The Salt Smugglers (7 page)

HARLEQUIN MASKS. — HAMLET THE YELLOW DWARF. — THEATER LICENSES

If the props were late to arrive, it is because this is always the case; — theaters tend to deal with details at the very last minute. Theater directors are often unable to pay the costume designer, the painter, or the decorator ahead of time. And the latter therefore often refuse to deliver their goods until they are assured that they will receive their
cut
of the
take
, — which is of course impossible to predict until opening night.

It was at these moments that poor Harel, — who was a remarkable fellow after all, for he had directed the
Yellow Dwarf
and been honored by the Academy for a poem in praise of Voltaire, — found himself crushed by the financial burden of having to run a theater as ill-starred as the Porte-Saint-Martin.

The theater license for the place came to fifteen thousand a year, which he had to fork over to the director of the place, — a humorous old fellow who had managed to have two theaters
bestowed
upon him; — one of which he owned outright and the other of which was a mere
fiefdom
whose paltry profits caused a smile to play across his face while slowly driving its occupant into rack and ruin.

All this feels so very
Ancien Régime
. But the fact of the matter remains that if Harel had had in his coffers the 150 thousand francs that he paid out to his suzerain over a period of ten years, he would not have been as financially strapped as he was back during that summer while awaiting his elephant.

Harel often had to spring for extremely expensive costumes. So one had to be careful when mentioning plays to him set during the Middle Ages or under the reign of Louis XV, — not to mention those set back in the luxuriant days of the Greeks, the Bible, or the Orientals.

One day he was offered a play set during the Regency whose success was virtually guaranteed, given the spectacular outfits of the period. Harel called up his wardrobe manager M. Dumas and asked him: « How are we doing with Regency outfits?

— Not well at all, sir! We're out of jackets! We have a few vests and some
trousses
(the breeches of that era).

— Well, with a few vests and breeches, we'll just have to add some serge jackets in eye-popping colors. If the vests are bright enough in the footlights, the audience will go home happy. »

It was thus that that
La Duchesse de La Vaubelière
was staged; the theater aficionados were bowled over by the Regency vests and queued up in endless lines for the show, — whose tickets cost between 50 and 65 centimes.

Harel later confessed to me: « This success was my undoing. »

And he proceeded to show me the
books:
an average of eight hundred francs a night for the first twenty performances.

Then the box office earnings fell off precipitously. — I said to myself: « Beware of believing that you'll ever make a killing in the theater. »

But I was still quite worried about the props. The props in question were: sixteen student caps and sixteen masks for the scene of the
Saint Wehme,
— obviously black velvet masks, — such as the ones worn in the productions of
Bravo
, of
Lucretia Borgia
and a host of other dramas.

The caps finally arrived during the first intermission, but I was told: « the masks are still on their way. »

It's quite difficult to get one's bearings from the wings of a theater; — statesmen suffer from the same blindness. — The audience was all ears: rapt, utterly silent. The third act had just ended, and here I was, a nervous wreck because of the masks needed for the fourth act.

I climbed up to the dressing rooms in the attic. Some extras were putting on the uniforms of the German honor guard, blue with epaulettes of yellow braid. Others were slipping into the uniforms of the
sicaires
and
trabans
, — which they found most humiliating.

As for the
students
, they were getting outfitted with nary a care in the world, seeing as how they had been assured that their caps were about to arrive, — and blissfully oblivious to the fact that they would have to wear masks for the conspiracy scene in the fourth act.

« Where are the masks? I asked.

— The props manager has not yet distributed them. »

I went to locate Harel.

« The masks?

— They're on their way. »

The audience was growing restless during the intermission. The theater staff had exhausted all of Harel's standard bag of tricks in these situations, — which involved distracting the public from a late curtain by showering it with a rain of confetti during the first intermission. During the second, they would toss down a cap from the upper gallery, which would be passed around from hand to hand in the orchestra seat section. During
the third intermission, they would stage a scene in one of the private boxes which would inevitably provoke heated arguments in the pit: « He's going to kiss her! No he won't! »

When the delay between the third and fourth act grew too protracted, they used to set a dog to barking, — or have a child start screaming. Then they'd have a bunch of kids (especially paid for the purpose) yell out: «
Get that crybaby outta here
. » At least the point was thereby made. If necessary, the orchestra would then strike up
La Parisienne
, — which was still permitted back in those days.

After ten minutes of intermission, Harel came up to me and said: « The students have their caps ... But do they absolutely need masks at this point?

— How could you dare ask me such a thing? It's for the scene of the Secret Trial!

— Well, a mistake has been made. All they sent over were some harlequin masks. They thought it was for a masked ball scene, — these days there's always some sort of ball scene in the fourth acts of modern dramas.

— Where are the masks? I asked Harel, heaving a great moan.

