Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud (Being secret letters from a gentleman at Paris to a nobleman in London) - Volume 6

Excerpt

PARIS, September, 1805.

My LORD:—I was lately invited to a tea-party by one of our rich upstarts, who, from a scavenger, is, by the Revolution and by Bonaparte, transformed into a Legislator, Commander of the Legion of Honour, and possessor of wealth amounting to eighteen millions of livres. In this house I saw for the first time the famous Madame Chevalier, the mistress, and the indirect cause of the untimely end, of the unfortunate Paul the First. She is very short, fat, and coarse. I do not know whether prejudice, from what I have heard of her vile, greedy, and immoral character, influenced my feelings, but she appeared to me a most artful, vain, and disagreeable woman. She looked to be about thirty-six years of age; and though she might when younger have been well made, it is impossible that she could ever have been handsome. The features of her face are far from being regular. Her mouth is large, her eyes hollow, and her nose short. Her language is that of brothels, and her manners correspond with her expressions. She is the daughter of a workman at a silk manufactory at Lyons; she ceased to be a maid before she had attained the age of a woman, and lived in a brothel in her native city, kept by a Madame Thibault, where her husband first became acquainted with her. She then had a tolerably good voice, was young and insinuating, and he introduced her on the same stage where he was one of the inferior dancers. Here in a short time she improved so much, that she was engaged as a supernumerary; her salary in France as an actress was, however, never above twelve hundred livres in the year—which was four hundred livres more than her husband received.

He, with several other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers, quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs; and instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and regenerate his nation. His name is found in the annals of the crimes perpetrated at Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot d'Herbois, and other wicked offsprings of rebellion. With all other terrorists, he was imprisoned for some time after the death of Robespierre; as soon as restored to liberty, he set out with his wife for Hamburg, where some amateurs had constructed a French theatre.

It was in the autumn of 1795 when Madame Chevalier was first heard of in the North of Europe, where her arrival occasioned a kind of theatrical war between the French, American, and Hamburg Jacobins on one side, and the English and emigrant loyalists on the other. Having no money to continue her pretended journey to Sweden, she asked the manager of the French theatre at Hamburg to allow her a benefit, and permission to play on that night. She selected, of course, a part in which she could appear to the most advantage, and was deservedly applauded. The very next evening the Jacobin cabal called the manager upon the stage, and insisted that Madame Chevalier should be given a regular engagement. He replied that no place suitable to her talents was vacant, and that it would be ungenerous to turn away for her sake another actress with whom the public had hitherto declared their satisfaction....