When Macaire, Germany and Mephisto had successively dawned on the delighted consciousness of the Parisians—those most insatiate of all theatre-goers—Lemaitre had won the sceptre of the Paris stage. He reigned over the public with despotic sway, and the public adored its theatrical monarch. With his subjects he could do anything, take any liberty, without fear of dethronement. One evening, during an act in which he had not to appear on the stage, he was leaning while chatting with a comrade against that part of the wings known in French as "harlequin's cloak"—in our stage language the prompt-place. A brass knob was under his elbow. "What's this machine for?" he said, examining it. "Don't touch it, Monsieur Frédéric," cried an employé: "it's the gas-regulator." "Bah! has the gas got a regulator, then? Lucky gas! Let's see what will happen." With this he turned the knob and plunged the whole theatre into darkness. Two thousand Frenchmen and women cried out in alarm and consternation. Great was their indignation and savage their inquiries as to the cause of the occurrence. But no sooner were they informed that Lemaitre had committed this hangable feat than the joke seemed charming, and when he came on the stage in the following act they received him with bravos and joyous laughs.
Lemaitre was indeed a spoiled child of the public, and his prodigious success began to have the effect which success often has upon us poor mortals. He became impatient of all restraint, jealous of all honor offered to his confrères. The Ambigu won him away from the Porte Saint-Martin after a short time, and on the stage of his first successes he was supported by Madame Dorval, one of the finest actresses the French stage has known. These two dramatic powers did wonders, and the public divided its applause between them. This did not suit the petted genius. He complained to the manager. "Your horrible claque splits my ears," he cried in a fury: "I expect you to get rid of it at once. Or if not—" Before his ultimatum was pronounced Madame Dorval appeared. "Are you crazy?" she said to the manager: "what is the use of these imbeciles with their hand-clapping? Drive them all away from the theatre, and leave the real public to its own impressions. If your Romans[B] do not at once disappear, I play no more."—"Nor I," said Lemaitre.—"So be it," said the manager: "the claque shall be discharged."
Such a bold step in a Paris theatre was almost unheard of. What! try to run a theatre without the regular corps of hired applauders? The thing was incredible. But the leading artists demanded it, and the manager notified his claqueurs that their pay was stopped. That night not a ripple of applause disturbed the monotony of the performance. The public, left to itself, and accustomed to have a gang of paid worthies to start the applause at the right moment, applauded neither Lemaitre nor Dorval, nor any of the other players. "It is evident," said Lemaitre to himself, "that people who admire my acting fear being mistaken for hired claqueurs if they express their enthusiasm. I must arrange that." He therefore quietly caused to be planted a few judicious claqueurs about the house at his own expense, and that night bravos and hand-clappings were bestowed on Lemaitre alone. This suited the actor's notions to a nicety. Not so with the actress, however. "These people have no taste," she thought; "but that can't last." So she arranged privately for a small claque of her own, and that night she also was applauded. But this sort of game was one which the smaller players of the theatre could take a hand in, too. And on the third night, strange to say, there was applause for everything and everybody; all the performers had "ovations" in turn; even the ballet-girls had a share in the general glory so liberally bestowed. "What is the meaning of this?" demanded Lemaitre and Dorval of the manager: "did you not promise that your claque should be discharged?" The manager shrugged his shoulders. "My claque is discharged," said he; "and now there are, I perceive, three claques instead of one—yours, madame's and the whole company's. Nothing could be fairer."
It may seem strange that our actor, who dealt so roughly with the critic who suggested bribery, should have condescended to pay men for applause. But custom regulates our sense of honor. The claque is an institution so openly recognized in French theatres that the proudest dramatic or lyric temple in Paris would not know what to do without it. Even the classic Théâtre Français and the frigid Odéon, which are in great part supported by the government, and about which hangs the purest odor of high art, have each a regularly organized claque, which is paid to applaud, and which holds its rehearsals with the same solemnity that the players do, in order to introduce at the proper moment a gust of hand-clapping, a burst of laughter, or cries of "Bravo! bravo!" There is no concealment whatever about their operations. The claqueurs occupy conspicuous seats in every theatre, and it is often quite an entertainment in itself to watch their goings on. The leader gives the signal to begin and the sign to stop; and if any man of his band applauds too idly, that man is openly rebuked, and instructed by vehement gesture to do his duty better.