— The dresser has them. »

I entered the dressing room. All the student-stagehands were furious because I had promised them they would be playing serious parts.

« Harlequin masks! ... they complained, — What do they have to do with our roles? »

Mélingue and Raucourt, who been supplied with proper black velvet masks, were taking it easy in the green room, confident that they would not be exposed to ridicule. But the horrid harlequin masks with their pug noses and bushy moustaches caused me no end of concern. — Raucourt opined: « The solution is to cut off the moustaches. The noses may be a bit stubby, but that won't make much of a difference. These are student conspirators, after all; — people will just say they have no
nose
for politics. »

In the end, in order to save the day (and the act), Mme Mélingue, Raucourt, Mélingue, Tournan and I all pitched in to snip the moustaches off the masks, — all this hair would have otherwise picked up the sheen of the footlights and entirely robbed the scene of the Night of Saint-Wehme of all its drama.

Someone called me aside and said: — « Harel has set you up. » — I have always refused to believe this.

As for the stage set which Cicéri had supposedly designed, it forced us to cut out a third of the act. — It turned out that, given the miniature dimensions of this underground cellar, it was just too difficult to move the cast around as originally blocked.

Thus reduced to these tiny proportions, the fourth act hardly justified the fears it had inspired among the government censors.

Luckily the talents of the lead actors were such that the fifth act (a difficult one, at that) proved to be a
smashing
success. The line in the play that was the most applauded ran as follows, spoken by one of the students: « Kings are on their way out ... Let's give them a shove. » The thunderous applause that greeted this sequence of simple words caused Harel to comment: « They'll shut down the play tomorrow ... but at least we will have had a splendid evening of it. » The flop of the fourth act threw cold water on his enthusiasm. He hoped that the play might be prosecuted, but no such luck.

He nonetheless demanded that the ministry pay him an indemnity, — to cover the delays that the whole censorship process had occasioned and the resultant poor showing at the box office, all of which was hardly offset by the glowing future promised by the arrival of the
elephant
.

After thirty performances late that summer, it was with great interest that I observed the pachyderm honorably follow in the footsteps of my drama. The sixteen stagehands, who were quite expensive, were laid off, — and I decided to return to Germany and drown in the vineyards of the Danube all the troubles stirred up by vineyards of the Rhine.

The Rhine is treacherous: — it contains too many
loreleis
singing to mariners from the ruins of ancient castles at night. — The Danube, by contrast, is a dear old river, rolling sausages (
wurchell
) and salty pretzels in its gentle waves.

But this is a memory of Vienna. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

Harel had been compensated for the losses caused by the delay in the play's production. According to the complaint he had officially lodged, I was to receive equal compensation.

There had been a changing of the guard at the ministry; a member of the opposition had replaced the minister of the king's party whom I have previously mentioned. I insisted on my right to indemnification. But I didn't want the money to be disbursed to me without any return favor on my part. I promised I would churn out six hundred francs worth of newspaper copy for the sum of the same amount that was due tome.

Here is what I had to say in answer to the accusations of
Le Corsaire
. — Let's return to the abbé de Bucquoy. The National Archives passed his genealogy onto me. — His patronymic is
Longueval
. And for particular reasons that continue to puzzle people of simple minds, this name does not occur once in the various accounts or documents that call his existence to our attention.

As concerns the Longueval family, however, the Archives contain a charming love story that I can convey to you without fear, — given that this love story is completely historical.

Angélique de Longueval was the daughter of one of the greatest nobles of Picardy. Her father, Jacques de Longueval, count d'Haraucourt, privy councilor of the King, marshal of the royal armies, was also the governor of the Châtelet and of Clermont-en-Beauvoisis. It was on the outskirts of the latter town, in the castle of Saint-Rimault, that he used to leave his wife and daughter whenever his duties called him away to court or to the army.

From the age of thirteen onward, Angélique de Longueval, whose temperament was at once dreamy and despondent, claimed that she
took no interest in lovely jewels or beautiful carpets or elegant clothing and thought only of death to cure her spirits
. A gentleman in the service of her father fell in love with her. He could not take his eyes off her, he attended to her slightest need, and even though Angélique had not the faintest idea what Love might be, she was pleasantly surprised to find herself the object of such assiduous attention.

When this gentleman finally declared his love to her, his words so impressed themselves on her memory that
six years later, after having gone through the trials and tribulations of another love and having suffered misfortunes of every sort, she could still remember this first letter and recite it to herself word by word. Allow me to quote this curious illustration of the period style of a provincial lover in the age of Louis XIII.

DEPARTURE FOR COMPIÈGNE THE ARCHIVES AND THE LIBRARY THE LIFE OF ANGÉLIQUE DE LONGUEVAL, OF THE DE BUCQUOY FAMILY

Here is the letter written by Mlle Angélique de Longueval's first lover: