Three gibbets dumb and tall,
Against the east, with scrawny arms, outlined;
Far off a lonely tower, left behind,
With silver cross and ball.
And distant, round and dim,
Behind the waste, behind the gibbets high,
The witches' moon, with filmy bloodshot eye,
Peering above the rim!
W. W. Young.
FRÉDÉRIC LEMAITRE.
"Incomparably the finest acting I ever saw," wrote Dickens from Paris twenty years ago, "I saw last night at the Ambigu." The actor was Frédéric Lemaitre, and the part he played was that of Georges de Germany in the drama of Thirty Years, or the Life of a Gambler. At this time (February, 1855) Lemaitre was already so old a man that Dickens was surprised to see him still playing, and the part was one which the actor had created originally twenty-eight years before that. He first played it at the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre in 1827, close upon half a century ago. "Never," continues Dickens, "did I see anything in art so exaltedly horrible and awful. In the earlier acts he was so well made up and so light and active that he really looked sufficiently young. But in the last two, when he had grown old and miserable, he did the finest things, I really believe, that are within the power of acting. Two or three times a great cry of horror went all round the house. When he met in the inn-yard the traveler whom he murders, and first saw his money, the manner in which the crime came into his head—and eyes—was as truthful as it was terrific. This traveler, being a good fellow, gives him wine. You should see the dim remembrance of his better days that comes over him as he takes the glass, and in a strange dazed way makes as if he were going to touch the other man's, or do some airy thing with it, and then stops and flings the contents down his hot throat, as if he were pouring it into a limekiln. But this was nothing to what follows after he has done the murder, and comes home with a basket of provisions, a ragged pocket full of money, and a badly-washed, bloody right hand, which his little girl finds out. After the child asked him if he had hurt his hand, his going aside, turning himself round, and looking over all his clothes for spots was so inexpressibly dreadful that it really scared one. He called for wine, and the sickness that came upon him when he saw the color was one of the things which brought out the curious cry I have spoken of from the audience. Then he fell into a sort of bloody mist, and went on to the end groping about, with no mind for anything except making his fortune by staking this money and a faint dull kind of love for the child. It is quite impossible to satisfy one's self by saying enough of such a magnificent performance. I have never seen him come near its finest points in anything else. He said two things in a way that would put him far apart from all other actors. One to his wife, when he has exultingly shown her the money, and she has asked him how he got it—'I found it;' and the other to his old companion and tempter, when he charged him with having killed that traveler, and he suddenly went headlong mad and took him by the throat and howled out, 'It wasn't I who murdered him—it was misery!' And such a dress! such a face! and, above all, such an extraordinarily guilty, wicked thing as he made of a knotted branch of a tree which was his walking-stick from the moment when the idea of the murder came into his head! I could write pages about him. It is an impression quite ineffaceable. He got half boastful of that walking-staff to himself, and half afraid of it, and didn't know whether to be grimly pleased that it had the jagged end, or to hate it and be horrified at it. He sat at a little table in the inn-yard drinking with the traveler; and this horrible stick got between them like the Devil, while he counted on his fingers the uses he could put the money to."
It will be a surprise to many readers to learn that Frédéric Lemaitre is still living and still playing. On the evening of March 25, 1874, I went to this same old theatre of the Ambigu to see him play Feuillantin in Le Portier du Numero 15. The part is that of an old man, and the actor played it "in his habit as he lived," without artificial make-up or wig. His own long iron-gray hair floated on the air; the wrinkles in his old face were painted there by the hand of Time; his voice was cracked and broken, and his gait that of advanced age. I had formed the impression, beforehand, that Lemaitre was simply a tottering old wreck, a painful and pitiable sight; and I went to the theatre prepared to be saddened by the spectacle of a ruin. A ruin it was, perhaps, but what a grand and impressive one! The old man was magnificent! So far from exciting pity, he roused in me feelings of the warmest enthusiasm. So far from seeming to ask for sympathy, he compelled admiration by force of his splendid pantomime, in witnessing which one forgot he had no voice, or remembered it only to see in the fact a fitting feature of the old portier he was playing. In the midst of my admiration for the actor, however, I studied the man himself; and I saw that he dominated his fellow-actors with a will of the most imperious sort. He swept along the action of the piece, and manipulated the rather poor company of actors who moved about him, with a leonine agility of movement and an autocratic command of the scene which showed that even in his old age he was no subject for patronizing sympathy. There was a meek, white-faced young lady who played the part of granddaughter to the old portier, and I transferred my pity to her; for the way Lemaitre hauled her hither and thither by her slender wrists (not in simulated rudeness, for she was the pet of the old portier's heart, but simply in the actor's imperative arrangements of tableaux), and the manner in which he dragged her young head with his iron arms to his broad breast in affectionate but rough and picturesque embrace, were enough to wear on the nerves of the stoutest young woman; and this one was as frail in form as she was fair in face.
A day or two later I had an opportunity of observing more closely the hero of fifty years of mimic life. It was in the green-room of the Ambigu, half an hour before the curtain rose on his fiftieth performance of the portier, and the old man was in his shirt-sleeves and with his apparel otherwise disordered. Learning that we were from America, he invited us to sit for a moment in his dressing-room, which adjoined the green-room, and waved us toward the door with as grand a gesture as if he were Hamlet saying "Lead on! I'll follow thee." The dressing-room was a pleasant little box (in French stage-parlance, by the way, a player's dressing-room is always called his loge), with the walls covered with portraits of theatrical and other celebrities. The impression Lemaitre made on me at this time was more that which might be made by an American statesman of the old school—a Clay, a Webster, an Adams—than that one would expect from a mere mouther of other people's words. However, I am wrong to apply this term to Lemaitre, who was in the truest sense an author. But of this later. He was full of a sort of sad dignity, and the burden of his conversation was, "I am no longer young." He inquired curiously concerning America, but when it was suggested that he should visit our country, shook his head: "No; I am too old to cross the sea now." The above passage from Dickens was referred to, but he had never heard of it: he said, however, that Monsieur Dickens had once sent him some novels to read, and by his tone did not imply that he was at all flattered by the admiration of the Englishman. For in truth Lemaitre was already a spoiled child of adulation years before Charles Dickens became famous; and now that Dickens was nearly four years dead, the old actor still lived, and remembered that every admiring adjective known to the French language had been showered upon himself: what mattered a few more in the English language? Looking in the tired, watery old eyes of the man sitting before me with his hands thrust deep in his pockets—and what magnificent, fiery, great black billiard-balls of eyes they must have been in his youth!—looking at the skinny folds which years had gathered about his aged jaws, it was still, strange to say, perfectly easy to realize the fascinating man Lemaitre had been in his prime, the tremendous power for swaying the emotions of his auditors which once abode in that rugged frame.
Frédéric Lemaitre was born at Havre on the 21st of July, 1798, and had been on the stage thirty years at the time when Dickens saw him at the Ambigu. As he was at that time already nearly sixty years old, it is easy to believe what some have asserted, that his powers were beginning to wane. Seeing him, therefore, in the year 1874, at the age of seventy-six, still an actor of such fascination that I hardly know his equal in Paris, and reading Dickens's account of his acting at the age of fifty-eight, the most cautious critic may accept without modification the extravagant stories told of the power he had over his audience when he was still young. Similar stories are related of Edmund Kean, and the resemblance in the private characters of the two men is most striking.