The French Revolution Part 12

One last quotation gives a picture of the prison of St. Lazare, whence he went to the scaffold a few days after penning these lines:

Ici meme, en ces parcs ou la mort nous fait paitre, Ou la hache nous tire au sort, Beaux poulets sont ecrits; maris, amants sont dupes.

Caquetages; intrigues de sots.

On y chante, on y joue, on y leve des jupes; On y fait chansons et bon mots; L'un pousse et fait bondir sur les toits, sur les vitres, Un ballon tout gonfle de vent, Comme sont les discours des sept cents plats belitres, {273} Dont Barere est le plus savant.

L'autre court; l'autre saute; et braillent, boivent, rient, Politiqueurs et raisonneurs; Et sur les gonds de fer soudain les portes crient, Des juges tigres nos seigneurs Le pourvoyeur parait. Quelle sera la proie Que la hache appelle aujourd'hui?

Francois de Neufchateau, who became a Director after the revolution of Fructidor, and the younger Chenier, were perhaps the best dramatists of the epoch. The former hardly deserves extended notice. Chenier's _Charles IX_, played at the outbreak of the Revolution, had a great success as a political play, and he followed it up with several others that served as pegs on which excited audiences might hang their political hats. Voltaire's _Brutus_, unplayable half a century before, was all the vogue now; and the dramatist had only to air democratic sentiments to please his audience.

The thing went far, and art suffered in the process. Plot and dialogue took on the feverish colours of the Revolution. Audiences howled _la Carmagnole_ or the _ca ira_, before the curtain went up; and when the play began, revelled in highly-spiced, political dramatics, in which the Pope soon became the most reviled and popular of villains. The Pope {274} drunk, the Pope kicked in the stomach by his brutal confederate George III, the Pope making love to Madame de Polignac, the Pope surrounded by the tyrants of Europe swallowed up by the flame-belching volcano of an enchanted island, such were the t.i.tbits that brought moisture to the palates of the connoisseurs of the drama in Paris.

The efforts of Joseph Chenier to get his tragedy _Timoleon_, played, at a moment when he was not in good repute with the Committee of Public Safety, may serve as an example of many similar incidents. The words, "We need laws, not blood," in his _Charles IX_, had displeased Robespierre and Billaud-Varennes, and the Jacobins were resolved to prevent any new production. He read the Ms. of his _Timoleon_ however, with great success, to the company of the Theatre de la Republique.

Vilate may be left to continue the tale:

Le lendemain je me trouve place, dans la Societe des Jacobins, pres David et Michot. Celui-ci disait a l'autre: _Ah! la belle tragedie que celle de Timoleon; c'est un chef d'oeuvre; demande a Vilate_. Je ne pus me defendre de rendre une justice eclatante~.~.~. au genie de l'auteur. Le peintre (David)~.~.~. nous repond: _Chenier une belle tragedie! c'est impossible. Son ame a-t-elle jamais pu sentir la liberte {275} pour la bien rendre? Non, je n'y crois pas_. A quelques jours de la, me trouvant avec Barere et Billaud-Varennes, on parle de _Timoleon_. Billaud ne put dissimuler son humeur: _Elle ne vaut rien; elle n'aura pas l'honneur de la representation. Qu'entend-il par ce vers contre-revolutionaire_:

_N'est-on jamais tyran qu'avec un diademe_?

Barere, qui avait mele ses applaudiss.e.m.e.nts a la lecture de la piece, mais auquel j'avais deja rapporte les propos de David, ajoute: _Oui, il n'y a pas de genie revolutionaire; elle manque dans le plan_. Billaud a Barere: _Ne souffrons pas qu'elle soit jouee_. Barere: _Donnons lui le plaisir de quelques repet.i.tions_.

Several rehearsals were accordingly permitted to take place. Two performances followed. At the third there came a collapse.

On laisse aller la tragedie jusqu'a la scene ou Aristocles va pour placer le bandeau royal sur la tete de Timophane, sous pretexte que le peuple de Corinthe concentre son indignation.~.~.~.

A man in the pit thereupon rose and called out:

_Si le peuple eut besoin d'etre provoque pour s'elever contre la tyrannie, c'est une injure faite au peuple francais que de lui offrir cet exemple de faiblesse et d'ineptie. A bas la toile!_

The cry was taken up; a riotous scene followed; and presently: on pousse l'horreur jusqu'au point de forcer Chenier a bruler {276} lui-meme, sur le theatre, le fruit de huit mois de travaux et de veilles.

Art, like literature, languished during the Revolution, or meretriciously touched herself up with the fas.h.i.+onable rouge. Before and after are great periods, but for the moment art seems to have lost its cunning; the artist, like David, turns politician. Fragonard and Greuze both survived to see the Empire, but lost their vogue. The touch of Greuze could hardly be appreciated in the age of Danton; the luscious sweetness of Fragonard was in like case; both of these great artists were ruined by the Revolution and died in poverty. Instead of these graceful masters of the false pastoral taste of the decaying century, a robust group of military painters arises, Vernet, Charlet, Gericault, and later Raffet, most brutal, but most candid portrayer of the armies of the Republic. The false cla.s.sical style, inherited from the period of Louis XVI, is metamorphosed by David and Gros, becomes inflated, declamatory, vapid, and wooden. David's immense picture, the most insistent canvas now hanging in the Louvre, representing the three Horatii swearing to Rome that they would conquer or die, gives the note of the period. False sentiment, {277} mock heroics, glittering formula, lay figure att.i.tude, all are there.

A few artists succeeded in carrying the elegance of the 18th century through the storm into the period beyond, notably Prud'hon, who has been called the Watteau of the Revolution. His portraits of the women of the Bonaparte family, Josephine, Hortense, Pauline, have all the grace and fascination of the earlier age, merge with it the abandon of the Directoire period, and touch the whole with the romanticism and individualism of the coming century. In terrible contrast with these lovely and alluring women of the new age, is the grim figure caught in a few masterly strokes by David, as Marie Antoinette, proud and unbending as ever, but shorn of all the glory of Versailles, her face haggard, her hair gray, dishevelled, mutilated by scissors, pa.s.sed by on the prisoner's cart on her way to the guillotine. It is the guillotine, in art as in politics the most potent of solvents, that stands between Trianon and the romantics.

END