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I authorise the Theatre Francais to play to-morrow, Friday, the 25th, on behalf of the victims of the war, the fifth act of "Hernani" by the actors of the Theatre Francais and the last act of "Lucrece Borgia" by the actors of the Porte Saint Martin, and in addition the recitation as an intermede of extracts from Les Chatiments, Les Contemplations and La Legende des Siecles. Mlle.
The performances of Hernani made me a still greater favourite with the public. I had already rehearsed with Victor Hugo, and it was a real pleasure to me to see the great poet almost each day. I had never discontinued my visits, but I was never able to have any conversation with him in his own house. There were always men in red ties gesticulating, or women in tears reciting.
He had described to David the first night of Hernani, when he had been one of the long-haired band of rapins, who came down in their scores to the Theatre Francais to defend their chief, Hugo, against the hisses of the Philistine. The two were making coffee in Barbier's attic, at the top of a side street off the Oxford Road, when these memories seized upon the old Romantic.
Victor Hugo composed Marion Delorme between June 1 and June 24, 1829; and when the piece was interdicted by the censor, he immediately turned to another subject and wrote Hernani in the next three weeks. The fourth act of Marion Delorme was written in a single day. Here apparently was a very fever of composition.
The public coughed, wriggled, and showed that they found the whole thing painful and ridiculous. In our performance it was Mounet-Sully, in all the splendour of his talent, who played Hernani. And it was Worms, that admirable artiste, who played Charles Quint and how well he took the part! How he rolled out the lines! What a splendid diction he had!
A certain Pole employed in the enterprise was to be at Hernani, with horses in readiness to convey them to San Sebastian. There a sloop had been engaged, and was waiting their arrival.
And before the first act was over we were sitting, bent forward, gazing at the stage in an intense and concentrated excitement such as I can scarcely remember ever feeling again, except perhaps when the same actress played "Hernani" in London for the first time in 1884. Sarah Bernhardt was then December, 1874 in the first full tide of her success. She was of a ghostly and willowy slenderness.
Like Shakespeare, he used idioms and slang with profusion anything to express the idea. Will this convey the thought? If so, it was written down, and, once written, Beelzebub and all his hosts could not make him change it. But in the interest of truth let me note one exception: "I do not like that word," said Mademoiselle Mars to Victor Hugo at a rehearsal of "Hernani"; "can I not change it?"
I shall never see him again, which makes me sad; I was often deeply struck by the quaint wisdom of that old human relic, and his image is associated in my thoughts with evening walks and summer sunsets and lovely flowers and lordly trees, and he will haunt Cassiobury always to me. I went with my mother to buy my dresses for "Hernani," which will cost me a fortune and a half.
I remember Mademoiselle Mars in 'Hernani." Kitty bounded in her seat. Whereupon it appeared that just before she left Paris she had been taken by a friend to see the reigning idol of the Comédie-Française, the young and astonishing actress, Sarah Bernhardt, as Doña Sol.
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