 |
| Pink Dragons at Tuatha De Danann |
 |
| Resting on high at Dark Moon |
 |
| In the Wedding Chapel at Dark Moon |
 |
| Wendy Xeno's wonderful Gilmour |
 |
| Beyond one of the doors at Gilmour |
 |
| Resting my heels in pastoral Mirrormere |
 |
| Contemplating surrealism at The Path (Lea2) |
 |
| D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? |
 |
| Warned to choose wisely, I made the worst choice possible. Pink! |
Yolande Geoffrion appears to have given up her scribblings, sparing us her sentimental nonsense about the Comedie Italienne. If you wish to know the truth they were the most mendacious and quarrelsome band of foreigners ever to appear in Paris, vain in their estimation of their miserable talents and ridiculous in whichever society they appeared. They were clowns, exaggerated, perhaps deranged, and little loved by their audience. The Hotel de Bourgogne where they played was a magnet that transfixed the Parisian fool’s morbid fascination for the public display of powdered tarts and libertine asses, enjoyed primarily by effete dandies, cardsharps, poets and whores.
Everything bad about Ms Geoffrion she learned from the Italians, no doubt to the great dismay of her English-born bouquiniste uncle and to the shame of her parents so recently laid in their graves. The scoundrels M. Riccoboni and M. Biancolleli. were delighted to have so rapt and mutable a student. She learned to invent tales, to masquerade convincingly as a young man, to sing disreputable verse and to dance so delicately that she soon had young ladies swooning when she appeared as Radamus in La Perniad. For many years she attended the famous salon of Madame d'Épinay as the Comte de Ramon, and was a favorite in polite society until exposed for what she was.
Even her name is an affectation, for there is nothing young about Ms Geoffrion. She seems to have left us without compunction, but that does not surprise me, for she was ever the slothful apprentice, slinking away whenever she was out of sorts. Everyone pretends not to know where she has vanished (though I disbelieve M. Antfarm), I may yet shed some light on whence she came.
And though she might have earned my enmity and scorn for her general deceit, to which even I, Theophrastus Erasmus Fluxus, doctor of philosophy and divers arts, fell victim when I met her in 1741, you will see I shall relate her sad tale without the opprobrium her actions deserve, trusting in the reader’s sense of propriety and outrage to be her just and proper reward. I am aware she has spread tales against my reputation; these do not deserve so much as a sneeze in reply. My character and eminence are unassailable. But I would render an honest, factual account of her misadventures, that you, gentle reader, may be cured of Illusion and returned to the light of Truth and Reason.
I was not a young man then, though not as ancient as I am now, when several drunken companions dragged me to the Comedie Italienne against my protests. I did not by habit waste time listening to the fantastic plots and ridiculous characters of Moliere or Marivaux, who outdid each other making up ever more incredible farces that France has ever seen, insulting the intelligence of the Parisian audiences in abominable verse. Of the and clownish Italians. But as I say, I was pressed into attendance, for my fellows, robbed of their judgment by gallons of Burgundy, insisted that as an educated and discerning man I must come with them to pay homage to “la Columbine Divine.” From their description, she was the very epitome of French wit and dignity bravely holding her own against all manner of foreign intrigue, and God’s answer to every man’s desire. I replied with my own wit and dignity, “I know little about the desires of men like you, and am surely ignorant of any foreign intrigue. Kindly excuse me from your sober company,” but they laughed and repeated my words to each other, and it seemed to give them pleasure to do so in a bizarre accent that bore no resemblance to the way I spoke French, and to lock their arms around mine, one to each side, and to fairly lift me off my feet and out the door. Clearly they desired my companionship and perhaps wished to learn what I thought of their inane theatre. I submitted to their wishes for a block or two, but when I tried to slip away they redoubled their grip on me.
M. de Troy (for that was the name of my companion to my right) told me how the grandmother of our present Columbine had also played the role, as had her mother Eularia, who was married to the famous Harlequin Dominique. “Three generations of coquette in a figure that needs no corset,” he crowed in my ear, “she will make a little man of you, Fluxus!”
