Sallé’s more deliberate, probably more feeling work, has been noted in an earlier chapter. Her popularity hardly could have been less, all told, than that of her rival.
Mlles. Allard and Guimard were two stars who followed a little later in the same period. The former combined extraordinary vigour with pathetic pantomime. The work of Guimard was delicate, pretty, light. “She is a shadow, flitting through Elysian groves,” one of her contemporaries wrote of her. Certainly she had the art of pleasing, on the stage or off. The list of eminent competitors for her affection is eloquent not in its length, but in the number of occupants of high station—including three princes of the Church. With a passion for theatrical and political intrigue she combined a spirit of the utmost generosity. To her the painter David owed his professional beginnings; he was an art student without means to study, and engaged in house-painting for a livelihood, when Guimard secured him a pension that afforded him study at Rome. Some of Fragonard’s best decorations were made for her establishments.
Her refusal to have any rival about her kept the Opera in an uproar. Perfectly appointed little theatres in both her country and city homes enabled her, with her taste, means, and popularity among the people of the stage, to give performances for which invitations were most highly prized. For these performances she made a practice of setting dates to coincide with court receptions, knowing from experience that the best wit and most of the elegance of Paris would make excuses to the court. From this estate she was reduced, partly by the storm of the Revolution, to a condition of miserable poverty lasting until her death; which was delayed until her seventy-fourth year.
Men did not fall short of women in merit and recognition. Beside the Vestris, father and son, fame touched Javillier, Dauberval, and the comedy dancer Lany. Maximilian Gardel, he who substituted for Auguste Vestris on condition of appearing without the mask (Apollo, in Castor and Pollux was the rôle), was a composer of note as well as a dancer. His brother Pierre added to these qualities skill as a violinist.
The progress of the ballet was halted by the Revolution. Gardel headed an effort to keep it in motion with the aid of a spectacle La Marseillaise as vehicle; but the people were on the streets, dancing la Carmagnole, and nobility were as far from Paris as possible. It is probable that the ballet was set down as an aristocratic institution. Napoleon included a corps de ballet in the equipment of the campaign in Egypt; but it signified nothing to the advantage of the art. Immediately after the Terror, eighteen hundred dance-halls were opened in Paris, to furnish, seven nights a week, relief for fever and frenzy. Even England was too preoccupied to offer the ballet a dwelling; its organisation, for the time being, was lost.
But only for the time being. History records a bit of international negotiation indicating Europe’s readiness to return to the realities of life and the happiness thereof. In 1821 an ambassador of a great power acted officially as an impresario of dancers.
England, whose best public taste never has been satisfied with the work of her own people, was, within a few years after the peace, again seeking dancers in France. Efforts to get the best were handicapped. The national character of the French Academy makes its pupils and graduates wards of their government, in effect; government permission is and was necessary as a condition to leaving the country. Negotiations therefore were put into the hands of the British ambassador, less formal dealings apparently having failed to produce results. The agreement was incorporated in the form of a treaty, France agreeing to lend England two first and two second dancers, England in return agreeing not to attempt to engage any others without the Academy’s consent.
M. Albert and Mlle. Noblet were the first two artists to be taken to London under the new arrangement, at salaries of £1700 and £1500 respectively. During the same period, and for years after, Her Majesty’s Theatre had the services of Carlo Blasis, one of the most capable ballet-masters of his time, father of several virtuosi, and the writer of books of lasting value on the subject of his profession. Dancing reached a popularity that would seem the utmost attainable, were it not for disclosures to be made in the years soon to come.
Beauty and its appreciation will carry a public to a condition of ecstasy. If to this be added the incessant discussion attendant on a controversy, with the hot partisanship that accompanies the coexistence of rival stars, the devotional flame is augmented by fuel of high calorific value. Not without cause were the hostilities of Pylades and Bathyllus, of Sallé and Camargo, associated with great public enthusiasm. To artistic appreciation they added the element of sporting interest.
In Marie Taglioni and Fanny Ellsler, Europe had the parties to a years-long competition that was Olympian in quality and incredible in its hold on the sympathies of the public. Both goddesses in art, their personalities and the genres of their work were at opposite extremes. In Pendennis Thackeray asks, “Will the young folks ever see anything so charming, anything so classic, anything like Taglioni?” Of Ellsler, Flitch quotes words equally enthusiastic—and less coherent—from the pen of Theophile Gautier, who was an incurable maniac and copious writer on the subject of dancing: “Now she darts forward; the castanets commence their sonorous clatter; with her hands she seems to shake down clusters of rhythm. How she twists! how she bends! what fire! what voluptuousness of motion! what eager zest! Her arms seem to swoon, her head droops, her body curves backward until her white shoulders almost graze the ground. What charm of gesture! And with that hand which sweeps over the dazzle of the footlights would not one say that she gathered all the desires and all the enthusiasms of those that watch her?”