Superwomen Part 12

Yet--or perhaps because of it--the baron asked Adrienne Lecouvreur to be his wife. She was in the seventh paradise of first love. It was all turning out the way it did in plays. And plays were, thus far, Adrienne's chief guidebook of life. So the prettily staged engagement began; with roseate light effects.

Before Adrienne had time for disillusionment, the baron died. In the first grief--she was at an age when every tragedy is absolutely permanent and irrevocable--the luckless girl tried to kill herself.

Her kindly fellow actors took turns in watching her and in abstracting un.o.btrusively any lethal weapons that might chance to be within her reach. And at last Youth came to the rescue; permanent heartbreak being too mighty a feat for sixteen.

Adrienne fell to referring to the baron's death as her life tragedy, not yet realizing that the affair was but an insignificant curtain raiser.

By and by another n.o.bleman crossed her horizon. He was Philippe le Ray. And for the moment he fascinated Adrienne. Once more there was a hope--or she thought there was--of a marriage into the aristocracy.

Then, just as everything seemed to be along smoothly, she threw away her possible chances with both hands.

Into the road company came a new recruit, Clavel by name. You will not find him in the s.h.i.+ning records of the French stage, nor under the "Cs" in any encyclopedia. His name has been picked in history's museum solely from the fact that he jilted Adrienne Lecouvreur.

Philippe le Ray was promptly shelved for the new love. And with him Adrienne sacrificed all her supposed chances of wealth, rank, and ease; for the sake of a penniless actor, and for love.

She became engaged to Clavel. They planned to marry as soon as their joint earnings would permit, and to tour France as co-stars. Or, if the public preferred, with Clavel as star, and with Adrienne as an adoringly humble member of the cast.

Early in the affair, Clavel found a better-paying position in another company. Adrienne urged him to accept it, for the temporary parting promised to bring nearer the day of their marriage. And Clavel, to please her, took the offer.

So, again, Adrienne found herself alone. But it was a loneliness that vibrated with hope. It was at this time that she chose for herself a motto, which thereafter emblazoned her letters and lingerie.

It was, "~Que Faire Au Monde Sans Aimer?~" ("What is living without loving?") She was soon to learn the grim answer to the challenge-query she so gayly hurled at fate.

Clavel's letters grew few. They waned in warmth. Odd rumors with which the theater world has ever been rife began to reach Adrienne. And at last she wrote her absent lover a missive that has been numbered by ~cognoscenti~ among the great love letters of the ages. Here it is, in part--a halting translation:

I scarce know what to believe, from your neglect. But be certain always that I love you for yourself a hundred times more dearly than on my own account. Oh, love me, dear, as I shall forever love you! That is all I ask from life.

But don't promise to, unless you can keep your word. Your welfare is far more precious to me than my own. So always follow the course that seems most pleasant to you. If ever I lose you and you are still happy, I shall have the joy of knowing I have not been a bar to your happiness.

The worthy Clavel took Adrienne at her word. He proceeded to "follow the course that seemed most pleasant to him"--by breaking the engagement and marrying a lesser woman who had a dot of several thousand francs. He explained his action by saying that he must look out for his own future, and that Adrienne had no prospects of success on the stage.

And thus the thrifty actor pa.s.ses out of history. Thus, too, he lost a future chance to handle the funds of Europe's richest actress, and of starring as her husband. Peace to his puny soul!

Adrienne Lecouvreur no longer clamored to die. She was older now--nearly twenty. And the latest blow hardened instead of crus.h.i.+ng her. By this time the girlish chrysalis had been shed and a gloriously beautiful woman had emerged. Already she was hailed as the "Actress Heart Queen." Men were straining the vocabulary of imbecility to coin phrases for her.

And for the first and last time in her career, Adrienne resolved to capitalize her charms. It was the one adventuress-moment in all her story. And the Hand that ever guided her course picked her up and set her back, very hard and very promptly, in the destined path of tragedy from which she had tried to stray.

Stinging and heart-dead from Clavel's desertion, she listened to the vows of the Comte de Klinglin. He was rich; he was a soldier of note; and Adrienne was no longer the world-innocent child of her first engagement days. She played her cards with the skill of a perfect actress. From mere flirtation, the count advanced to the point of wors.h.i.+ping her.

De Klinglin besought her to marry him. And with seeming reluctance, she yielded. She even pointed out a way by which they might evade royal and family law by emigrating for a time to some other country, and then, by judicious bribery, arranging a return and a reinstatement. De Klinglin entered eagerly into the plan.

Then, on the very eve of their proposed wedding, the count deserted her and married an heiress. Decidedly, the Hand was guiding Adrienne against every effort or desire of her own.

This latest blow to pride and to new-born ambition was the turning point in Adrienne Lecouvreur's road. It changed her from a professional beauty into an inspired actress.

She threw herself into her work with a tragic intensity bred of her own sorrows. She turned her back on social distractions, and on everything that came between her and success. Her acting as well as her beauty became the talk of the provinces. Word of her prowess drifted to Paris, the Mecca of eighteenth-century actor-folk. A Paris manager came to see her act, and he at once engaged her.

In 1717, when she was twenty-three, she burst unheralded upon the French metropolis. In a night, Paris was at her feet. Almost at once, she was made a leading woman of the ~Comedie Francaise~; where, for thirteen years, she reigned, undisputed sovereign of the French stage.

Never before had such acting been witnessed or even imagined. It was a revelation. Up to this time French actors had mouthed their words noisily and grandiloquently, reciting the Alexandrine or otherwise metrical lines--wherein practically all the cla.s.sic plays of the period, except some of Moliere's, were written--in a singsong chant that played sad havoc with the sense.

