Jacob's Folly (32 page)

I
t was July. A balmy evening, I remember, still quite light in the Tuileries. I had just turned nineteen. A small, sleek monkey on a long chain loped toward me and grabbed my hand. I was frightened at first, but the little fellow looked up at me kindly and chirped. He was wearing a blue jacket with gold buttons. His chain led to a colorful painted sign that I could not make out. A large man stood beside the sign. He had a big, ferocious head framed by a mane of hair.

“Turco!” he bellowed to the monkey. And then, seeing me, he beckoned. “Come! Free of charge!”

A crowd was gathering around players from various centuries: Henri IV, Eleanor of Aquitaine, some sort of Viking character, and others I did not recognize, ignorant as I was of most European history. Two fiddle players appeared in the circle and began to play a jaunty tune. I worked my way to the front of the crowd. The act began. I can only remember slivers of the action. The spoken part of the play consisted of bawdy rhyming couplets of varying quality, which, I suspected, the actors were largely making up on the spot. The crowd was roaring with laughter. Some people were weeping in hysterics. I didn't laugh, but I was intrigued. When the play ended, the man with the great
leonine head, monkey on his shoulder, called out in a booming voice, “Our main show begins at eight o'clock in the Spectacle des Grands Danseurs, our brand-new theater, at the ramparts by the boulevard du Temple. You can't miss it. Come and bring your friends. Bring your wives. Your mistresses. This is a show that leaves the Comédie-Française looking like a bunch of anemics. We will show you real theater!”

When the crowd dispersed I approached the impresario.

“Monsieur,” I said.

“What is it?” he asked brusquely.

“I would like to join your company. Do you have a job for me?” Jean-Baptiste Nicolet took me by the shoulders and looked down into my face, turning me this way and that.

“What can you do?”

“Anything.”

“What are you called?” he asked.

“Le Naïf,” I answered without thinking.

Nicolet frowned. “Come to the theater, we'll try you out. We need a fop.”

I scuttled in the shadow of the mountainous Nicolet as the troupe straggled through the teeming streets, my hopes already pinned on his protection. Henri IV eyed me suspiciously from beneath his velvet toque, thumbs tucked into his vest. Eleanor of Aquitaine, a sallow lady of giant proportions, farted dolefully as she trudged past me, weighed down by her gilt robes. A rat-faced girl in a Hellenic costume rushed to my side, then turned and walked backward, scrutinizing me openly, her athletic arms swinging.

“But Nicolet!” she cried to the impresario. “He'd be perfect as the dying prince!” Then she confided to me, “Ours has been arrested.”

Nicolet led us into the theater through a side door. The smell of melting wax, deeply familiar from my days of love with Antonia, gave me
a false sense of homecoming. Impatiently, I pushed away the heavy ropes that sagged like vines from the ceiling, rushing to keep up with the maestro. Onstage, jugglers tossed painted balls back and forth; a man walked by on his hands. The monkey, Turco, hopped from Nicolet's shoulder and swung into the arms of a rather pretty girl, who kissed him on the lips, then pirouetted away. The members of the troupe scattered and disappeared into various crevices. I swiveled to face the house, and was disappointed by the barren long hall, with its tiers of utilitarian box seats surrounding a scuffed wooden floor. Nicolet roared out, “Taconet!” A small hunchbacked man with a shock of black hair appeared from behind a canvas backdrop of an ivy-covered ruin.

“Here's your new prince,” said Nicolet, holding me by the back of the neck. Taconet took me in with hopeless, bored eyes. My yellow silk suit was stained, my wig frayed. “Do you think we can use him?” asked the impresario. Taconet shrugged.

“We'll try him once,” rumbled Nicolet, pushing me away.

That very night, I was lolling in a bath chair, white paint on my face, dark circles smudged around my eyes. I was the tubercular Sardinian prince, married to the lusty princess of Naples, played by the rat-faced girl of that afternoon. Nicolet had rushed me into my costume while giving me a quick description of the plot. Around us, other players hurriedly did up buttons and crammed on wigs in the communal dressing room.

“But what are my lines?” I asked, as Nicolet smeared my cheeks with lead.