M. Auxelle (my left side companion) said, “Yes, she could teach you something you can’t learn in your books, Herr Doctor.”
The hôtel Bourgogne was a massive, gloomy building, the survivor of several fires and riots. The narrow rue Mauconseil was mobbed with carriages, horses, vain men and women of all stations, hawkers and urchins, the ever-importunate beggars hobbling on crutches, soldiers in justaucorps and bandeliers. We pushed through this crowd and into the steaming interior and found our box just as the house lights were being extinguished. Before we plunged into darkness I made out a seething crowd in the narrow parterre below, none who would have paid more than fifteen sous, overdressed couples in the opposite boxes above them, and everywhere the acrid smell of humanity mixed with the burning fat of the footcandles.
The heavy curtains were drawn apart with difficulty on a stage made brilliant by the light of hundreds of tapers that smoked and sputtered, threatening ever to plunge the entire building into an inferno. Looking back at the press of bodies that continued to surge up the narrow stairway we had just ascended, I despaired of ever escaping alive, and gave myself up to what I fully expected to be my last mortal pleasure, now appearing on the boards.
I kept the figurine that the stranger in the cemetery had given me and studied it with enormous interest for as I have said it was an exquisitely carved and detailed model of a male figure as bare of clothing as any greek sculpture in a prince's antiquities collec- tion, and there were parts on that tiny body that I had never yet seen except on a child. When I first looked at it, it was reclining in a pose like that of the dying Gaul, head bowed and sub- missive, but later I found that I must have been mistaken and discovered the figure was in fact standing in a proud attitude. I placed it on the sill of my bedroom window that first night and fell asleep watching his silhouette, a seven inch shadow against the dull glimmer of the street lamps. But the following morning, to my utter astonishment, it had taken a seated aspect, and indeed every time I looked at it after the passage of a period of time, the figure was differently posed, now marching, now prone, now seated, now bending over and plucking an invisible harvest, now reaching for the sky. Never once did it repeat a pose and I kept it for more than a decade. I never once saw it move, and I tried to twist and bend its brazen limbs in my childish fingers without any effect. It was a solid compact of metal, immoveable and lifeless, but I came to think of it as alive, with a soul or a spirit imprisoned in metal as long as I beheld him, but free to clamber and run and dance in his immodest fashion whenever my eyes were turned or my attention elsewhere. I dared not show this miracle to my uncle or Madame Boucher, or even to Marie-Thérèse or any other soul, convinced they would take it from me because of his nakedness, and the lustful leer that looked out of his miniature visage. He was a disturbing guest, but my guest nonetheless, and I wondered about the strange man who had given him to me, and the meaning of it.
It occured to me then that the world is a changeable and variable place, its houses and roads and churches and bridges are in constant, fluid motion, but that we are deceived by their form and fail to see they are different each moment, like the waters of the Seine flowing endlessly within its banks beneath the Pont Neuf. So I began to observe the people around me, and paid regard to their variable humours and mercurial dispositions, of Marie-Thérèse particularly, as I came to know her so well, who seemed a different person from month to month, with new interests and passions each season. And with the help of that mute, metallic and miniature teacher, I began to notice the changes to my own person and body, and fancied that the Yolande of yesterday was not the Yolande of today, and these transformations, profound as they were becoming, were nonetheless unnoticeable from day to day as long as my attention slept.
If this creature of metal were alive, it never gave any indication that he could see or hear me, though I often addressed him in private and confessed to him my most secret thoughts and reflections upon the day's events. He lived in my pocket, or at my windowsill, or upon a shelf behind a book when, as I attained maturity, he grew increasingly lewd and priapic, and I could not bear to look at him. He seemed less a guest and more an emblem of my own sinful desire and guilty soul or partner to wicked thoughts that sometimes found their way into my foolish head. Much later I learned what he was and the evil he did me, but that tale must wait until I have recounted more of the man from whom I had him.
