LINDA KELLY's books include The Marvellous Boy: the Life & Myth of Thomas Chatterton, Women of the French Revolution and, most recently, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She is also co-editor of two anthologies, Feasts and Proposals, and is a trustee of The London Library and of The Wordsworth Trust. She is married to the writer Laurence Kelly; they have three children and live in London.
The Young Romantics
Writers & Liaisons
Paris 1827-37
by Linda Kelly
published by Starhaven at Smashwords
Copyright 2003 Linda Kelly
ISBN 0-936315-20-2
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Contents
Preface
Every generation experiences its own excitement on discovering the great era of European Romanticism. Few have enjoyed as fine an account of one of its defining moments as Linda Kelly’s The Young Romantics. First published in 1976, it was instantly acclaimed as a small classic. In the best tradition of belle-lettres, it managed to evoke a sweep of literary history without the tax on time or eye-sight required by the door-stopper biographies of following decades. As Graham Greene wrote to the author: ‘I have been reading with delight The Young Romantics – I admire it for its brevity and the narrative skill which keeps so many characters moving on their parallel or intersecting lines year by year.’
To have written about one of the great figures of the French Romantic revolution with such novella-like compactness would have been a feat. To have embraced all of them in this way was prodigious. Richard Holmes, doyen of Romantic biographers, noted in a review: ‘To recapitulate the celebrated affairs between Vigny and Marie Dorval, Marie Dorval and George Sand, George Sand and Alfred de Musset, Hugo and Juliette Drouet, Madame Hugo and Sainte-Beuve, Sainte-Beuve and Hugo, requires more dexterity than I possess. Suffice it to say that Linda Kelly manages skilfully and not unkindly and that though the “romantic triangle” is much in evidence, geometry has yet to invent the polygon to which these emotional intricacies of domestic Parisian life under Louis-Philippe’s reign conform.’
A contemporary historian has located the ‘birth of the modern’ in the time and place about which Linda Kelly writes. She got there before him. Indeed, the lasting importance of her slim volume may be less as an account of Romantic theatrical battles against French classicism or the triumph of melodrama in art and life – the new empire of feeling which, after all, German and English Romantics had already stormed into – than about a manner in which, amid shifting balances between decorum and bohemianism, subsequent generations have come to live. In this as in its economy and style, The Young Romantics may remain for generations to come a fascinating, fastidious model.
Stoddard Martin
* * * * * * *
1827
One morning, early in January 1827, a slight red-haired young man rang the bell of a small apartment above a joiner’s shop in the Rue de Vaugirard. His name was Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. He was twenty-two, the only son of a widowed mother, a medical student who in the intervals of his studies had already begun a promising career as a literary critic. He was calling on Victor Hugo, a young poet whom he had never met but whose latest volume of poems he had just reviewed in the liberal paper Le Globe.
The Globe, an influential, somewhat academic journal, had hitherto shown little sympathy for Hugo and his fellow poets of the romantic school. The romantics, for the most part, were royalist and Catholic; the Globe was free-thinking and anti-clerical. Nor did their literary opinions agree. The Globe’s political convictions were in the traditions of the enlightened eighteenth century, and so too was its liking for classical proportion in the arts. The romantics, legitimist in politics, were considered revolutionary in literary matters. Hugo’s gothic novel Han d’Islande, whose monstrous hero drank blood from human skulls, had shown romanticism at its most frenetic. ‘If genius is close to madness,’ wrote a critic, ‘then the author of Han d’Islande may be said to approach genius.’
But Hugo’s recently published Odes et Ballades could not be so easily dismissed. Here, whatever his previous reservations, the editor of the Globe could recognise a new voice in French poetry, a complement in literary terms to the Globe’s own desire for social and political renewal. He had handed the poems to Sainte-Beuve, a former pupil and his protégé on the paper. ‘They’re by that young barbarian Victor Hugo,’ he told him, ‘who has talent.’
Sainte-Beuve’s review, the most important he had yet undertaken, gave an enthusiastic appreciation of Hugo’s work since his first emergence, five years earlier, as a leader of the romantic school. Sainte-Beuve paid tribute to the grace and virtuosity of the new volume, Hugo’s ‘style of fire, glittering with images, leaping with harmonies’, tempering his praises only with a warning against imaginative excess. ‘In poetry, as elsewhere, nothing is more dangerous than too much force.’
Hugo, surprised and pleased by the review, coming as it did from a previously unfriendly quarter, had written to the editor to ask the address of his reviewer. Sainte-Beuve turned out to be a neighbour. Hugo lived at 90 Rue de Vaugirard, Sainte-Beuve at 94. Here, the day before Hugo had called to express his thanks and, finding him out, had left his card. Sainte-Beuve was now returning his call.
The Hugos were at lunch when Sainte-Beuve was shown in. Madame Hugo, a dark-eyed, Spanish-looking beauty, was still in a morning négligé. Hugo rose to greet him. He was a pale young man with hazel eyes, clean-shaven, soberly dressed, not tall but with an immediate presence. He had a grave and candid face, a long finely-chiselled nose, brown hair brushed back from a lofty forehead – its monumental proportions the delight of caricaturists in later years. The mark of power, so his admirers claimed, was on that brow. Hugo was twenty-four, radiantly happy in his marriage, conscious of genius and a growing fame. Sainte-Beuve, echoing his editor, described the Hugo of this period as a ‘young barbarian king’.
At first sight the contrast between the two young men seemed painful. Sainte-Beuve too was short, but frail and ill-proportioned, with a round head too large for his body. An intimate disability, a malformation of the urethra, intensified his sense of physical inferiority and his natural diffidence with women. ‘O cruel nature,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘to give a poet the sense of beauty and a thirst for love and to hide his soul behind a comic mask.’
But a brilliant intelligence lit up and redeemed Sainte-Beuve’s unattractive countenance; his expression, unless he was crossed, was tolerant and good-humoured. His conversation was halting, with sentences left unfinished as though in despair at the complexity of things, but subtle, witty and insinuating. Young though he was, and still not committed to a literary career, he had already shown himself to be a critic of exceptional ability, his judgement backed by enormous erudition, the acuteness of his insights, he later maintained, owing something to his scientific training. The dissection of souls, of moods, of ideas, was Sainte-Beuve’s true forte.
