Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2327 page)

At the first play he went to, the performance was stopped while the news of the last Crimean engagement, just issued in a supplement to the
Moniteur
, was read from the stage. “It made not the faintest effect upon the audience; and even the hired claqueurs, who had been absurdly loud during the piece, seemed to consider the war not at all within their contract, and were as stagnant as ditch-water. The theatre was full. It is quite impossible to see such apathy, and suppose the war to be popular, whatever may be asserted to the contrary.” The day before, he had met the Emperor and the King of Sardinia in the streets, “and, as usual, no man touching his hat, and very very few so much as looking round.”

The success of a most agreeable little piece by our old friend Regnier took him next to the Français, where Plessy’s acting enchanted him. “Of course the interest of it turns upon a flawed piece of living china (
that
seems to be positively essential), but, as in most of these cases, if you will accept the position in which you find the people, you have nothing more to bother your morality about.” The theatre in the Rue Richelieu, however, was not generally his favourite resort. He used to talk of it whimsically as a kind of tomb, where you went, as the Eastern people did in the stories, to think of your unsuccessful loves and dead relations. “There is a dreary classicality at that establishment calculated to freeze the marrow. Between ourselves, even one’s best friends there are at times very aggravating. One tires of seeing a man, through any number of acts, remembering everything by patting his forehead with the flat of his hand, jerking out sentences by shaking himself, and piling them up in pyramids over his head with his right forefinger. And they have a generic small comedy-piece, where you see two sofas and three little tables, to which a man enters with his hat on, to talk to another man — and in respect of which you know exactly when he will get up from one sofa to sit on the other, and take his hat off one table to put it upon the other — which strikes one quite as ludicrously as a good farce.
 . . . There seems to be a good piece at the Vaudeville, on the idea of the
Town and Country Mouse
. It is too respectable and inoffensive for me to-night, but I hope to see it before I leave . . . I have a horrible idea of making friends with Franconi, and sauntering when I am at work into their sawdust green-room.”

At a theatre of a yet heavier school than the Français he had a drearier experience. “On Wednesday we went to the Odéon to see a new piece, in four acts and in verse, called
Michel Cervantes
. I suppose such an infernal dose of ditch water never was concocted. But there were certain passages, describing the suppression of public opinion in Madrid, which were received with a shout of savage application to France that made one stare again! And once more, here again, at every pause, steady, compact, regular as military drums, the Ça Ira!” On another night, even at the Porte St. Martin, drawn there doubtless by the attraction of repulsion, he supped full with the horrors of classicality at a performance of
Orestes
versified by Alexandre Dumas. “Nothing have I ever seen so weighty and so ridiculous. If I had not already learnt to tremble at the sight of classic drapery on the human form, I should have plumbed the utmost depths of terrified boredom in this achievement. The chorus is not preserved otherwise than that bits of it are taken out for characters to speak. It is really so bad as to be almost good. Some of the Frenchified classical anguish struck me as so unspeakably ridiculous that it puts me on the broad grin as I write.”

