Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (3) -- Entertainment in Paris

In such an environment the theater, legitimate and illegitimate, operatic and naughty, was bound to thrive. The number of

theaters in the cityhad been increasing since Molière, yet the actor came into his own as a public figure only toward the end of the nineteenth century, after the era of great literary-political heroes: Rousseau, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo. In the eighties, the roaring voice and sheer physical power of Mounet-Sully made him king in a world of mighty tragedians whose grandiloquence we no longer know. His furious integrity as an actor combined a cultist's intensity with the posturing of a buccaneer. For a few months, until she left him for further glory, Mounet-Sully found his queen in a young actress of illegitimate birth (with an illegitimate child of her own), violent disposition, slender figure, and haunting feline face. This woman, Sarah Bernhardt, lived for thirty­five years at the center of scandal and publicity; she was denounced by some for her love affairs and extravagances and lauded by others as the greatest genius of her time.

After eight years with the Comedie-Française she resigned in a quarrel with the director and made the first of eight triumphant tours in America. She dragged with her across the country, in addition to her score of pets, the famous gold-fixtured coffin which an admirer had give her at her request. After having been photographed in it to spite her director, she kept it at the foot of her bed wherever she went. In the United States dozens of pamphlets circulated in her path, with titles like The Amours of Sarah. The Bishop of Chicago thundered so eloquently from his pulpit against the corrupting influence of the French actress that her agent sent him a polite note: "Monseigneur: I make it a practice to spend $400 on publicity when I come to your city. But since you have done, the job for me, I am sending you $200for your needy. Every fortune Sarah amassed on her world-wide tours she proceeded to lose during the next season or two in Paris, even though she was idolized by all classes. One after the other, three major Paris theaters passed through her hands; each had to be sold to cover her mounting debts. When an injury to her leg first caused talk of amputation (which finally became necessary in 1915), P. T. Barnum approached her with an offer of $10,000 for the severed limb and the right to exhibit it. In 1896 a municipal Journée Sarah Bernhardt brought the whole of Paris to her feet. It began with a banquet for six hundred at the Grand Hotel. The guests marveled at the undiminished youth of the fifty-two-year-old beauty whose son was already over thirty and managing her affairs. A procession of two hundred carriages followed hers to her own Théâtre de la Renaissance. After her performance of the third act of Phèdre, half a dozen poets, including François Coppée and her new lover, Edmond Rostand (shortly to write two hits, Cyrano de Bergerac and L'Aiglon), recited verses to her on a stage banked with flowers. Four years later she attempted her most ambitious performance: Hamlet, en travesti, in Marcel Schwob's fastidious prose translation. For twelve days running she rehearsed from noon until six in the morning and finally staged a passionate, sometimes sentimental version in which she whispered "To be or not to be" almost in secreto. Colette described her in the performance as having "a face sculpted in white powder." Paris loved it; London, despite her previous successes there, refused it in outrage; the festival at Stratford-on-Avon was entranced. She went on acting for fifteen years, short one leg at the end but never out of voice. Sarah Bernhardt's was the most highly charged temperament of the era and one of its greatest talents. Neither Caruso nor Nijinsky had such a career of enduring public adulation, somersaulting business adventures, and tumultuous private life. Only an actress could replace the colossus of Victor Hugo, take Paris for her private stage, and become what the French have called ever since a monstre sacré.

But in reality it was the era of music hall and café chantant--both of them popular adaptations of the light-opera craze which

Offenbach had brought to the Paris of the Second Empire. Everyone was willing to pay to see even brighter costumes and more sparkling antics than those that filled the streets. La Goulue and, later, Mistinguett (originally Miss Tinguette) were vivacious brassy entertainers who worked themselves to the point of exhaustion. Then out of this bubbling atmosphere emerged the apparition of a thin nervous woman in a white dress and long black gloves. No one could have predicted her success. In a sensual grating voice she sang of heartbreak and cruelty and unabashed crime. After hearing her, people never forgot the harsh diction and awkward eloquent gestures of Yvette Guilbert. These were also the years when Colette left her cultivated music-critic husband, Willy, for whom she had first set pen to paper. She danced in gold tights through the provinces and into the best salons of Paris before she reached fame as a novelist and one of the most penetrating chroniclers of the period. Three permanent circuses and a new Hippodrome fringed Montmartre along the boulevards. The clown, the horse, and the acrobat here earned their place in modern art; the Degas ballet dancer became the Toulouse-Lautrec cabaret entertainer, and then became the Picasso Harlequin. The team of clowns, Footit and Chocolat, developed the first comic-stooge act (known as clown et auguste). Grock and Antonet, the American Emmet Kelly, and the Fratellini brothers all achieved fame in Paris before the turn of the century.

Antoine, actor-producer and truant employee of the Paris gas company, brought a restrained naturalism and new dramatic talent (Strindberg and Ibsen) into his pioneering Théâtre Libre near the Place Pigalle. Actors learned to speak for, not at, the audience. He hung a bleeding side of beef in the set of a butcher's shop, and--it is hard to realize--for the first time in Paris, regularly turned the house lights out so that the attention of the audience would have to be directed to the stage. The theater reigned supreme. Yet it was all a show within a show. The frenzy on hundreds of stages all over Paris reflected the gala life around them. At the Opera, unlike the concentration required at Antoine's Theatre Libre, the performance never stopped the fashionable goings-on in the boxes. The city beheld itself endlessly and was never bored or displeased.