820. The Government decreed the demolition of the building, and an opera house was hurriedly erected in the Rue Lepelletier. This inconvenient, stuffy Hall of the Muses, so familiar to the older generation of opera-goers, was at length superseded by the present luxurious temple in 1874.
The early French operas were of the nature of elaborate ballets, based invariably on mythological subjects, and, indeed, the ballet up to recent times, when the reforming influence of Wagner’s music-dramas made itself felt, has always formed the more important part of every operatic performance. Only when the curtain rose on the scènes de ballet did chatter cease, for as Taine remarked, “Le public ne se trouve émoustillé que par le ballet” (“The public only brightens up at the ballet”), and the traditional habit of Society was expressed in the formula, “On n’écoute que le ballet” (“One only listens to the ballet”). Molière wrote a tragédie-ballet, a pastorale heroique, a pastorale comique, and eight comédies-ballets, in one of which, Le Sicilian, the king himself, the Marquis of Villeroi and other courtiers performed with Molière and his daughter. In 1681 the permission already given to the princes and other nobles to take part in the ballets without derogation was extended to the ladies of the court, who in that year performed the Triomphe de l’Amour. The innovation proved most successful, and soon affected the public stage, where, as at the court, up to that period male performers alone were tolerated. Mdlle. de la Fontaine was the first of the famous danseuses of the Paris opera, and her portrait, with those of some score of her successors, still adorn the foyer de la danse. The opera was a social rather than a musical function, and the old foyer, until the fall of the Second Empire, was the favourite meeting-place during the season of royal and distinguished personages, courtiers, ministers, ambassadors, and, indeed, of all French society of the male persuasion. Such was the passion for the opera during the reign of Louis XVI. that fashionable devotees would journey from Brussels to Paris in time to see the curtain rise and return to Brussels when the performance was over, travelling all night.
“In fair weather or foul,” says Diderot in the opening lines of the Neveu de Rameau “it is my custom, towards five in the evening, to stroll about the Palais Royal, where I muse silently on politics, love, taste or philosophy. If the weather be too cold or wet, I take refuge in the Café de la Régence, and there I amuse myself by watching the chess players; for Paris is the one place in the world, and the Café de la Régence the one place in Paris, where chess is played perfectly.” The Café Procope and the Régence have been termed the Adam and Eve of the cafés of Paris. The former was the first coffee-house seen there, and was opened by one Gregory of Aleppo and a Sicilian, Procopio by name, shortly before the Comédie Française was transferred in 1689 to its new house in the present Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. The famous café, where, too, ices were first sold, was situated opposite the theatre, and at once became a kind of ante-chamber to the Comédie, crowded with actors and dramatic authors, among whom were seen Voltaire, Crébillon and Piron.
The Café de la Place du Palais Royal, the original apellation of the Régence, was founded shortly after the Procope, and became the favourite haunt of literary men, and especially of chess-players. Here the author of Gil Blas beheld, in a vast salon brilliant with lustres and mirrors, a score of silent and grave personages, pousseurs de bois (wood-shovers), playing at chess on marble tables, surrounded by others watching the games, amid a silence so profound that the movement of the pieces could alone be heard. If, however, we may credit a description of the famous hall of the chequer-board published in Fraser’s Magazine, December 1840, the tempers of the players must have suffered a distressing deterioration since the times of Le Sage, for when the author of the article entered the café, in the winter of 1839, his ears were assailed by a “roar like that of the Regent’s Park beast show at feeding-time.” So great was the renown of the Parisian players that strangers from the four corners of the earth—Poles, Turks, Moors and Hindoos—made journeys to the Café de la Régence as to an arena where victory was esteemed final and complete. Not even on the Rialto of Venice, says the writer in Fraser’s, in its most famous time, could so great a mixture of garbs and tongues be met. Here, among other literary monarchs who visited the café, came Voltaire and D’Alembert. Jean Jacques Rousseau, dressed as an Armenian, drew such crowds that the proprietor was forced to appeal for police protection, and the eccentric philosopher, while absorbed in play, was furtively sketched by St. Aubin. Here came, incogniti, the Emperor Joseph of Austria, brother of Marie Antoinette, and Emperor Paul of Russia, the latter betraying his imperial quality by tossing to the waiter a golden louis he had won by betting on a game. The café was the favourite resort of Robespierre, a devoted chess-player, who lived close by in the Rue St. Honoré (No. 398), and of the young Napoleon Bonaparte when waiting on fortune in Paris. The latter is said to have been a rough, impatient player, and a bad loser. Hats were kept on to economise space, and on a winter Sunday afternoon a chair was worth a monarch’s ransom: when a champion player entered, hats were raised, and fifty challengers leapt from their seats to offer a game. So proud was the proprietor of the distinction conferred on his café, that long after Rousseau’s and Voltaire’s deaths he would call to the waiter, “Serve Jean Jacques!” “Look to Voltaire!” if any customers sat down at the tables where the famous philosophers had been wont to sit. While the big game of political chess was being enacted in the streets of Paris during the three days of July 1830, the players of the café are said to have calmly pushed their wooden pieces undisturbed by the fighting outside, during which the front of the building was injured. The original café no longer exists, for in 1852 the Régence was removed from the Place du Palais Royal to the Rue St. Honoré. Last year the writer was startled by an amazing exuviation of the somewhat faded café, which had assumed a new decoration of most brilliant and approved modernity; it now vies in splendour with the cafes of the Boulevards. A few chess-players still linger on and are relegated to a recessed room.
Shortly after the foundation of the Régence another café was opened by Widow Marion on the old Carrefour de l’Opéra, where the Academicians gathered and discussed of matters affecting the French language. At Guadot’s, on the Place de l’Ecole, was heard the clank of spur and sabre. Soon every phase of Parisian social life found its appropriate coffee-house, and by the end of the eighteenth century some nine hundred cafés were established in the city.