But, as has been said, Lemaitre was growing spoiled as a man by his success as an artist. He rebelled against the idea that any person should be admired on the scene where he was king, and he carried this feeling to the absurdest lengths. In one of his plays he had to bring in the corpse of his young brother (of the story), and the actor who played this part identified himself so well with the immobility of the last sleep that the public, struck with astonishment, broke in upon one of Lemaitre's finest speeches with cries of bravo for the little dead brother. "This is a very impertinent rascal," muttered Lemaitre, "who makes himself applauded in my very arms. I shall punish him for it." Leaning over the supposed corpse while speaking his lines, he blew into the dead boy's nostrils. Not a movement! Then pretending to yield to despair—always in consonance with the part he was playing—Lemaitre pulled the hair of the defunct with frantic gestures. Not a muscle stirred! Whereupon Lemaitre seemed to break down utterly under his grief, let go of the body, and it fell hard upon the stage like an inert mass. The effect was superb. The whole house applauded, the bravos became frantic, the great actor was hoist with his own petard. Lemaitre passed the night in solemn reflection on the seriousness of the case. The result was that at the next representation, while carrying in his little dead brother, he delicately tickled him under the arms. The unhappy defunct could not stand this. He came to life, burst out laughing, and was heartily hissed, while Lemaitre, the picture of solemn grief, inly chuckled at the success of his efforts to destroy rivalry.
But, notwithstanding his superb egotism and his jealousy of applause, Lemaitre was capable of mocking at himself in a most amusing manner. At one of the last representations of Robert Macaire he expected to be called before the curtain at the end of the play. He was not, however; whereupon he ordered the curtain to be raised and came forward with his gravest air. "Gentlemen," said he, addressing the audience, "I desire to know if M. Auguste is not here." M. Auguste does not answer, and the spectators look at each other in surprise. "M. Antoine!" Silence again. "Well, gentlemen, I am the victim of the dishonesty of the chef and sous-chef of the claque. I gave them forty francs this morning to call me out, and neither of them is here. You perceive, gentlemen, how grossly I have been swindled."
After his fame had grown to greatness Lemaitre reappeared on the classic stage of the Odéon, the scene of his earliest efforts. Here he played a number of parts, including Othello. But the actor had in his mind an idea which haunted him. It was that his favorite rôle of Robert Macaire had not had all the development of which it was capable. He associated with himself two authors, Antier and Saint-Amant, who accepted his ideas and wove them into a new play under his direction, bearing the name of his thieving hero. The success the piece achieved was something prodigious. All Paris ran to see it, and it was played for an unparalleled length of time. Lemaitre was so in love with the part that he used often to play it off the stage. Thus, one day at the Café de Malte they brought him his bill after breakfast. He arose, threw ten francs on the counter, and was leaving. "But the bill is ten francs fifty," said the café-master. "Very good," said Lemaitre: "the fifty centimes are for the garçon." The stage and caricature have since dressed up this mot in various forms, but Lemaitre was its first publisher. During this same winter of 1836 he was skating one afternoon on the basin in the Luxembourg garden, where he was the object of great admiration for his graceful evolutions. Presently one of a group of women, as he passed near, recognized him and cried out, "My fifteen francs, Monsieur Frédéric: have you forgotten my fifteen francs?" The actor stopped. The woman was his former hostess of the Latin quarter, with whom he had lived in the days of his impecuniosity during his first connection with the Odéon. Putting on the air of Robert Macaire, Lemaitre replied, "Your fifteen francs, madam? You are mighty impertinent. Under the alcove in my room I left an old wig. That wig cost me thirty-five francs: you owe me a louis. I will send for it to-morrow." And he skated calmly away. Next day, however, the hostess received her due.