Today, meeting Hugo, he was nervous and confused at first, his confusion increased by the presence of Madame Hugo from whom, with an instinct resembling prudery, he kept his eyes averted. She in her turn paid little attention to him, lapsing before long into an abstracted silence from which, when Sainte-Beuve got up to go, her husband had to rouse her. A young mother, recently recovered from the birth of her third child, and still breast-feeding a baby son, she had other preoccupations than poetry.
For it was poetry, after Hugo’s first thanks and compliments, that was the subject of their conversation. Sainte-Beuve had written poetry himself but had shown it to no one. New worlds opened out as he listened to Hugo. Hugo spoke of the art of poetry, the secrets of rhythm and colour, the techniques and ‘fingerings’ of the new poetic method. Sainte-Beuve, who had recently embarked on a study of the French poets of the sixteenth century, like the romantics innovators in form and metre, responded eagerly, finding new and hitherto unsuspected parallels between the Pléiade and the romantic school. Till then liberal and rationalist, temperamentally repelled by the royalism and mysticism of the romantics, Sainte-Beuve had not sought contact with them. Now, swept along by Hugo’s ‘vast discourse’, his reservations, for the time being, disappeared. ‘From that day,’ he wrote, ‘began my initiation into the romantic school of poetry.’
The first meeting was soon followed by others, Hugo being quick to recognise Sainte-Beuve’s value as a critic, scholar and ally in the liberal press, Sainte-Beuve expanding in the glow of Hugo’s personality, his medical studies neglected, the stringencies of the Globe forgotten as he moved towards the ‘enchanted isle of poetry’. Older friends looked on sceptically. ‘You will grow out of it,’ said one; ‘you are like a young man in love.’
Sainte-Beuve took little notice. Diffidently he sent his poems, the poems he had shown to no one, to Hugo. ‘Come quickly, my friend,’ wrote Hugo in reply, ‘so that I can thank you for the fine verses you have entrusted to me. I’d like to tell you too that I had already guessed, less by your articles, remarkable though they are, than by your looks and conversation, that you were a poet. Let me then be a little proud of my perspicacity, let me congratulate myself on having sensed the presence of so great a talent.’
Years later, when friendship between the two had turned to bitter enmity, Sainte-Beuve could still remember the generosity of Hugo’s first response and the delicacy with which, combining praise with criticism, he had shown him where his weaknesses lay. ‘When I read Hugo’s Odes et Ballades,’ he said at a dinner at Magny’s, ‘I took my poems to him… The people on the Globe called him a barbarian. All the same, everything that I have done he made me do.’
In the spring of 1827 the Hugos moved house. The little flat above the joiner’s shop had been too cramped for entertaining; Hugo’s ambitions and his income were increasing. They found a new apartment in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs not far away, a quiet tree-lined street, still unpaved, and only a short walk from the open fields. Sainte-Beuve, whether by accident or design, had moved to the same street a few weeks before. Lamartine, visiting him there, was charmed by the peace and seclusion of his new home: ‘your mother, the garden, the doves, the peace . . . which remind me of those gentle priests and country presbyteries I used to love in my childhood.’
No such peace reigned in Hugo’s apartment, which was lively with children’s voices and with streams of visitors, though a spacious garden behind the house with poplars and an ornamental pond spanned by a rustic bridge gave the illusion of a country setting. Inside he had rented the whole first floor: two bedrooms, a dining-room, a study and, most important, a large and handsome drawing-room, its walls hung with prints and paintings of the romantic school and, in the place of honour, the golden lily of the Jeux Floraux at the Academy of Toulouse, the poetry prize awarded to Hugo in his eighteenth year. Here, in the ‘chambre au lys d’or’, as it was called, Hugo for the first time had space to receive the growing number of his friends and followers and to found a salon and a school. Sainte-Beuve, before long its most assiduous member, would christen the group the Cénacle – the word, deriving from the Cène or Last Supper, is used to describe a fervent literary or artistic confraternity.
In this case it was both. Hugo, who rivalled his artistic contemporaries in painting, was passionately interested in art and architecture. His own poems, well thumbed and splashed with paint, lay side by side with the works of Byron, Goethe and Walter Scott in the studios of Paris. ‘Fraternité des arts’, wrote Sainte-Beuve, in his poem ‘Le Cénacle’.
Round Hugo, over the next few years, would gather almost every star, risen and rising, in the romantic firmament. Not since the Renaissance, as the romantics themselves pointed out, had such a constellation lit the literary and artistic heavens. Here came Lamartine, an occasional and honoured visitor; Alfred de Vigny, blonde and aristocratic, who shared with Hugo and Lamartine the triple crown of romantic poetry; Emile Deschamps, poet, dandy, lover of Spain and Shakespeare, and his brother Antony; Balzac, still little known; Prosper Mérimée; the ebullient Alexandre Dumas; Gérard de Nerval; Théophile Gautier; Alfred de Musset. Here too came Delacroix, his polished manners belying his revolutionary reputation as a painter, and with him other artists of the romantic school: Tony Johannot, the illustrator, whose charming vignettes decorated the poems and novels of the romantics; the sculptor David d’Angers; Eugène and Achille Devéria; Louis Boulanger, one of Hugo’s closest friends, ‘an intelligence’ he considered, ‘open to Shakespeare and Rembrandt alike’. Musical figures were less common. Hugo had no great feeling for music though Liszt, the prodigy of the Paris salons, would play in his apartment and Berlioz was an admirer and later an acquaintance. Few of the guests had reached their thirtieth year; some, like Musset, were still in their teens. ‘It will be remarked,’ wrote Dumas in his memoirs, ‘that these great revolutionaries were very young.’
The Hugos’ hospitality was very simple. Hugo, after early struggles with poverty, kept a close eye on the household accounts. Once Mérimée, a gifted cook, donned an apron to make macaroni à l’italienne, a success, wrote Madame Hugo, that equalled that of his books. More often cups of weak tea were the only refreshment served. ‘You had to be all soul when you went there,’ said a visitor, ‘and leave your stomach in the hall.’
But Hugo, young, brilliant, breathing energy and gaiety, was a magnetic host, Madame Hugo an affable if sometimes absent-minded hostess. In looks at least she seemed the match of Victor, tall, opulently curved, with a regal carriage and magnificent dark eyes. She did not however shine in conversation, sometimes retreating into a ‘mysterious apathy’, her defence perhaps against the imperious personalities round her, at other times joining in with misplaced animation. ‘Madame Hugo,’ said an unkind guest, ‘has all the pretensions of a wit, which is a pity.’ Later Hugo would notice this and suffer before his friends, silencing her with a devastating glance. But in 1827 he was still deeply in love with his wife and devoted to their two small children,1 Léopoldine and Charles, who would run among the guests or make for safety on his knee. The domestic happiness of the ‘holy family’ was one of the charms of the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.