At the same theatre, in the early spring, he had a somewhat livelier entertainment. “I was at the Porte St. Martin last night, where there is a rather good melodrama called
Sang Melé
, in which one of the characters is an English Lord — Lord William Falkland — who is called throughout the piece Milor Williams Fack Lorn, and is a hundred times described by others and described by himself as Williams. He is admirably played; but two English travelling ladies are beyond expression ridiculous, and there is something positively vicious in their utter want of truth. One ‘set,’ where the action of a whole act is supposed to take place in the great wooden verandah of a Swiss hotel overhanging a mountain ravine, is the best piece of stage carpentering I have seen in France. Next week we are to have at the Ambigu
Paradise Lost
, with the murder of Abel, and the Deluge. The wildest rumours are afloat as to the un-dressing of our first parents.” Anticipation far outdoes a reality of this kind; and at the fever-pitch to which rumours raised it here, Dickens might vainly have attempted to get admission on the first night, if Mr. Webster, the English manager and comedian, had not obtained a ticket for him. He went with Mr. Wilkie Collins. “We were rung in (out of the café below the Ambigu) at 8, and the play was over at half-past 1; the waits between the acts being very much longer than the acts themselves. The house was crammed to excess in every part, and the galleries awful with Blouses, who again, during the whole of the waits, beat with the regularity of military drums the revolutionary tune of famous memory — Ça Ira! The play is a compound of
Paradise Lost
and Byron’s
Cain;
and some of the controversies between the archangel and the devil, when the celestial power argues with the infernal in conversational French, as ‘Eh bien!
Satan, crois-tu donc que notre Seigneur t’aurait exposé aux tourments que t’endures à présent, sans avoir prévu,’ &c. &c. are very ridiculous.
All the supernatural personages are alarmingly natural (as theatre nature goes), and walk about in the stupidest way. Which has occasioned Collins and myself to institute a perquisition whether the French ever have shown any kind of idea of the supernatural; and to decide this rather in the negative. The people are very well dressed, and Eve very modestly. All Paris and the provinces had been ransacked for a woman who had brown hair that would fall to the calves of her legs — and she was found at last at the Odéon. There was nothing attractive until the 4th act, when there was a pretty good scene of the children of Cain dancing in, and desecrating, a temple, while Abel and his family were hammering hard at the Ark, outside; in all the pauses of the revel. The Deluge in the fifth act was up to about the mark of a drowning scene at the Adelphi; but it had one new feature. When the rain ceased, and the ark drove in on the great expanse of water, then lying waveless as the mists cleared and the sun broke out, numbers of bodies drifted up and down. These were all real men and boys, each separate, on a new kind of horizontal sloat. They looked horrible and real. Altogether, a merely dull business; but I dare say it will go for a long while.”

A piece of honest farce is a relief from these profane absurdities. “An uncommonly droll piece with an original comic idea in it has been in course of representation here. It is called
Les Cheveux de ma Femme
. A man who is dotingly fond of his wife, and who wishes to know whether she loved anybody else before they were married, cuts off a lock of her hair by stealth, and takes it to a great mesmeriser, who submits it to a clairvoyante who never was wrong. It is discovered that the owner of this hair has been up to the most frightful dissipations, insomuch that the clairvoyante can’t mention half of them. The distracted husband goes home to reproach his wife, and she then reveals that she wears a wig, and takes it off.”

The last piece he went to see before leaving Paris was a French version of
As You Like It;
but he found two acts of it to be more than enough. “In
Comme il vous Plaira
nobody had anything to do but to sit down as often as possible on as many stones and trunks of trees as possible. When I had seen Jacques seat himself on 17 roots of trees, and 25 grey stones, which was at the end of the second act, I came away.” Only one more sketch taken in a theatre, and perhaps the best, I will give from these letters. It simply tells us what is necessary to understand a particular “tag” to a play, but it is related so prettily that the thing it celebrates could not have a nicer effect than is produced by this account of it. The play in question,
Mémoires du Diable
, and another piece of enchanting interest, the
Médecin des Enfants
,
were his favourites among all he saw at this time. “As I have no news, I may as well tell you about the tag that I thought so pretty to the
Mémoires du Diable;
in which piece by the way, there is a most admirable part, most admirably played, in which a man says merely ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ all through the piece, until the last scene. A certain M. Robin has got hold of the papers of a deceased lawyer, concerning a certain estate which has been swindled away from its rightful owner, a Baron’s widow, into other hands. They disclose so much roguery that he binds them up into a volume lettered ‘Mémoires du Diable.’ The knowledge he derives from these papers not only enables him to unmask the hypocrites all through the piece (in an excellent manner), but induces him to propose to the Baroness that if he restores to her her estate and good name — for even her marriage to the deceased Baron is denied — she shall give him her daughter in marriage. The daughter herself, on hearing the offer, accepts it; and a part of the plot is, her going to a masked ball, to which he goes as the Devil, to see how she likes him (when she finds, of course, that she likes him very much). The country people about the Château in dispute, suppose him to be really the Devil, because of his strange knowledge, and his strange comings and goings; and he, being with this girl in one of its old rooms, in the beginning of the 3rd act, shews her a little coffer on the table with a bell in it. ‘They suppose,’ he tells her, ‘that whenever this bell is rung, I appear and obey the summons. Very ignorant, isn’t it? But, if you ever want me particularly — very particularly — ring the little bell and try.’ The plot proceeds to its development. The wrong-doers are exposed; the missing document, proving the marriage, is found; everything is finished; they are all on the stage; and M. Robin hands the paper to the Baroness. ‘You are reinstated in your rights, Madame; you are happy; I will not hold you to a compact made when you didn’t know me; I release you and your fair daughter; the pleasure of doing what I have done, is my sufficient reward; I kiss your hand and take my leave. Farewell!’ He backs himself courteously out; the piece seems concluded, everybody wonders, the girl (little Mdlle. Luther) stands amazed; when she suddenly remembers the little bell. In the prettiest way possible, she runs to the coffer on the table, takes out the little bell, rings it, and he comes rushing back and folds her to his heart. I never saw a prettier thing in my life. It made me laugh in that most delightful of ways, with the tears in my eyes; so that I can never forget it, and must go and see it again.”

