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When Esperance returned to the Boulevard Raspail, she found her parents much elated at her success. Count Styvens, who had been present at the competition, had hurried to tell them the good news and give them all the details of their daughter's significant triumph. "She surpassed herself in Phedre," he had said.
DUGAZON, the actor, next introduced Madame XAVIER, a very handsome and elegant woman. Lastly, Mademoiselle RAUCOURT presented her pupil, Mademoiselle GEORGES WEIMER, a young girl of perfect beauty. Mademoiselle DUCHESNOIS played Phedre, in RACINE'S tragedy of that name, seven successive times.
But I was still very weak, and could only take up my work towards the month of November. I played all the pieces of my repertoire, and I was annoyed at not having any new roles. One day Perrin came to see me in my sculptor's studio. He began to talk at first about my busts; he told me that I ought to do his medallion, and asked me incidentally if I knew the role of Phedre.
But at the final revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he thought his conscience, or rather his vanity, compromised, and quitted France, although the King offered to allow him a chaplain of his communion, and a dispensation from all the oaths, to Petitot himself, to Boyer, his brother-in-law, and the chaplain whom they had retained with them. Lovers' Vows. The Body-guards. Racine's Phedre. The Pit.
"She would prefer some classical piece! Phèdre, for instance." "Be it so." Bouvard set forth the theme: "It is about a queen whose husband has a son by another wife. She has fallen madly in love with the young man. Are we there? Start! "'Yes, prince! for Theseus I grow faint, I burn I love him!"
This expedient may be more or less legitimate in archaic or legendary drama, where there is room for all kinds of poetic fantasy; but in the drama which pretends to actual truth we demand another intervention, one that shall seem to us more genuinely irresistible, if crimes like Macbeth's, such a deed of horror as that to which Agamemnon consented: perhaps, too, the kind of love that burned in Phèdre, shall achieve their mysterious excuse, and acquire a grandeur and sombre nobility that intrinsically they do not possess.
Unequal to creative effort he undertook a translation of Racine's 'Phedre' in German pentameters and finished it about the middle of January, 1805. After this he threw himself with great energy upon 'Demetrius', but it was the final flicker of a dying flame. In February came a fresh prostration, and it was then evident that the end was near.
I saw Rachel in 'Phèdre' and in 'Adrienne. I had previously asked a friend if I, in my ignorance of acting, and in my inability to tell good from poor, should really perceive a marked difference between Rachel and her aids. She thought I should. I did indeed!
The bill announced Phèdre and the Chien du Jardinier, The Gardener's Dog. With one voice the audience demanded the hymn dear to the muscadins and the gilded youth, the Réveil du peuple, The Awakening of the People. The curtain rose and a little man, short and fat, took the stage; it was the celebrated Lays. He sang in his fine tenor voice: Peuple français, peuple de frères!...
This indeed is the framework of his poetry, and to speak of it adequately would demand a wider scope than that of an essay; for how much might be written of that strange and moving background, dark with the profundity of passion and glowing with the beauty of the sublime, wherefrom the great personages of his tragedies Hermione and Mithridate, Roxane and Agrippine, Athalie and Phèdre seem to emerge for a moment towards us, whereon they breathe and suffer, and among whose depths they vanish for ever from our sight!
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