Hugo’s salon was soon the chief romantic gathering place, but it was only one of many in the Paris of the period. In the Rue Abbaye-au-Bois Madame Récamier, still beautiful at fifty, held court. Every afternoon from three to five Chateaubriand, her lover of twenty years’ standing, would arrive to take tea and the conversation would dance to his tune. Alfred de Vigny’s salon was aristocratic as well as literary in flavour; he referred to the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Germain as ‘le grand monde’. Stendhal, witty and paradoxical, was the star of liberal salons. Over forty and too much of an individualist to join the Cénacle, he spoke of Hugo as ‘le bonhomme Hugo’, an affront to the poet’s youthful dignity.
Best known of all, and until 1827 the centre of the romantic movement, was the salon of Charles Nodier, librarian of the Arsenal. Nodier was a bibliophile and scholar, a literary chameleon, classical in the purity of his style, romantic in his love of the fantastic. He had written fairy stories, poetry, gothic melodramas; he had compiled a dictionary; he was learned in botany and science; like Sainte-Beuve, who was introduced to him by Hugo, he was deeply interested in the poets of the sixteenth century. He had come to the Arsenal, once the residence of Henri IV’s great minister Sully, and now a royal library, in 1824, at the age of forty-four, after an erratic and impecunious life.
His Sunday evenings were famous. The white-panelled Renaissance salon with its crimson curtains and gilded mouldings made an elegant setting. Outside, the balcony looked over the river and the poplars of the island of Louvier, and in the summer the croaking of frogs was an accompaniment to the talk within. Madame Nodier, plump and bourgeoise, though at first overawed by her surroundings, had soon domesticated them and an evening at the Arsenal had an almost family feeling – a feeling accentuated by the youth of her guests. Refreshments – little cakes and glasses of sugared water – were modest. The Nodiers, like most of their guests, were not rich, though an occasional visitor from the world of fashion brought a whiff of wealth and luxury with him.
From eight to ten the evening would be given up to talk of art and literature, its seriousness laced with flirtation. At the Nodiers’ salon, more noticeably than at the Hugos’, there was always a scattering of pretty girls. Nodier’s lively daughter Marie, just out of the schoolroom, was one of the chief attractions, the subject later on of the famous sonnet of Arvers: ‘Mon âme a son secret, ma vie a son mystère…’
On good evenings, Nodier, an incomparable story-teller, would take the floor with some reminiscence of his youth. Languid, witty, his willowy form draped against the fireplace, his face serenely melancholy, he seemed, wrote Dumas, like ‘a mixture of Walter Scott and Perrault, the savant grappling with the poet, memory battling with imagination’. Newcomers would bow and creep to their places while the story lasted. It always seemed to end too soon. ‘Enough of prose’, he would finish, ‘let us have poetry, poetry’, and, sliding into his armchair by the fire, he would turn with a smile to one of the poets there – Hugo perhaps, or Vigny, more rarely Lamartine – who without moving from his place, shoulders propped against the wall, would launch on some poetic flight. Later Musset, aged barely nineteen, would read his first poems there.
At ten o’clock Marie Nodier would take to the piano; there would be dancing and games of cards; Nodier, a passionate but unlucky gambler, absorbed himself in écarté till the end of the evening. Hugo, deeply prudish, never danced. He considered the waltz lascivious and had once at a ball described the women in low-cut dresses as ‘whited sepulchres’. He had been younger then, but he still watched his wife with a jealous eye and would not permit his friends to address her by her christian name. As for other women, wrote an observer, he seemed all arms and legs in their presence.
‘Gais comme l’oiseau sur la branche’,
wrote Musset, recalling the charm of those evenings,
Le dimanche,
Nous rendions parfois matinal
L’Arsenal…
Quelqu’un récitait quelque chose,
Vers ou prose,
Puis nous courions recommencer
A danser…
Alors, dans la grande boutique
Romantique,
Chacun avait, maître ou garçon,
Sa chanson…
Hugo portait déjà dans l’âme
Notre-Dame,
Et commençait à s’occuper
D’y grimper.
De Vigny chantait sur sa lyre
Ce beau sire
Qui mourut sans mettre à l’envers
Ses bas verts…
Sainte-Beuve faisait dans l’ombre
Douce et sombre,
Pour un oeil noir, un blanc bonnet,
Un sonnet.
Et moi de cet honneur insigne
Trop indigne,
Enfant par hasard adopté
Et gâté,
Je brochais des ballades, l’une
À la lune,
L’autre à deux yeux noirs et jaloux
Andaloux…
By 1827 Nodier’s position as host and patron of the romantic movement was beginning to slip. He noted with a certain wryness the growing ascendancy of Hugo. Hugo was preparing for battle; he saw literature in all-or-nothing terms. Nodier had wider sympathies, but you cannot win battles if you see everybody’s point of view.
What was the battle? What were the aims of the romantics? Why was the subject the focus of such violent interest?
Hugo and his generation were all ‘enfants du siècle’, all, give or take a year or two, born with the century. Brought up amidst the dramas of Napoleon’s wars, they had reached manhood to the anticlimax of peace and Bourbon rule. Restless and dissatisfied, their dreams of military glory frustrated, they had turned themselves instead towards the liberation of the arts, their foes no longer the armies of Europe but the tyrannies of classical tradition.
For thirty years, while the nation’s energies had been absorbed in politics and war, the arts had virtually stood still in France, frozen, through lack of challenge, in the classical attitudes of the old régime. The violent emotions and experiences of the Napoleonic era had done much to render them meaningless. ‘Since the campaign in Russia,’ said a former officer to Stendhal, ‘Iphigénie en Aulide no longer seems such a good play.’
By the 1820s while the academic establishment, hiding its own sterility behind the great names of the past, continued to denounce all change, the ice of classicism was beginning to crack. New influences were crowding in from abroad: Chateaubriand, the ‘enchanter’, had cast his spell on the rising generation; the poetry of Lamartine, Hugo and Vigny heralded the spring. An old society lay in ruins; the tremendous forces which had overturned it were sweeping at last through the realms of art and literature, their momentum all the greater for having been so long delayed.