“You don't need to speak, you're dying. But, when she admits to her infidelity, make an indignant speech of a few lines …” He then stuffed me into my bath chair, turned, and walked off, preoccupied. Eleanor of Aquitaine, the giantess, now dressed as a nurse, burst into the dressing area, took up the handles of my invalid's chair, and wheeled me onto the stage, where a family of acrobats was somersaulting into the wings. In a panic, I let my head fall back and shut my
eyes, deciding to affect semiconciousness, thereby explaining my mutism.

Squinting, I could make out the audience below us, some rapt, others milling about, eating, and breaking into fights. As the melodrama unfolded, I listened keenly for my cue, my mouth dry, breath short. At last the dreaded moment arrived: I heard the princess of Naples boasting to her handmaiden that she had been unfaithful—with my own brother! My cheeks burning with embarrassment, I roused myself, sat up in my chair, and gave my faithless wife a lashing I imagined my master might have given Antonia after my escape: “Is this how you repay my generosity? My trust? Lie down, sow, and traffic in the mud where you belong!” I cried, reaching a trembling hand out and pointing at the ground. The rat-faced girl seemed amazed by my liveliness. The crowd cheered and clapped. I felt a surge of joy rise up in me.

After the performance, Nicolet called me into his office. The monkey was hunched on the maestro's desk, picking at a roll in near darkness. A scattering of crumbs had fallen over the wood like snow. One side of Nicolet's tortured head was thrown into relief by the warm light of a lone candle. The other side fell into pitch-darkness.

“Where have you come from?” he asked me, peeling an orange with his big fingers. The fruit glowed in its meager spill of light.

“I … I was in service. A valet,” I answered.

“What led you here?”

“I was dismissed, some weeks ago. I have nothing else.”

“Can I expect the police to come calling?”

“No—”

“Because I have had enough of that for one season.”

“Nothing like that.”

“Why were you dismissed from service?” The scowling half face floated in the dark like a planet.

“I became the
greluchon
of my master's mistress.” For the first time, I saw Nicolet smile. He shook his head, severing a section of orange with a spray of juice and popping it into his mouth. The tantalizing
smell of the fruit reached my nostrils. Chewing, he slid a few coins across the desk.

“Your first week's pay,” he said, tossing the rest of the orange to the monkey.

And so began my career as the actor “Le Naïf.” I became a member of the Spectacle des Grands Danseurs, receiving meager pay for my work in the
canevas
, brief plays in which the players made up almost all the lines. Really we were filler, storylets sandwiched between the strong men, jugglers, and acrobats who were the true stars of the Spectacle des Grands Danseurs. Our working process was simple: our resident bard, the hunchbacked Taconet, designed a canvas backdrop with a melodramatic flavor—a ruined temple in Athens, for example, or a canal in Amsterdam. Then he devised a plot, and a few lines for each character to spout at crucial moments. Apart from these flimsy anchors, the actors cooked up the whole play every night. It was terrifying and exhilarating, walking the tightrope without a net day after day. With my petite stature and guileless face, I was always cast as the innocent prince or the simpleton valet. Eventually I pasted on a beard and branched out to foreign emissaries, mistrels, and … Jews. I suggested casually one day that there might be a Jewish peddler in one of our
canevas
that took place in Amsterdam. Unsuspecting, Nicolet told me to invent a character. Chayim Levi was a comic triumph. I did him for years, dancing across the stage in a yarmulke and protective fringes.

With my earnings, I quickly saved enough money to rent a small flat on the rue de Grenelle. I even employed a flunky to make my bed and clean my house. I had no need of a cook, as I ate all my meals at my local inn or in the houses of friends. Apart from my meals and a few hours' sleep a night, I lived in the theater.

I began to enjoy a bit of a reputation. By practice and force of will I had eradicated my accent and sounded purely French. I became an
expert at improvised cascades of righteous indignation. I used rage as fuel. I found it plentiful in myself; once I hit the first vein, there was enough to stoke my engine for an hour. I could also assume an air of wounded pathos. I could be funny. I had audiences howling. Gradually I became a second lead, the antagonist.