In the week after M. Panard and M. Fagan opened La Sylphide Supposee at the Théâtre de la Foire, my uncle Adraste took me back to the Théâtre Italien to begin my apprenticeship as an actress. M. Biancoleli's gamble with the farce at the Saint Laurent Fair paid back its principal with interest, for La Sylphide played thirty-four performances in the hôtel Bourgogne and became a staple in the repertoire of la Comedie Italienne. The old theatre was by now a familiar place to me, for Marie-Thérèse and I had become fast friends over the summer and together we explored its many mysterious corners and abandoned rooms, used to store the properties of productions long forgotten, though I never persuaded her ever to return to the stairway that led up to its terrifying tower.
We spent our days learning the four types of battemens, nine types of pas de bourrée, balloté, fouetté, caprioles and entrechats and the lazzi or comic routines of the repertoire. It was exhausting work but we were well fed and grew strong and supple. Our fair instructrice was the long-limbed and beautiful Mademoiselle Belmont who wafted over the stage floor in a cloud of lace and ribbon but could not sing in tune to save her life. She was tormented by jealous lovers and could never pick between them. She cried often. We were taught pantomime by our old Arlequin, M. Vicentini, who went by his stage name of Thomassin. His daughter Sidonie and son Joachim were about my age and studied at my side. Sidonie had an older sister Catine who had debuted earlier in the year. I learned to sing and declaim, and learned to speak Italian passably well, though all the players spoke French well. Our days were long and so I returned at night to my uncle's bookstore too tired to read, except on Sundays when I would take a little volume of poetry with me to browse in the cemetery after mass. Madame Riccoboni and her son returned from Italy the next year and returned to the stage with much celebration. I grew up among those happy, mad, passionate men and women, who wore down my reclusive and morbid solitary nature with their brilliant and implacable friendliness.
As I grew more graceful in movement and confident in conversation, I left my old hiding holes behind the bookshelves and under the tables of my uncle's shop for more companionable pleasures, walking with friends in the parks and joining my uncle in his coffeehouse meetings with other artists and performers. Before long I had a small circle of admirers of my own, solicitous young men whose names I no longer remember, whom I would meet secretly to exchange notes. They were every one a poet, dedicating their souls to Amor and their pens to Aphrodite and Isis in hope of inducting me into eleusinian mysteries. I would have been conquered if I were not already familiar with the sources of those 'original' lyrics, for they plagiarized the English mercilessly and I felt more pity than love for their small talents. But I could smile prettily and dance around them and confound them by replying in Tuscan. I don't believe I broke anyone's heart, because we were only actresses and they were knaves apprenticed to rakes and scoundrels. But we enjoyed our games of glances and chaste caresses and doubtful promises of fidelity, of being rêves poursuivis, pursued dreams, flowers of youth and beauty, the image of every brilliant quality and grace. We sublimated into sylphides ourselves, volatile spirits without substance or gravity, reflecting into the arms and vanities of the youths who loved us. We stole their affections and collected their laughter. We pirouetted mercilessly at the centres of their revolving loyalty, radiant suns that warmed their smiling lips across an abyss of nonchalance and the unapproachable stage. We banished tears and misery to the utter depths of the outside world, that place of streets and markets and flesh and grime, to inhabit the enchanted world beneath the chandeliers, its palaces and breathing gods, its banquets and musicians and everlasting applause. We were actresses of the Italian Comedy and for a magical age we ruled the world.
With one hand in his and the other around the little figurine in my pocket, I followed my uncle Adraste as he rushed from the cemetery directly to the Fair of Saint Laurent, the Theatre de la Foire, where the satire of La Sylphide had been mounted by our competitors with much success. A crowd had already gathered, and he hoisted me upon his shoulders to get a better view of the stage erected on the balcony against a false facade above us.
"They're already attracting bigger crowds than Monsieur Biancolleli," said a man in an extravagantly floppy straw hat who had edged over in our direction. He lifted one side of the brim and smiled up at me. "Buongiorno, Principessa Yolande Rat-Catcher."
I cried out with delight.
"Shh, you must not give me away, or I shall have to have to go on stage and apologize for my own rhymes."
"You can't possibly be worried," said my uncle, "they can't be as good as yours."
