Titans of History (51 page)

Convent-educated but in fact Jewish, as a young girl Bernhardt toyed with the idea of becoming a nun. But her mother's influential lover, Charles, Duc de Morny (1811–65), apparently decided otherwise. A brilliant French statesman, now undeservedly forgotten, he was the son of Queen Hortense of Holland and Emperor Napoleon III's half-brother, as well as a natural grandson of Prince Talleyrand. A financier, racehorse owner and aesthete, not to mention an enthusiastic lover, he married a Russian princess. He was the mastermind of Napoleon III's coup and regime, and president of the Corps Legislatif, but his early death helped doom
the Second Empire. It was entirely appropriate that this personification of French power, worldliness and style should have launched (and possibly fathered) the most famous French actress until the era of film.

Morny secured Bernhardt a place at the Paris Conservatoire and a job at the Comédie Française, where she made her debut in 1862, having already won student prizes. Gripped by stage fright, Bernhardt might have seemed better qualified as courtesan than actress. After six years of hard slog, she made her breakthrough and was acclaimed for her roles as Cordelia in a French translation of
King Lear
and the minstrel Zanetto in
Le Passant
, a verse play by François Coppée. Her success in the latter was such that she was commanded to reprise her performance in the presence of Napoleon III.

Audiences clamored to experience her inimitable stage style, suffused with stormy outbursts of wild emotion, tears and grief. For many it became unimaginable that her most famous roles, Marguerite in Dumas's
La Dame aux camélias
and the title roles in Racine's
Phèdre
and Scribe's
Adrienne Lecouvreur
, could be played by anyone else.

Victor Hugo, in whose tragedies she starred, was entranced by her “golden voice,” while Sigmund Freud marveled that “every inch of that little figure lives and bewitches.” Yet Bernhardt was denounced by priests, not only for the risqué content of the plays she herself produced but also for her many lovers and unabashed sexuality. She lived life on her own terms, claiming to be “one of the great lovers of my time.” Her promiscuity was notorious: “My dear, when one has sat on a rose bush and pricked oneself, one cannot say which thorn was responsible,” was the response of her lover the Prince de Ligne (descendant of the 18th-century grandee and courtier) when Bernhardt revealed that she was pregnant with his child. Other lovers included Hugo and Gustave Doré.
Her middle-aged marriage to the young actor Jacques Damala ended when he ran up extensive debts and deserted her to join the French Foreign Legion. Perhaps her beloved son Maurice was the only man who never let her down.

In the early 1880s she left Paris to begin long international tours through Europe and America, where she not only took the leading female roles in productions of both the classics and modern French plays, but also acted male parts, her slight build making her convincing as Hamlet, for example. A brilliant self-promoter, she conquered Paris, then the world, and was “too American not to succeed in America,” as the writer Henry James wryly commented. Bernhardt was the first international star of the pre-cinematic age—and did star in several early silent movies, among them
Queen Elizabeth
and
La Dame aux camélias
, from 1912.

The multi-talented Bernhardt was also a gifted writer and sculptor, a skillful editor and translator of many plays. She herself became an actor-manager, organizing her own profitable tours. When her histrionic style went out of fashion, she simply directed her own theater company, renting the Théâtre des Nations in 1898 (later renamed the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt).

Bernhardt mythologized everything, constantly changing the story of her paternity, and she was probably the healthiest “consumptive” ever to have lived (on at least one occasion, coughing “blood” that was actually red liquid from a concealed bladder). But she was unremittingly loyal. Hearing that her runaway husband was now living in drug-addicted squalor, she personally rescued him, paying for private nursing. She was a fervent French patriot and mesmerized audiences to the very end.

1850–1893

Monsieur de Maupassant … possesses the three essential qualities of the French writer: clarity, clarity and clarity. He exhibits the spirit of balance and order that is the mark of our race
.

Anatole France, in
La vie littéraire
(1888)

Maupassant was the French writer who almost single-handedly made the short story an art form. A famous hedonist and sportsman, he shocked many with his “immoral” literature. His work recognized the appeal of sensuality and human nature's ambivalence toward it. It is this sensitivity, combined with prose of exquisite clarity, that makes him a writer of greatness.