At last the lazy hunchback, Taconet, managed to write down an entire play on paper all by himself: a wretched melodrama called
Tears on Sunday
. For the first time, I was cast as the lead, a fragile young noble at the brink of suicide whose despair is interrupted when he falls in love with his coachman's daughter, but then the daughter marries someone of her own class and our noble shoots himself after all. The play was a huge hit with an audience ready to ditch the worship of reason for that of sentiment. Wishing to be in touch with the people's newly maudlin tastes, Louis XV commanded a private viewing of the play. Statuettes and engravings of me in swooning poses were sold on the street. Whenever I left the theater, fans engulfed me.

One evening, several well-known actors from the Comédie-Française came to see the play, and asked me to join the company. I had scaled the heights, albeit on the back of a donkey. And now I would be speaking the words of Molière! I walked straight over to the leonine Nicolet, my head high.

“Monsieur Nicolet!” I exclaimed. “I am happy to say I have been approached by the Comédie-Française to be a part of their illustrous company. As I am sure you understand, this is a chance I cannot forgo.”

The impresario looked down at me with his predator's eyes, Turco perched on his shoulder eating a handful of nuts. He said nothing for a long moment. His silence made me uneasy. Eventually he turned and walked away.

The Comédie-Française was the most important theater in France. The actors owned the company, as well as being subsidized by the king. With my first pay, I employed a cook I could barely afford. I
became short-tempered with those I felt were wasting my time, but not as short as the leading men were. It took me several more years to become a real bastard. I felt this was the behavior expected of me as a serious artist. At first it was an act, but gradually it became my personality.

About a year after my arrival at the Comédie-Française, a valet knocked at my door with an invitation. The Marquise de Maillé de Brézé requested my company at an “at-home” that evening. My landau was stuck for twenty minutes behind a line of other carriages as I waited for the other guests to disembark before the Hôtel de Maillé de Brézé, a spectacular residence blazing in candlelight. At last a footman opened my door, and I alighted.

Rose-Béatrice de Maillé de Brézé was more than twenty years my senior, a tall woman with long white arms and a teasing wit. She adored the theater, had many of the finest actors in her salon regularly. To be folded into her world was a coup. That evening I was entranced by the velvety soup, the plump quail, the melting meringues, the torrents of whipped cream, and the rivers of champagne that raged down the table. I simply opened my mouth and let it all stream in. By the time the marquise showed me her private theater, a gem equipped with every modern convenience, I felt as serenely pliant as an overfed lapdog. I could barely rise to the challenge of her carressing goodbye, and fell asleep in my coach on the way home. The next morning, I was invited to witness the marquise's toilette, to see her primp her wig, powder her face, tie her stays. I arrived late, having overslept and taken time to dress with care: my suit was white silk, with fine horizontal stripes of rabbit fur sewn onto the vest. I wore ivory hose, and the light, summer lace of my cravat was from Brussels. A maid showed me into the marquise's dressing room, where my splendid hostess was already seated, a cup of coffee in her hands, fine curls framing her face, her dressing gown a mountain range of violet brocade expanding around her in luxurious folds. I took a seat beside her, and dared to
rest my elbow on her makeup cabinet, an ingenious little table with a built-in mirror and many drawers. It reminded me of the box I used to wear around my neck.

The Marquise de Maillé de Brézé was approaching fifty, yet her skin was very smooth, lined only around the mouth and eyes due to her tendency to smile. Her front teeth protruded slightly, giving her an involuntary little pout when she closed her lips, which I found quite charming. The principal signs of age on her face were along the jawline, which sagged slightly. But the near-constant animation of her features, so filled with intelligence and mercy, and her warm, steady brown eyes distracted from this flaw. The marquise was enchanting. I watched her play the little porcelain boxes of rouge, powder, and scent with nimble, expert fingers as she quizzed me on my impressions of the evening before.

“And the Comte de Brésaille? What did you think of him?” she asked me, winding her fluffy hair into a bun.

“I had the misfortune of being sat downwind of him,” I answered.

She swiveled her head to look at me, delighted. “He has a terrible digestion, it's true.”

“The worst, I'd say, in Paris.”

She laughed joyfully, putting a hand on my arm as if to steady herself. “So you are as cruel in life as you are on the stage?”