"Do I look worried?" he asked in a quaking voice, "But you know, Panard's songs are memorable, and Fagan writes remarkable French dialogue for an Irishman."
"Not Charles-François Panard, that merry drunkard..."
"Ah, I see you know him too! I say, Adraste, you keep the very best company!"
"He bought an edition of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera from me last month."
"Excellent! You will join us afterward, then, for dinner." Monsieur Biancolelli smacked his lips at me.
"But are you not incognito?"
"Good God, not from Panard! From the Riccoboni's!"
A horn fanfare announced the beginning of the performance, in the same manner as our own musicians in the Theatre Italien, but then died away on a flat note. The horn player stood up, raised his instrument over his head, reached in the bell and extracted an enormous piece of lady's underwear, then bowed to the delighted audience before tossing it to a young lady who appeared on the balcony. She caught it neatly, inspected it carefully, then declaimed,
We present our satire with honest intentions,
Aiming to delight with emulated inventions,
For it takes rare talent to be the original creator
Of verses so bad, even parody's a hurdle
When your model's on stage in that marginal theatre
run by the italienne who fits in this girdle.
"Monsieur Biancolelli, it's scandalous! She's insulting your verses!"
"Shh, I know, I know; I wrote her lines myself. And helped to fund the production."
My uncle and I burst out laughing.
"You know, I have probably made a terrible mistake. But it's hard not to write satire, and the more they laugh here, the more they'll want to come in and see what's been parodied. Besides, Panard needs the money."
The performance was an utter farce, with an obese sylph who made the entire balcony shudder, and the gnomide a dwarf made up as an old woman; Eraste a lecher and Arlequin a drunkard. The palace of the Sylphides was a tavern, and Clarice, the neglected fiancee of besotted Eraste, made an appearance as a laundress, boxed her sylph-sotted betrothed about the ears, then pulled him off stage to the applause of the audience. But the verses were very funny, and we laughed without stop, who would have cried if we didn't know M. Biancolelli had had his hand in it.
We dined that night al fresco at a guinguette, a wine shop just on the edge of the city, with stout Monsieur Panard and wiry Fagan, his collaborator, and with Monsieur Biancolelli, a few unmarried members of the company de la foire, and one or two other performers of the Theatre Italien.
"Before Riccoboni won the Hotel Borgogne, we performed with you in the fairs, but a permanent home has our levity undone, and our rhyme no longer compares. " said M. Biancolelli as a toast.
M. Panard stood up to reply, . "my friends, all things in this world shall pass; this is a law even heaven holds dear. If you doubt it now just watch my glass, for the wine it holds shall soon disappear." And he held up the most enormous wineglass of eau-du-vie, bowed to us and drained it with pleasure.
Fagan took his turn, raised his glass and addressed M. Biancolelli gravely. "Of rhyming levity you do us accuse, to some we seem to play the buffoons, but the lightest humour can do more than amuse, making ridiculous the very thing it lampoons."
The entire table gave a long, pleasurable groan at this opening volley, for it announced the continuation of la guerre des vers, which had been waged between the members of the two companies for decades. M. Biancolelli added, "If Fagan wears a sullen air, and Panard never learned to pout, 'twas only because Fagan was spare, or because Panard was stout."
They went on like this all night, back and forth, as the wine shop filled with customers attracted by the impromptu jousting, and the delighted inn-keeper bustling around refilling jugs and glasses, turning any horizontal surface he and his wife could find into a table. Merchants and students, tradesmen and apprentices were all seated together, and a gentle couple who would not identify themselves and whose livery we did not recognize, also took part, adding a couplet or two of their own. Everyone was in the highest, most excitable spirits, interrupting each other with laughter and impertinent remarks.
I wandered about the tables and chairs, content to quietly study everyone who had gathered under the stars, until I caught sight of an old man in a three-tailed wig I thought I recognized, seated at the very edge of the company where the warm lantern light and laughter faded into the cold night air, and who seemed to watch me with glittering eyes. I fled back into the crowd, that was now singing le chevalier du Guet, and clung to my uncle, then fell asleep in his arms.