In 1880 Émile Zola decided to publish a collection of stories inspired by the recent Franco-Prussian War. Maupassant's contribution, “Boule de Suif,” was a masterpiece in miniature that ensured its author overnight success. It was typical of his style and originality, a tale of how a prostitute is exploited and betrayed by the hypocritical middle class in wartime. Many regarded such writing as little more than padding for newspaper columns, but Maupassant went on to develop the short story as a distinctive genre that was taken up by a series of later writers from James Joyce to Ernest Hemingway, and from Anton Chekhov to Somerset Maugham.

Born of impoverished Norman nobility, Maupassant gave up his unrewarding post in the civil service to embrace life as a writer. His genius was to reveal, in simple narrative, fundamental human
truths with a skill that rivaled—and sometimes even surpassed—that of the finest novelists. The concision, elegance and humanity of the 300-plus short stories he produced over the ensuing decade demonstrate his mastery of the form.

Maupassant sought to present not “a banal, photographic view of life … but a vision more complete, more gripping, more searching than reality itself.” In this, he owed much to the tutelage of the great novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–80). Flaubert, a friend of Maupassant's mother, took the young man under his wing when he returned to Paris after serving in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1.

Flaubert introduced him to the leading writers of the day, saying, “He's my disciple and I love him like a son.” In turn Flaubert was a surrogate father (some murmured a real one) to Maupassant, whose own parents had separated when he was eleven and whose father was always a remote figure. Maupassant's style was honed under Flaubert to such an extent that the Russian master Tolstoy was moved to praise his searing insight and his disciplined, beautiful prose as the marks of genius.

At the same time Tolstoy deplored Maupassant's immorality. He was perverse and witty: one story told of a hungry gentleman in a stranded train on a very hot day who finally availed himself of the milk of a breast-feeding peasant. Another tells of a respectable upper-class lady who, looking out of her window, is mistaken for a call-girl by a good-looking young blade and afterward seeks forgiveness by buying her husband a present with the proceeds. His work was often set in brothels or boudoirs; yet he was equally fascinated by war, by the shrewd peasants of his native Normandy, by finance and journalism, and by the strange twists of fate. The writer's fascination with sex (one critic described him as a “complete erotomaniac”) reflected a phenomenal promiscuity in life. Indeed, his boating trips with hedonistic Parisian
girls inspired his short story “Mouche,” and his literary success financed the maintenance of several mistresses. Maupassant's best-selling novel
Bel-Ami
(1885) is a masterpiece, probably the best account ever written of that very modern world where journalism and politics meet, and the author went on to name his yacht after it.

Maupassant believed that the artist's duty was not to be a moral arbiter but to present society with its own reflection and leave people to draw their own conclusions. He declared, “for a writer there can be no halfway house: he must either tell what he believes to be the truth, or tell lies.” The resulting incisiveness of his writing highlights the contrast between appearance and reality, illustrating how vanity and pride lead to self-deception and falsehood. Maupassant wrote of betrayal and seduction; of fortune favoring the ruthless and the selfish; of societies based on collective hypocrisy; and of madness. He did not shy away from the deep ambiguities hidden within ourselves, while his writing has the power to dispel society's myths.

Maupassant himself was living proof of such ambiguities. On the one hand, he was a man of action, a passionate oarsman who could comfortably row fifty miles in a day and once saved the English poet Swinburne from drowning. His military service and his love of the sea influenced many of the narratives and settings of his work. On the other hand, he was prone to anxiety and morbid thoughts and was increasingly gripped by the depression from which his mother had also suffered.

In his early twenties Maupassant discovered he had syphilis but refused to have it treated. Mentally he became increasingly unstable, as his frantic existence accelerated his physical deterioration. In 1892, a year after his brother (also suffering from syphilis) died insane, Maupassant attempted suicide. He was committed to a nursing home, where he died less than a year later—at just age forty-three.
In just over a decade as a writer, Maupassant produced some 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books and a volume of verse. His frenetic life and work matched each other. Yet while his life was short, his stories live forever.