Nor, despite the seeming stability of the Restoration, had the political impetus of earlier years been spent. In the aftermath of the Empire exhaustion had brought a temporary longing for repose. Now, to the excitement of creative ferment was added a hidden dimension: a growing undercurrent of political dissent, as yet unexpressed for fear of reprisal. The romantic rebellion, with its claims for freedom in the arts, cloaked the political revolution once more preparing in the shadows.
In the early days of the Restoration Louis XVIII, a Bourbon who had indeed learned something, had tried to steer the tricky course between revolution and reaction, between censorship and disorder, and had to some extent succeeded. His brother Charles X, who followed him in 1824, showed no such desire to heal the divisions in his country or to recognise the achievements of Napoleon and the Revolution. Obstinately set on putting back the clock, he had had himself crowned with medieval ceremony, indemnified the émigrés, passed laws condemning sacrilege, and increased the privileges of the church and aristocracy.
The press, representing a vigorous and articulate bourgeoisie, a class grown rich since the Revolution, was naturally a threat to the régime, and from Charles’ accession onwards censorship had become increasingly severe. Thus the Globe, liberal and anti-clerical, could not always express itself directly, although from the tone of its articles on non-political subjects the enlightened could glean a hidden meaning. Discussions of artistic and literary freedom in this atmosphere took on a more than academic interest.
Surprisingly, in the first years of the Restoration the poets of the romantic school, Hugo, Vigny and Lamartine among them, had tended to be royalist and Catholic. But their attitude owed more to literary sources – the chivalrous mediaevalism of Walter Scott, Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme – than to any deep conviction. ‘I will be Chateaubriand or nothing’, wrote Hugo in his diary at fifteen, and Chateaubriand, responding to his youthful admiration, was said to have called him ‘l’Enfant sublime’.
The anomaly could not continue; the reactionary policies of Charles X had shaken the romantic faith in throne and altar. In February 1827 Victor Hugo, recipient of a royal pension, took the first step away from his former loyalties. At a reception at the Austrian Embassy the bearers of Napoleonic titles awarded for victories won in Austria were announced without those titles, a deliberate insult to the Napoleonic era and, in the eyes of many, to France herself. Hugo, son of a Napoleonic general, gave voice to the public indignation in his ‘Ode à la Colonne’, published in Paris a few days later and reprinted all over France:
Non, Frères! non, Français de cet âge d’attente!
Nous avons tous grandi sur le seuil de la tente.
Condamnés à la paix, aiglons bannis des cieux,
Sachons du moins, veillant aux gloires paternelles,
Garder de tout affront, jalouses sentinelles,
Les armures de nos aïeux!
Hugo, the royalist, defended the honour of Napoleon. Young liberals, whose admiration for Napoleon matched their hostility to the Bourbons, began to see him as their spokesman. The liberal press drew closer to him and by association to the romantic cause. Sainte-Beuve’s links with the Globe, and Hugo’s new-found friendship with him would do much to further this rapprochement. By 1830, the year of climax for romantics and liberals alike, Hugo, his earlier beliefs abandoned, could proclaim in his preface to Hernani: ‘Romanticism, so often ill defined… is no more than liberalism in the arts.’
The first night of Hernani, in 1830, would be the culmination of the romantic fight for freedom. It was in the theatre that the decisive battles would take place and rightly so, for in no other branch of the arts was the weight of tradition heavier. The Théâtre Français was the holy of holies of French classicism; Racine and Corneille were its gods. Their sculptured heads, with heavy wigs, provoked the scorn of the young romantics: the periwig had become the symbol of everything that was sterile and static in French theatre. Classical history provided the themes for tragedy: the three unities, of action, time and place, were strictly observed; actors and actresses, trained in the grand declamatory manner, spoke their parts in balanced alexandrines. Everyday words were replaced by elaborate periphrasis: a dog, to give an example among thousands, was called, ‘de la fidélité le respectable soutien’.
While classicism reigned at the Théâtre Français, however, vigorously defended by actors whose talents expressed themselves best in this form, the popular theatre of the boulevards was showing a very different type of entertainment. Here melodrama held sway; dastardly bandits, angelic village maidens, crude cloak-and-dagger plots brought cheers and hisses from the audience. The acting had seldom been above the level of the plots, but in 1827 two actors of genius, Frédérick Lemaître and Marie Dorval, had scored a triumphant success in the play Trente Ans dans la Vie d’un Joueur. For the first time melodrama, though still confined to the popular theatre, could be judged on the level of art.
By 1827 too, the financial situation of the Théâtre Français was no longer impregnable. Their greatest actor, Talma, had died and with his death receipts from the box office had dropped. Theatrical controversy, such as the romantics promised to provide, might be one way to bring back the crowds.
Talma had been the glory of the classical theatre, but he himself had felt the limitations of its conventions. In 1826, not long before his death, he had sat at dinner next to Victor Hugo and had spoken to him of his desire for more reality in the theatre, for a role which was human rather than heroic.
‘The actor is nothing without his role,’ he said, ‘and I have never had a true one… You, Monsieur Hugo, you are young and bold, you should write me a part. I hear that you are writing a play about Cromwell. I have always wanted to play Cromwell… Tell me something about your play.’
‘The part you dream of playing,’ said Hugo; ‘is the part I dream of writing,’ and he began to expound his views on the theatre: the mingling of genres, the substitution of drama for classical tragedy, the suppression of rhetoric and fine verses.
‘Ah yes,’ cried Talma, ‘above all no fine verses.’ And at the end of the evening he seized Hugo’s hand:
‘Be quick and finish your play. I’m in a hurry to act in it.’
But Talma died soon after, and, lacking an actor of his stature for the leading part, Hugo had been in no hurry to finish Cromwell, expanding it instead to huge and unstageable proportions and crowding it with characters. It would remain a theoretical exposition of his views, reflecting in its choice of a republican hero a further shift from his earlier royalism. Behind the figure of Cromwell lay the vaster shadow of Napoleon, from now on to loom ever larger in Hugo’s imagination.