After having played this wicked and trivial thief so long that people began to say (as they say now of the creator of Rip Van Winkle) that he could not play anything else, Lemaitre startled the town with a new creation, utterly distinct from anything he had hitherto done. From depicting the most abject rascality he passed in a moment, as it seemed, to the representation of delicacy of sentiment and grandeur of soul in Alexandre Dumas's play of Richard d'Arlington, and again as Gennaro in Victor Hugo's Lucretia Borgia. Yet the wild dissipation of the man's life was never so great as at this precise period of his career. Harel, the manager of the theatre where he was now playing (the Porte Saint-Martin), was obliged almost every night to send emissaries after him to the restaurant opposite the play-house, where Lemaitre was indulging in monstrous dinners and was usually hilarious with wine. Harel, it must be mentioned, was a very penurious man, who never paid his people when he could postpone it, and whose meanness of soul Lemaitre delighted to excoriate. Often when dining bountifully at his restaurant, the actor being sent for in hot haste with the intelligence that the curtain was just going up, would cry, "Diable! And I haven't a sou in my pocket! Here's the bill. Carry it to Harel, and tell him they are keeping me here as a hostage." Though grinding his teeth with rage, the manager never failed to send the necessary sum for the release of his principal actor. At other times, when Lemaitre had breakfasted copiously, he did not dine, but the manager's purse then ran another peril. His actor would arrive at the theatre in a carriage, after having been driven about for five or six hours "for the benefit of his digestion," as he said, but never did he have the necessary sum to settle with the cocher, and again Harel paid before Lemaitre would get out of the vehicle. At other times during an entr' acte Lemaitre would disappear from the theatre, and when the curtain was ready to go up again could nowhere be found. "Frédéric! where is Frédéric?" the distracted manager would cry. Frédéric was down stairs in the café under the theatre playing games where the stakes were high, and almost always losing. "Monsieur Frédéric, the curtain is up!" the prompter would rush in to say. "Ciel! What can I do?" the imperturbable actor would reply. "I can't leave here, my dear fellow: I must win back what I've lost." Poor Harel had to pay again. As the receipts of the theatre were large, he did not dare complain much of these forced presents of money: Lemaitre called them his perquisites. He had a profound contempt for his manager's slippery financial manœuvres. Harel was really almost as eccentric in his own way as Lemaitre was in his. The history of some of his subterfuges with his creditors would make a curious chapter. One day he stuck up the following notice in the theatre: "To-morrow the box-office will be open from three-quarters past two until a quarter before three for the payment of claims." The box-office was besieged at half-past two by a crowd of creditors who had failed to see the hoax.
"My dear Frédéric," said Harel one night to the actor, "I have a proposition to make to you that will not displease you."—"Very good: tell it me to-morrow at breakfast." The next day they breakfasted, as our hero always breakfasted in those days, on truffles and champagne. Harel's proposition was this: "My project is to diminish your salary one-half."—"What!" cried Lemaitre in very natural surprise, "are you mocking me?"—"The theatre is on the verge of bankruptcy," pleaded Harel.—"How can that be? I have earned more than a million francs for it. What the devil do you do with your money?"—"My dear fellow," quoth Harel, "what do you do with yours?"—"Ah! that's different: I have no account to give to anybody but myself."—"But come, let us not get angry," said Harel: "I will continue to pay you the whole sum, while appearing to give you but half of it. In this way I shall be at liberty to cut down the other salaries, and the theatre can go on." Lemaitre arose, looked Harel straight in the eyes, and answered, "You have the secret of sobering a man by a single phrase. So you think me capable—" Harel interrupted him hurriedly, not relishing the angry light in the actor's eyes: "No, no—not at all: I was joking."—"Ah, you were joking? Eh bien, your joke is a horribly bad one. Pray don't repeat it."
Lemaitre was not deceived by the manager's sudden change of base. Three days afterward he revenged himself by a cutting bit of sarcasm. It was in Harel's own office. A young and well-dressed man presented himself, carrying a roll of manuscript. At sight of Lemaitre he drew back modestly, but Harel bade him remain, and asked him if he brought a drama. "Yes," answered the young man.—"Your own?"—"Yes."—"Then you have a reputation, doubtless?"—"No, it is my first piece."—"Ah," said the manager, who had taken note of the fact that the young author was far from shabby-looking, "in that case you are no doubt aware of the conditions. The essential thing with us managers always is to raise the receipts over the expenses."—"I understand that, sir."—"We prudent managers are obliged to refuse the pieces of all authors who have not yet achieved success, unless they will guarantee us the expenses that the rehearsal of the piece will entail upon us."—"That is my intention," was the young man's reply.—"Then we shall be able to understand each other. Your piece is in five acts?"—"In three, sir."—"Five acts would not have cost you a sou more." The conversation continued in this strain until the young author had signed a contract to pay ten thousand francs. With the spirit of a Shylock, Harel made out an account of actors, actresses, costumes, musicians, etc. that would have given gooseflesh to a less anxious and less wealthy author. Lemaitre remained sitting in a corner of the room until the manager arose to conduct the young man to the door: then he went up to them, laid his hand on Harel's shoulder, and said, "Why do you let him go? He has got his watch yet."