1854–1900

From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands
.

W.H. Auden, in the
New Yorker
(March 9, 1963)

Oscar Wilde—poet, playwright, aphorist, novelist and writer of children's stories, aesthete, victim of prejudice and hypocrisy, and insouciant, irrepressible wit—treated his own life as a work of art; he was its hero—and should remain ours. A lover of paradox and a connoisseur of life's absurdities, he effortlessly skewered the pretensions, prejudices and hypocrisies of his age. His destruction by the society that had lionized him was a tragic echo of the themes he explored with such charm and forensic skill in his own work.

Wilde's plays, such as
A Woman of No Importance
and
The Importance of Being Earnest
, are rarely off the stage. His dazzling wit is enduringly quotable: “I take my diary everywhere I go. One must always have something sensational to read on the train,” declares Gwendolyn to Cicely in
The Importance of Being Earnest
, a play that is said to be the most perfect comedy ever written. More than any other writer of the time, his satire deconstructs the pompous edifice of late Victorian society and does so with considerable
élan
.
But under the glittering surface lies the potential for tragedy, and much of his work shimmers on the edge of darkness.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, the novel Wilde published in 1889, pushed the limits of respectability with its themes of decay, cruelty and illicit love, causing Wilde's wife, Constance, to remark that “since Oscar wrote that book no one invites us anywhere anymore.” Yet it is a timelessly sensitive and affecting evocation of our fears of death and aging. Even his fairy tales,
The Happy Prince
and
The Selfish Giant
, do not shy away from the unpalatable reality of cruelty going unpunished and heroism unrewarded.

Wilde was born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, but his desire to be center stage prompted him to pursue an education and a life in England. The archetype of a
fin de siècle
aesthete, Wilde cultivated a flamboyant appearance and a quick and cutting way with words, turning himself into a celebrity long before his writing confirmed that he was worth all the attention. “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” he said. By his early twenties the tall, drawling Oxford graduate, got up in a velvet suit with Regency-style knee-breeches, was notorious. Even the prince of Wales demanded an introduction, declaring: “Not to know Mr. Wilde is to be not known in society.” From celebrity came a career: caricatures of the dandy who declared art to be the highest form of action began to appear on the London stage. When an enterprising producer took one of these plays on an American tour, he decided to take Wilde on a parallel lecture tour on the subject of aestheticism. Wilde—who reportedly arrived at US Customs with the comment “I have nothing to declare except my genius”—became as famous across the Atlantic as he was in England. It was only in the half decade before his fall that Wilde fully became the writer he had always planned to be.

Wilde's homosexuality has become as famous as his work. He was a butterfly broken on a wheel. His provocative effeteness had
prompted rumors about his sexuality for years, but Wilde was a married father who only became actively homosexual in his thirties after his marriage hit a bad patch. “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it,” said Wilde famously. He described his sexual adventures as “feasting with panthers.” Caught up in a vendetta between his preposterously vain and destructive lover Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas and Douglas' father, the lunatic martinet the marquess of Queensberry, Wilde found himself the subject of a sustained campaign of childish abuse. Queensberry sent him phallic bouquets of vegetables, and the note he left at Wilde's club in February 1895 accusing him of being a “posing somdomite” [
sic
] was the final straw. Urged on by Bosie, Wilde sued for libel.

It was a terrible mistake. Under cross-examination Wilde was as flippantly witty as ever, playing to his new audience, the occupants of the court's public gallery. But even his eloquent defense of immorality in his work could not cancel out details of his dalliances. The establishment could not tolerate such revelations. Wilde lost the case and was immediately tried and sentenced to two years' hard labor for gross indecency. Cries of “Shame” filled the galleries. Queensberry called the bailiffs in to repossess Wilde's house in lieu of costs. His son, who had fled to the Continent to escape indictment, publicly bemoaned his suffering, at a safe distance.