But great as was the pleasure thus derived from the theatre, he was, in the matter of social intercourse, even more indebted to distinguished men connected with it by authorship or acting. At Scribe’s he was entertained frequently; and “very handsome and pleasant” was his account of the dinners, as of all the belongings, of the prolific dramatist — a charming place in Paris, a fine estate in the country, capital carriage, handsome pair of horses, “all made, as he says, by his pen.” One of the guests the first evening was Auber, “a stolid little elderly man, rather petulant in manner,” who told Dickens he had once lived “at Stock Noonton” (Stoke Newington) to study English, but had forgotten it all. “Louis Philippe had invited him to meet the Queen of England, and when L. P. presented him, the Queen said, ‘We are such old acquaintances through M. Auber’s works, that an introduction is quite unnecessary.’“ They met again a few nights later, with the author of the
History of the Girondins
, at the hospitable table of M. Pichot, to whom Lamartine had expressed a strong desire again to meet Dickens as “un des grands amis de son imagination.” “He continues to be precisely as we formerly knew him, both in appearance and manner; highly prepossessing, and with a sort of calm passion about him, very taking indeed. We talked of De Foe
and Richardson, and of that wonderful genius for the minutest details in a narrative, which has given them so much fame in France. I found him frank and unaffected, and full of curious knowledge of the French common people. He informed the company at dinner that he had rarely met a foreigner who spoke French so easily as your inimitable correspondent, whereat your correspondent blushed modestly, and almost immediately afterwards so nearly choked himself with the bone of a fowl (which is still in his throat), that he sat in torture for ten minutes with a strong apprehension that he was going to make the good Pichot famous by dying like the little Hunchback at his table. Scribe and his wife were of the party, but had to go away at the ice-time because it was the first representation at the Opéra Comique of a new opera by Auber and himself, of which very great expectations have been formed. It was very curious to see him — the author of 400 pieces — getting nervous as the time approached, and pulling out his watch every minute. At last he dashed out as if he were going into what a friend of mine calls a plunge-bath. Whereat she rose and followed. She is the most extraordinary woman I ever beheld; for her eldest son must be thirty, and she has the figure of five-and-twenty, and is strikingly handsome. So graceful too, that her manner of rising, curtseying, laughing, and going out after him, was pleasanter than the pleasantest thing I have ever seen done on the stage.” The opera Dickens himself saw a week later, and wrote of it as “most charming. Delightful music, an excellent story, immense stage tact, capital scenic arrangements, and the most delightful little prima donna ever seen or heard, in the person of Marie Cabel. It is called
Manon Lescaut
— from the old romance — and is charming throughout. She sings a laughing song in it which is received with madness, and which is the only real laughing song that ever was written. Auber told me that when it was first rehearsed, it made a great effect upon the orchestra; and that he could not have had a better compliment upon its freshness than the musical director paid him, in coming and clapping him on the shoulder with ‘Bravo, jeune homme! Cela promet bien!’“