Incidentally, the costuming--as you may see from contemporary cuts--was a nightmare. And when a character on the stage was not declaiming or dramatically listening, he usually stood stock-still in a statuesque att.i.tude, staring into blank s.p.a.ce, with the look of an automaton.

All this seems ridiculous to us; but it had come straight down as an almost inviolable "cla.s.sic tradition" from the ancient Greek drama, which had been more a series of declamations than a vital play.

Yes, Adrienne Lecouvreur was a revelation to Paris. On the stage her voice was as soft and musical as it was penetrating. Instead of intoning a pompous monologue, she spoke her lines as people in real life spoke. Her emotions were keenly human. Every syllable and every shade of voice meant something.

Without sacrificing the poetry of the rhymed couplets, she put the breath of life and of conversational meaning into them. She dressed the characters she played in the way such persons might reasonably have been supposed to dress. She made them a joy to the eye instead of an insult to the intelligence. And when she was not speaking, she was forever acting; introducing a million bits of byplay to replace the old statuesque poses.

She had lived. And she put the breath of that life into her work. This seems simple enough to us in these days of stage realism. But it was a wonder-breeding novelty to France. Adrienne revolutionized acting, diction, and costuming. Paris acclaimed her as a genius; which abused term was for once well applied.

Men of rank clamored for introductions to her. They plotted, and sighed, and bribed, and killed one another for her favor. But for them all she had one stereotyped answer; an answer that waxed historic through many firm repet.i.tions:

"Love is a folly which I detest!"

Which, in conjunction with her motto, "What is living without loving?"

throws a sidelight on Adrienne's ideas of life at the moment.

Not only did she revolutionize the stage, but she was the first actress to be taken up by society. Not only the foremost men in France, but their wives as well, threw open to her the magic doors of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Old Philippe the Regent was misgoverning France just then; and to say that his court was morally rotten would be gross flattery. The unapproachable Lecouvreur was thus a freak, as well as a delight. Like the good, old, overworked "breath of mountain air in a slum," this loveless genius swept through the palaces of Paris and Versailles. A hundred n.o.bles longed for her favor. Not one could boast that he had so much as kissed her lips. Here is her picture, sketched from the ~Mercure~, of 1719:

Without being tall, she is exquisitely formed and has an air of distinction. No one on earth has greater charm. Her eyes speak as eloquently as her lips, and often they supply the place of words.

In brief, I can compare her only to a flawless miniature. Her head is well poised on shapely shoulders. Her eyes are full of fire; her mouth is pretty; her nose slightly aquiline. Her face is wonderfully adapted to express joy, tenderness, pity, fear, sorrow.

And Adrienne? Her opinion of all this adulation is summed up in one sentence from a letter she wrote:

I spend three-fourths of my time in doing what bores me.

Among her maddest admirers was a wizened, monkey-faced youth who even then was writing anarchistic doctrines that one day were to help shake France's worm-eaten old monarchy to its fall.

He was Francois Marie Arouet. But for reasons best known to himself, he preferred to be known simply as "Voltaire"--a name to which he had no right whatever, but by which alone history remembers him. Voltaire was Adrienne Lecouvreur's adoring slave. She treated him only as a dear friend; but she loved to hear his vitriolic anathemas on government, the aristocracy, and theology. He was in the midst of one of these harangues, at her rooms one evening, when the Chevalier de Rohan--bearer of the proudest name in all Europe--sauntered in. He eyed the monkey-like Voltaire in amused disfavor; then drawled, to no one in particular:

"Who is this young man who talks so loud?"

"A young man, sir," retorted Voltaire, "who is not forced to stagger along under a name far too great for him; but who manages to secure respect for the name he has."

De Rohan's ta.s.seled cane swung aloft. Adrienne tactfully prevented its fall by collapsing in a stage faint. But the incident did not close there. Next day Voltaire was set upon by ruffians in Rohan's pay, and beaten half to death.

The victim did not complain. There was no justice for a commoner, in France at that time, against a member of the ~haute n.o.blesse~. So Voltaire contented himself by going to a fencing master and practicing for a year or more in the use of the small-sword.

At the end of that period, he challenged Rohan to mortal combat. Rohan professed to regard the challenge as a piece of insolence, and, through royal favor, had Voltaire, sent, by ~lettre de cachet~, to the Bastille. There was no chance for redress. And, on his release, Voltaire prudently let the feud drop.

At the perihelion of Adrienne's Dia.n.a.like sway over French hearts, a new social lion arrived in Paris. He was Maurice, Comte de Saxe, born of a morganatic union between a German countess and Augustus the Strong, King of Poland. (Augustus, by the way, was the parent of no less than one hundred and sixty-three children--an interesting record even in those days of large families, and one that should have gone far toward earning for him the t.i.tle of "Father of his Country.")

Saxe came to Paris crowned with laurels won as a das.h.i.+ng military leader, as a fearless duelist, and as an irresistible heart breaker.

He had won, by sheer bravery and strategic skill, the rank of Marshal.

He was of the "man on horseback" type over whom crowds go wild.

The new hero was a giant in stature, strikingly handsome, and so strong that in one hand he could crush a horseshoe into a shapeless lump. He was a paladin--Ajax, Don Juan, Tamerlane, Mark Antony, Baldur, all rolled into one. He was a glorious animal, high of spirits and of hopes, devoid of fear and of the finer feelings. A Greek G.o.d--or whatever you will. And about him hung the glamour of countless conquests on the battlefield and in love.