The great theatrical event of 1827 was the arrival in Paris that autumn of a troupe of English players and the ensuing revelation of Shakespeare to French audiences. Four years before, Stendhal in his Racine et Shakespeare had compared the two in an essay that set out many of the aims of romantic drama. But at the time he wrote it French chauvinism, the wounds of Waterloo still smarting, was at its height. In 1822 a visiting troupe of players from England had been pelted with eggs and vegetables and hissed from the stage. ‘Down with Shakespeare,’ was the cry, ‘he is a lieutenant of Wellington.’
In 1827 the public could afford to be more open-minded. The success in England of Mademoiselle George, the leading lady of French tragedy and moreover a former mistress of Napoleon, had opened the way for a return visit by an English company. The Odéon, Paris’s second ‘official’ theatre, which shared with the Théâtre Français the monopoly on classical drama, was placed at its disposal and on a hot night in September, to a packed and curious audience, its first performance, Hamlet, was given with Charles Kemble and the young Irish actress Harriet Smithson in the leading roles.
‘Universal stupefaction!’ wrote Delacroix to Hugo. ‘Hamlet raises his hideous head, Othello prepares his murderous pillow, subverting all dramatic law and order. Who knows what next? King Lear is about to tear out his eyes before French audiences. The dignity of the Academy demands that all imports of this kind should be declared incompatible with public morality. Farewell good taste! Whatever happens put on a stout cuirass beneath your clothes. Beware the daggers of the classicists.’
Both Delacroix and Hugo were in the audience that night and so were other young romantics, Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Gérard de Nerval and Berlioz among them. Few of them could understand English. They perceived Hamlet through the mists of translation, taking their French cribs with them to the theatre. But the impression they received was overwhelming. The picturesque costumes, the freedom of construction, the mingling of tragedy and comedy, of violence and lyricism, the death scenes in public instead of discreetly off stage, the naturalism and freedom of the acting, so different from the ‘Greek correctitude’ of the classical theatre, were entirely new. No doubt the vehemence of the actors’ gestures owed something to the fact that they were playing before a foreign audience, but Kemble with his bitter laugh, seeming to reveal a whole philosophy of sardonic disillusion, was an unforgettable Hamlet, and Harriet Smithson – especially successful in the mad scene – was a heart-rending Ophelia.
A few days later came Romeo and Juliet. ‘Ah, what a change from the leaden clouds and icy winds of Denmark to the burning sun, the perfumed nights of Italy!’ wrote Berlioz. ‘What a transition from the melancholy, the heartbreak, the cruel irony, the madness, the tears, the mourning, the lowering destiny of Hamlet to the ardent and impetuous love, immense, irresistible, pure and lovely as the smile of angels, the vengeance, the lost despairing kisses, the fatal conflict of love and death on the part of these hapless lovers! By the end of the third act, scarcely able to breathe, my heart as if gripped by an iron hand, I cried to myself, “I am lost, I am lost”.’
The young composer fell hopelessly in love. Unable to work, he wandered aimlessly through Paris and the surrounding countryside, dreaming of Shakespeare and his Juliet, passing days without sleep, collapsing only from exhaustion, once among the corn stooks of a harvest field, once at a table at the Café du Cardinal, where he slept for five hours, to the great alarm of the waiters who thought he was dead and dared not go near him.
He had never met Miss Smithson. She had Paris at her feet. In England, where the grand manner of Mrs Siddons was the ideal, her gentle voice and soft Irish accent had been a disadvantage. Now she seemed dazed by the magnitude of her success. Night after night the streets were blocked by carriages outside the theatre; every section of the press, even the classicists, paid tribute to her beauty and her art. When Mademoiselle Mars, the queen of the Théâtre Français, took a box at the theatre, it seemed that her triumph was complete. ‘Our actresses go to school,’ wrote Delacroix, ‘and stare their eyes out.’
‘An English critic has stated in The Illustrated London News’, wrote Berlioz in his memoirs, ‘that on seeing Miss Smithson that night I said, “I shall marry Juliet and write my greatest symphony on the play”. I did both, 2 but I never said anything of the kind… I was much too overwhelmed to entertain such dreams.’
While Berlioz paced the streets in a lover’s frenzy, Victor Hugo returned home from the theatre and that very night, it is said, sat down to begin his preface to Cromwell. The play was completed and awaiting publication; the preface, imbued with his enthusiasm for the new ‘god of the theatre’, was published with it in December. It was Hugo’s manifesto and would be that of the romantic movement. Sounding the battle-cry of ‘nature and truth’ in the arts, he proclaimed the ideal of drama in the Shakespearean manner – freedom from classical unities and conventions, the mingling of tragedy and comedy, the grotesque and the sublime, obedience to no rules save those of the poet’s own inspiration. ‘Let us take the hammer to theories, poetics and systems,’ he wrote, ‘let us fling down this ancient plasterwork which masks the face of art.’
Hugo’s call resounded through every branch of the arts. While the classicists denounced him, the romantics rallied to him as their leader. ‘To the younger generation,’ wrote Théophile Gautier in his Histoire du Romantisme, ‘the preface to Cromwell shone like the tables of the law on Sinai.’ On a purely theatrical level, Hugo’s vision of drama in the Shakespearean tradition, combining poetry, historical colour and violent action, looked forward to a bridging of the gap between the melodramas of the boulevards and the classical tragedies of the Théâtre Français. At the end of 1827, Cromwell being too vast to stage, that drama had yet to be written.
1828
‘Thank you, my friend, for your immortal book,’ wrote Alfred de Vigny to Victor Hugo. ‘It is a colossal work… Cromwell covers the face of modern tragedy with wrinkles.’
Eighteen months before, Vigny had published his historical novel Cinq-Mars, the first major work of its kind in France. Set, as Les Trois Mousquetaires was to be, in the time of Cardinal Richelieu, its final scene portrayed a discussion between Corneille and the poet Milton in which, reflecting on the Cardinal’s appetite for power, Milton forecasts the emergence in England of a man whose ambition will take him even further. ‘His name,’ he says, ‘is Cromwell.’
‘Our thoughts often coincide, dear Alfred,’ wrote Hugo to Vigny, inviting him to a reading from his play. ‘That’s partly why I love you. I have taken the seventeenth century where you left it and have made the last word of your novel the first one of my play.’
