LIVES

Between 1700 and 1750, the Parisian theatre underwent many significant changes. Actresses were less likely to be born into theatrical families, less likely to be married to fellow actors (or, indeed, married at all). Some were enthusiastic participants in le monde, the famously libertine social, artistic, and literary milieu that developed in Paris after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Although their sexual adventures were greatly exaggerated by the gossip-mongers and the morals police, some actresses had affairs with noblemen and even royals, others built irregular marriages and long-lasting relationships with important men. One result was the reinforcement of the old stereotypes, a growing habit of generalizing “the actress,” and increased hostility toward “public” women. More is known about eighteenth-century actresses than about earlier ones, but the evidence can be contradictory, and certain narratives need to be challenged.

Actresses were important to the survival of the theatre in the eighteenth century. The Comédie-Française often sailed on perilous financial seas, and the women played an important role in keeping it afloat, their star power as great or greater than that of the actors. But as the troupe became ever more institutionalized under the agents of the monarchy, the women lost even more control than the men did of the management of what had once been their “republic.”

Anecdotes are irresistible; personal and active, they add life and color to a narrative. Although the dangers embedded in using anecdotes are obvious, life narratives without anecdotal material can be short, not so sweet, and without much human interest. As W. H. Auden said of biography, “a shilling life will give you all the facts,” but nothing but the facts can be remarkably uninformative, especially when records are sparse and documents questionable.

A historian who is trying to piece together a credible representation of the past and proposes to include anecdotal information is faced with a daunting task, however: to “unpack” each anecdote, judge the information it yields, dismiss what is clearly impossible or improbable, and attempt to fit what is believable or probable into the emerging pattern that will in the end constitute “evidence.”

A great deal has been written in recent years about anecdotes and their use, especially by literary historians of the New Historicist school. For Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, the anecdote, like a literary work, is a text: “both are fictions in the sense of things made, both are shaped by the imagination and by the available resources of narration and description,” but they are “ineradicably” dissimilar because “they make sharply different claims upon the actual.”

BEFORE 1600

In the beginning there were a few women in France who braved the wrath of the Roman church, broke through social barriers, and went on the stage – maybe because they wanted to, maybe because they had to, maybe out of serendipity. We have no way of knowing. What we have known since 1888 is that a woman named “Marie Ferré, or Fairet, actress and acrobat, was contracted to Antoine de L'Esperonnière's troupe in 1545 in Bourges.” Ferré was the wife of Michel Fasset, a bateleur, or street entertainer, who lived in Normandy and was not present when the contract was signed. Given that circumstance, Ferré was permitted to sign for herself, but with the stipulation that if her husband did not approve, the contract would be void. She agreed to travel with L'Esperonnière and perform the “antiquailles de Rome” or other “histoires, morales, farces et sobressaults,” that is, histories, moralities, farces, and acrobatics. In return she was to be nourished and lodged and to receive the sum of 12 livres tournois per year.

This contractual arrangement is not what we might have expected from what we know of the professional theatre later on in seventeenth-century France; Ferré is to be an employee of L'Esperonnière, not a sharer in the troupe's income. The contract does, however, require her to share any gifts she receives of money or clothing with Gaillarde, the wife of the director and, presumably, also a performer.

In the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the commercial theatre became firmly established in Paris and underwent several profound transformations, among them an explosion in the number of playwrights and plays written, a certain regularization of the profession of actor, and an increase in patronage – and efforts at control – by the monarchy in the person of the king's first minister, the cardinal de Richelieu. According to Paul Pellisson, the first historian of the Académie Française:

Beyond the personal pleasure he took in attending a play, Richelieu's mission was to “rehabilitate” the theatre as part of his cultural policy; according to Georges Couton, the king gave him a free hand. Under his aegis Pierre Corneille, Jean Mairet, Jean de Rotrou, Pierre Du Ryer, and many other playwrights furnished the two established theatres with an astonishing number of new tragedies and comedies, increasingly consistent with the ideas of the cardinal and the taste of an audience newly attracted to the drama.

Tallemant des Réaux includes the following anecdote in his historiette about the poet Boisrobert: the jolly abbé was told to gather up some actors, actresses, and playwrights to give their opinion of a rehearsal of Mirame, Richelieu's choice for the opening of his grand new theatre at the Palais-Cardinal in 1641. Boisrobert permitted a woman Tallemant calls “la petite Saint-Amour Frerelot” to attend. The furious cardinal accused him of allowing a whore to contaminate his theatre. Boisrobert defended himself, saying:

Boisrobert's certainty that all seventeenth-century actresses are whores was founded on a long history of similar assumptions about women on the stage, beginning in classical times and gathering momentum in the early Christian era. Women who adopted the theatre as a profession in early modern France faced not only the usual antitheatrical biases, based on Roman law and patristic writings, but a special set of presumptions tied to their gender. As far back as Xenophon in the fourth century bce, women who performed for money, publicly or privately, faced the condescension and contempt of their societies.

When Paul Scarron baptized the leading lady of his profoundly provincial theatrical troupe “Mademoiselle de L'Étoile” in Le Roman comique in 1651, we might think he was verging on irony. In fact, the word “star,” meaning an actor or actress distinguished by his or her celebrity, seems to have entered English usage only in the nineteenth century and to have been borrowed by the French in the twentieth. Scarron's pairing of Mlle de L'Étoile with her partner, Le Destin, plays rather on an earlier meaning of étoile, as in Shakespeare's “a star danced and under that I was born.” Both “Destin” and “Étoile” imply that fate rather than choice has determined their profession. But in fact, if not in lexicography, the “star,” that is, someone notably conspicuous for professional accomplishments and celebrity, was born in France over the course of the last half of the seventeenth century.

A “star” displays some fairly obvious characteristics. Perhaps the most important one is that audiences are drawn to star performances, increasing the financial rewards for everyone involved. Another sign of stardom is when playwrights write specific roles to feature the biggest draws. In the seventeenth century, the two great star-makers were Molière and Racine. Of course, Molière primarily wrote plays that featured Molière, but he also established the stardom of his wife, Armande Béjart, with roles like the Princesse d'Élide, Psyché, Célimène, and Elmire.

In 1729 the celebrated actress Adrienne Lecouvreur died in mysterious circumstances. Some of the events that supposedly took place before and during her final illness are reported by her friend, Mlle Aïssé, in a letter written to Mme Calandrini:

La Lecouvreur, a poor creature, is thus summed up by her “friend,” who was not, incidentally, known as la Aïssé, although her own history was far from impeccable. An epistolary writer, Mlle Aïssé was meant to have been a Circassian princess, sold into slavery and bought by the French ambassador to Turkey, who brought her back to France to be raised by his sister-in-law. Like her friend Adrienne Lecouvreur, she never married, and she had at least one notorious love affair and at least one illegitimate child. Nonetheless, she retained the honorable title of “mademoiselle.”

Why “la Lecouvreur”? Inside the theatre of the ancien régime the actress was almost always given the title “mademoiselle,” but outside the private world of the stage, the actress was often referred to not with a title but with an article. Even today in France, the la is sometimes used, although now it indicates an actress of mythic stature.