Hugo and Vigny had been friends since 1820, when they had met in the salon of their mutual friend Emile Deschamps. Hugo, at eighteen, was already invested with Chateaubriand’s title of ‘l’Enfant sublime’; Vigny was a young army officer, dreaming of poetry, bored and disillusioned by garrison life. In Hugo he found for the first time a friend whose aspirations matched his own. A correspondence began between them, Hugo’s letters shy and slightly formal at first, for his background was bourgeois and Vigny was an aristocrat and four years his senior. But their friendship soon became more fervent and more equal. Each published his first volume of poems in 1822. They continued in fraternal rivalry for the next few years, promoting and delighting in one another’s triumphs and judged on an equal footing by the critics.
Hugo and Emile Deschamps visited Vigny in the officers’ mess, the three of them conducting their conversation, amid shouts of laughter, entirely in alexandrines. When, in 1822, Hugo, after long opposition, married his boyhood sweetheart, Adèle Foucher, Vigny was a witness at his wedding. And when in 1825 Vigny announced his marriage to Lydia Bunbury, daughter of an English sugar-planter, ‘simple, good and gentle as a Tahitian maiden’, Hugo sent effusive congratulations: ‘The likeness of our lives completes the harmony of our souls. Our wives will love one another as we already do and we four shall be as one.’
The hope was not to be fulfilled. The English Lydia and Adèle Hugo had little in common. Successive miscarriages left Lydia a semi-invalid, unable to bear children. The blonde blue-eyed looks that had enchanted Vigny soon disappeared. Fat and ailing, bad at French and after a while forgetful of her own language, she could take little part in the intellectual give and take of romantic circles. Increasingly her husband took her into the grand monde of the Faubourg Saint-Germain where the formal manners of the aristocracy served to hide embarrassments.
His fellow writers saw Vigny as a snob. He was indeed an aristocrat, proud of his title and ancient lineage, perhaps more so than his origins warranted. His parents had seen relatives perish on the guillotine. Poor and proud, over-absorbed in their only son, they had imbued in him a sense of caste which, combined with his natural timidity, tended to cut him off from his contemporaries. Through Hugo, in the heady atmosphere of the Cénacle he was able for a time to throw off his reserve and share the excitement of the romantic battle, knowing his creative powers to be at their height.
In 1827 he had finally abandoned his military career in favour of literature. Too proud to put himself forward, he had received no mark of patronage despite his royalist connections in his thirteen years as a soldier. His chivalrous attitude towards the monarchy, like Hugo’s, was changing. He had little money of his own. His wife’s father, the sugar-planter, had had substantial estates in the West Indies, and Vigny’s mother had nourished hopes of ‘regilding the family’s arms’. But Lydia’s dowry proved disappointingly small. Not long afterwards her father had remarried and rapidly produced a second family, thus decreasing the interest, already slight, which he showed in his daughter’s affairs. He had no love for his French son-in-law, whose name in conversation he would pretend to have forgotten. 3
But outward circumstances left Vigny curiously untouched. He nursed his wife devotedly; he concealed his poverty, receiving his friends, despite the simplicity of his hospitality, with the grace and formality of a grand seigneur. He seemed to live upon a loftier plane than his fellow mortals, lost in the realms of poetry and thought. ‘Alfred de Vigny’, wrote Arsène Houssaye, ‘believed himself already in the Empyrean… It is true that he lived on the fifth floor, and thus was nearly in the seventh heaven.’
Alexandre Dumas, in his memoirs, confirms this impression. ‘Alfred de Vigny’, he wrote, ‘was a singular man, polite, affable and gentle in all his dealings, but affecting the most complete other-worldliness – a characteristic that went to perfection with his charming face, framed in long blonde curls like one of those cherubim whose brother he seemed to be… What above all astonished Hugo and me’, he went on, ‘was that Vigny appeared not the least concerned with the grosser needs of our nature which some of us, Hugo and I among them, satisfied not only without shame but with a certain sensual satisfaction. None of us had ever seen Vigny at table. Marie Dorval, who for seven years passed several hours each day at his side, confessed to us with an amazement approaching terror that she had never seen him eat anything but a radish!’
In 1828 neither Marie Dorval, fresh from her triumphs on the boulevards, nor Dumas, a close friend of the future, had yet come into Vigny’s life. Sainte-Beuve, however, pursuing poetry and romantic friendships, had made the acquaintance of Vigny that spring. Their first meeting might have been awkward. Two years before, Sainte-Beuve had attacked Cinq-Mars in the Globe on the grounds of its historical inaccuracy. But that was before he had fallen under Hugo’s spell. Hugo’s enthusiasm for Vigny’s poetry, which Sainte-Beuve scarcely knew, had opened his eyes. ‘I made myself forgiven’, he wrote, ‘by my sincere admiration for his poetry.’ Their friendship soon blossomed, forced perhaps too quickly in the hothouse atmosphere of the Cénacle and watered liberally with flattery; for despite their exchanged compliments they eyed one another from the start with distrust, Sainte-Beuve possessive in his attitude to Hugo, Vigny observing, not without regret, the critic’s influence on his friend. ‘I have just seen Victor Hugo,’ he noted in his diary; ‘he had with him Sainte-Beuve and two others. Sainte-Beuve is a small, rather ugly man, with a common face and exceedingly round shoulders, who speaks with obsequious reverential grimaces like an old woman; he expresses himself with difficulty but possesses a tremendous fund of information, and a considerable talent for literary criticism. By dint of intelligence he has come to write excellent poetry without himself being an instinctive poet. Full of seeming modesty, he has set himself up as a henchman of Hugo and has been swept into poetry by him; but Hugo, who all his life has been going from one man to another to skim what he can from them, has acquired quantities of knowledge from him which he never had before; for all his airs of being the master he is the pupil.’
Sainte-Beuve was now virtually a member of the Hugo family. He had given up his medical studies at the end of 1827 to devote himself entirely to literature. He would call on the Hugos twice a day; he had his own seat by the fireside. If Hugo were out he would talk to Madame Hugo, placid and welcoming among her children. She was expecting a baby; another son, François-Victor, would be born in October. In the evenings there were expeditions to Mère Saguet’s, a vine-clad restaurant outside the town. The menu was simple. The widow Saguet kept a poultry yard; a plate of eggs would stave off the pangs of hunger while she killed a chicken, plucked it and prepared it. This with cheese, washed down by plentiful supplies of white wine, cost only twenty sous. They would return home in the sunset.
To the charm of friendship was added the awakening of the poetic faculty. ‘Coming from a purely rationalist and critical school as the Globe then was,’ wrote Sainte-Beuve, ‘it was a whole new world for me and I forgot myself there, savouring the sweetness of praises which were never stinted in those circles and giving rein for the first time to poetic and imaginative faculties which till then I had painfully repressed.’ He could recognise the falseness and extravagance of certain aspects of romanticism, but the talent he saw around him gave him courage and he set his critical judgement on one side, consoling himself with the thought that these faults would remain as secrets of the family.
In July 1828 Sainte-Beuve’s long projected book on the poets of the Pléiade was published. It was a pioneer work: in it he had tried to keep the balance between the poetic standards of his own age and those of another, an act of historical sympathy that would be the key to future works. He had been drawn into the Cénacle as he was writing it, and his description of the innovations and achievements of the poets of the sixteenth century had been coloured by the thought that with Hugo he was participating in a new Renaissance. The Tableau Historique et Critique de la Poésie Française au XVIe Siècle, reviving a lyrical tradition that had long been lost, provided the romantics with a literary ancestry.
The Tableau ended with a selection from the poetry of Ronsard. On its publication Sainte-Beuve presented Hugo with the magnificent sixteenth century in-folio copy of Ronsard’s poetry from which he had made his choice. The inscription inside it read:
To the greatest lyrical inventor
in French poetry since Ronsard,
from Ronsard’s most humble commentator,
S.B.
The book, with its gilt-edged leaves and white vellum binding, became part of the iconography of the Romantic Movement. It lay on a table in the ‘chambre au lys d’or’, where visitors could leaf through it and the most distinguished of them, including Vigny, Lamartine and Dumas, inscribe their verses in its ample margins. Sainte-Beuve wrote a sonnet:
Votre génie est grand, Ami, votre pensée
Monte, comme Elisée, au char vivant d’Elie…
Such high-flown terms were the common coinage of the Cénacle. Its atmosphere was incense-laden. Hugo himself was a master of flattery. To Victor Pavie, who had written a favourable review of his Odes et Ballades in a provincial paper the previous year, he wrote:
‘I should think nothing of praise which was merely praise. But what I am grateful for in your article is the tremendous talent I find there; what pleases, what charms, what enchants me, is the total revelation of a noble soul, a deep intelligence, a lofty spirit.’
Victor Pavie was twenty, one of the flock of young men who were rallying to Hugo’s standard. The doors of his salon were open to receive them. When Pavie, who had never met Hugo, arrived in Paris he made his way to the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. With shaking knees he gave his name to the servant, who carried a child in her arms. He heard his name announced within. Hugo appeared at the door. ‘I flung myself into his arms,’ wrote Pavie. ‘There was a gap of about five minutes during which I spoke without knowing what I was saying, sobbing with enthusiasm and laughing in the midst of my sobs.’
Not all young visitors were so impressed. Alfred de Musset had been only twelve when he was first introduced to Hugo as a school-friend of Madame Hugo’s younger brother Paul Foucher. Now a slim and elegant seventeen-year-old, somewhat dandyish, with the febrile air of a ‘flower that is already fading’, he was a frequent visitor both to Hugo’s salon and to that of Charles Nodier. Lamartine, who first saw him at the Arsenal, described him as habitually silent and modest amidst the noise and chatter of the crowd around him, dreamy-eyed, his delicate mouth undecided between sadness and a smile. But Lamartine’s impression reflected the almost religious awe which Musset felt for him. Like all young men of his generation Musset had swooned over Lamartine’s Méditations, responding intensely to their mood of romantic melancholy. He felt no such reverence for Hugo. Hugo was only eight years older than he, Lamartine twenty; and Hugo, in 1828, was not yet consecrated by a similar success. His modest shyness in front of Lamartine was not repeated in Hugo’s presence. But he could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of the romantic struggle. ‘Like a soldier who sees his friends charging into gunfire’, recalled his brother, ‘Alfred felt seized by the desire to try his own powers.’ One morning, after an evening of poetry and literary discussion he went round to wake up Sainte-Beuve and with a gaiety that concealed nervousness recited some of his poems to him. ‘We have a child of genius among us,’ wrote Sainte-Beuve to a friend next day.
Meanwhile the theatrical challenge thrown down in the preface to Cromwell had not been forgotten. Some years before, Hugo had written a tragedy, Amy Robsart, adapted from Walter Scott’s Kenilworth. Dissatisfied with it and unwilling to use someone else’s ideas, he had set it on one side. Now, in the wake of the Shakespearean triumphs, he decided to revive it, prudently however presenting it as the work of another man, his seventeen-year-old brother-in-law, Paul Foucher.
Delacroix designed the costumes; Hugo himself arranged for its production at the Odéon theatre. The experiment proved a disaster. The first night, February 13th, took place amidst an ‘indescribable tumult’, the actors hissed and shouted into inaudibility by classicists who, hearing rumours of the play’s true source, had come to jeer at the author of Cromwell. The play was ignominiously withdrawn a few days later.
Poor Paul Foucher, who had lent his name unwillingly, was in despair. Hugo, honour-bound to defend him, wrote a letter to the papers. He himself, he declared, had been responsible for ‘certain words, certain fragments of the play… the parts that had been most hissed’ – a disingenuous half-confession since the whole play was his own. ‘The episode is a little cloudy,’ writes a biographer, ‘and it cannot be said that Hugo’s conduct shines too brightly through the clouds.’
The failure of Amy Robsart was a setback, though only a temporary one, for the cause of romantic drama. For Hugo it was a precious lesson. Never again would he go into battle half-prepared. Those ardent young men, so warmly welcomed to his side, would be his cohorts when the moment came.
In March 1828 Alfred de Vigny and Emile Deschamps completed a translation of Romeo and Juliet. Hugo was enthusiastic. ‘Your Roméo is admirable,’ he wrote to Vigny; ‘it is the Roméo of William and yet it is your own. It needed a genius as great as his to translate it as you have done.’
Roméo et Juliette was accepted at the Théâtre Français, a breakthrough less amazing than it at first appeared since Baron Taylor, the director, was an old comrade in arms of Vigny’s and a friend of Nodier and Hugo. His appointment three years earlier had roused the consternation of the classicists who saw their citadel in danger from within. His name – he was a naturalised Frenchman, born in Brussels of English parents – had caused further offence. ‘This compatriot of Shakespeare,’ they said, ‘despises Corneille, Racine and Molière.’
Their worst fears now seemed realised. The decline in receipts had strengthened Taylor’s hand in opening up the theatre to new influences. ‘The revolution will be carried through’, wrote Hugo to Deschamps, ‘and carried through by Emile and Alfred… What was doubtful with Cromwell will be more than sure with Roméo.’
The Cénacle rejoiced too soon. Mademoiselle Mars, the natural candidate for the leading part and not one to relinquish her claims lightly, was nearing fifty, past the age for Juliet. Vigny, secretly unhappy about the quality of Deschamps’ work, showed no inclination to tackle her opposition or that of other actors. Worse, another Roméo had been accepted at the rival Odéon. The play was set aside indefinitely.
The classicists breathed once more. Vigny turned his attention to a translation of Othello, this time without collaboration, Hugo to the preparation of a novel and a new collection of poems, Les Orientales. The literary fermentation was intense. ‘Victor, Alfred de Vigny, Emile Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset and I,’ wrote Paul Foucher to a friend, ‘are all plunged in work. Victor is like a column in the midst of us all and from time to time throws us an “Orientale” like a paving stone dropped upon ants.’
But the first real breach in the classical defences would be made by none of these, but by an outsider at that moment completely unknown, a former clerk in the office of the king’s cousin, the Duc d’Orléans. His name was Alexandre Dumas.
Alexandre Dumas was twenty-six. He had come to Paris with no money and huge ambitions four years earlier. His father, the son of a West Indian slave and the Marquis de la Pailleterie, had been a general under Napoleon, renowned for his feats of bravery, but had fallen foul of the Emperor and died disgraced. From him Dumas had inherited his size – he was over six foot – and his physical exuberance; from him too came his head of crinkly black hair contrasting strangely with pale blue eyes alight with intelligence and wit.
For Dumas, as for Berlioz, the Shakespearean performances had been a revelation. For the first time, he wrote, he had seen real passions on the stage, animating men and women of flesh and blood. He felt like a blind man who has just received his sight. He perceived that ‘in the theatrical world everything emanates from Shakespeare, just as in the real world everything emanates from the sun… I realised in fact that, after God, Shakespeare had created more than any other human being.’ From that moment he saw his vocation clear.
He had already had a pair of burlesques performed in the vaudeville theatre and had tried his hand, less successfully, at poetry and a tragedy. In his spare moments as a clerk, supplementing a happy-go-lucky education, he had studied history and literature voraciously. Shakespearean drama, or rather his interpretation of it, would bring the threads of these studies together and satisfy the appetite for violence and excitement which the son of a Napoleonic hero had in his blood.
No novel by Dumas could better the story of the next eighteen months – his struggles, his setbacks, his final astounding success as a dramatist – and no d’Artagnan could make a more delightful hero than Dumas is of his own memoirs. If truth and fiction sometimes mingle, his personality is large enough to impose its own pattern on events.
Dumas had his first dramatic subject waiting. At the autumn exhibition of the Salon a few days previously he had been struck by one of the most discussed exhibits, a bas-relief by a woman sculptor depicting the assassination of Monaldeschi, favourite of Queen Christina of Sweden, in the Galerie des Cerfs at Fontainebleau. Dumas knew nothing of the queen or of her murdered lover, but the episode looked promising. Borrowing a biographical dictionary, he read up all he could on the subject, his imagination taking fire as he went on. His drama would be called Christine.
In less than six months, seizing every idle moment in his office hours and working through the night at home, he had completed a five-act play in verse. ‘I felt as embarrassed,’ he wrote, ‘as a poor girl who’s had a baby out of wedlock.’ What should he do with this bastard, conceived outside all academic auspices? It seemed too vigorous to smother; its aspirations went far beyond the theatres of the boulevards. The Théâtre Français? There were hundreds of plays waiting to be read there; without a letter to Baron Taylor, the director, he might have to wait a year for a reading.
Dumas knew no one of influence at the Théâtre Français but he had once, by chance, met Taylor’s friend Charles Nodier. The circumstances had been typically eccentric. At a performance of Le Vampire, a ridiculous melodrama, four years before, he had fallen into conversation with his neighbour in the interval, a charming and erudite gentleman with whom he had talked agreeably of vampires, old books and cookery. This gentleman, in the course of the third act, was forcibly evicted from the theatre for hissing the performance. The disturber of the peace, Dumas read in the papers next day, had been none other than the celebrated Charles Nodier, co-author of the play, though whether he was hissing his own work, his colleague’s, or the actors, remained a mystery.
Would Nodier remember the episode? It was barely possible, but, failing any other introduction, Dumas wrote to him, recalling Le Vampire, his hisses and their conversation, and begging his help for Christine. Nodier did not reply, but a few days later a letter arrived from Taylor inviting him to read his play aloud and offering an appointment at seven in the morning in his apartment, his only moment in a crowded day.
Dumas’ memoirs describe this memorable first meeting. He arrived at Taylor’s flat to find himself forestalled by another aspiring playwright who held the director trapped, like Marat, in his bath while he read him, at seemingly endless length, a five-act tragedy. By the time it had reached its weary close and its persistent author been despatched, the bath-water was cold. Taylor, whose teeth were chattering, jumped back into bed. Dumas politely offered to return some other time.
‘Ah no,’ said Taylor, ‘since you’re here…’
‘Then,’ said Dumas, ‘I will read you the first act and if it tires or bores you I will stop.’
‘You’ve more compassion than your confrère,’ said Baron Taylor; ‘that’s a good sign.’
With a trembling voice almost inaudible from nervousness, Dumas read the first act.
‘Shall I go on?’ he asked timidly.
‘But yes, but yes,’ said Baron Taylor. ‘Upon my word it’s very good.’
Dumas read on with growing courage. His interest turning to enthusiasm as he listened, Taylor himself demanded the third act, then the fourth, then the fifth.
In less than a week, with Taylor’s recommendation behind it, Christine had been accepted by the committee of the Théâtre Français. But Dumas’ joy was short-lived. He was soon to discover, he wrote, that ‘in the theatre, contrary to real life, all joys belong to giving birth and that after birth the pains begin’. Between acceptance and performance at the Théâtre Français, above all for an unknown author, lay a minefield of obstruction and intrigue. Taylor, despite his title of director, was a constitutional monarch presiding in the midst of backstage factions. Like Roméo et Juliette, Christine was abandoned in mid-rehearsal.