MADAME RISTORI AS MARIE ANTOINETTE.
()NE of the most tragical figures in history is Marie Antoinette. Her life traversed the whole range of human emotion and all the possibilities of contrast ; around the unpitied loneliness of its close thronged every condition of human desola- tion. The dramatist who should set her story on the stage with a proximate approach to the truth of it would be a great dramatist, and the actress who should show us anything like our own conception of one of the most supremely wretched women whom death ever released would be a great actress. Signor Giacometti has not quite done the one, but Madame Ristori does the other, sustaining the incomparably arduous part of Marie Antoinette with grandeur, intensity, and naturalness which it is no exaggera- tion to call awful. The play is a series of tableaux, in which the leading incidents of the history of Louis XV L and Marie Antoinette are represented, with some minor inaccuracies, but none which overpass fair dramatic licence, and with a close adherence to the characteristics of the King and Queen. Much of the dialogue is very good indeed, but one ought strictly to avoid glancing at the wonderful nonsense which calls itself the English version, and is printed in the double columns of the book of the play, for the least touch of the ludicrous is treason to the occasion, and one must laugh if one looks. The prologue produces a slight - sense of disappointment with Madame Ristori, who neither looks nor acts well as the frivolous young Queen, bent on outraging public opinion and infringing etiquette by performing the part of Rosina in Beaumarchais' famous comedy. Her dress, very rich and quite accurate, is unbecoming, and badly put on ; her movements are too quick and too ponderously petulant, her sentences are spoken too rapidly, and her manner lacks the sim- plicity which is so striking afterwards. She is not the Marie Antoinette of the Trianon, the playfellow of the Count d'Artois, the prettily despotic, pleasure-loving young woman, rather dis- dainful of the heavy good-sense of Louis ; rashly proud of her unhappy triumph over his scruples, an easy victim to flattery, credulous of friendship. She has not invested herself with this phase of the Queen's life, and therefore she fails to make us believe in it, to carry us back to the Trianon days, which existed as truly as the days of the Tuileries, the Temple, and the Conciergerie. Only in the scene of her triumph, when she has persuaded the King to permit her to play Rosins, and won his promise to look in at the performance ; when she boasts of her fatal success, declares that her toilette will be called "monstrous," and her supper party an "orgy," and goes out, exclaiming, " Siamo i commedianti del Re !" does she come up to our expectations. But from that moment, she never falls below them ; and her power, her ease, her spontaneity grow upon her audience with every scene, fixing them with a spell. In the first act, which represents the events of the 5th October, the Queen is seen under a totally different aspect ; she is the ex- quisitely tender mother, gentle, sweet, mourning for her eldest- born, and cherishing the children who remain with a sorrow- ful, proud, foreboding love ; she is the wife, conscious of imprudence, who has learned to love and reverence the hus- band whom her waywardness has harmed. How simple, how dignified, how profoundly womanly she is, as she talks to her children and to Madame Campan, recalling the absent friends, her beloved Marie de Lamballe especially ; and then to Madame Elizabeth, recurring to the evil omens of her early days in France, and giving utterance to her sense of doom ! Her mind is straying to the grief of the past, to the dread of the future ; and rouses itself with effort to the comprehension of the King's fears about the effect on the popular mind of the famous supper to the Royal Guard. But once roused, she is again the courageous, disdainful, angry Queen, quoting her mother, and full of bitter hate against the re- bellious people, until one dubious phrase of Louis' strikes home to the wife's heart, and she says, with extraordinary pathos :—" Voi- mi credete dunque cib che mi credono tutti—PAustriaca I" The effect of this phrase is one of her finest, the sense of isolation in it is perfectly conveyed, and instantly her mind reverts to the presentiment hanging over her all day ; increased by the arrival of Malesherbes, the mention of Philippe d'Orleans, and the entrance of the Count de Provence. All through the ensuing scenes of this act, which are full of movement, her by-play is very good, and when she is speaking her manne'r, voice, and gestures are wonderfully fine. She is admirably supported by the gentlemen who respectively play the King and La Fayette, and the stage business is perfect. The distant noise of the gathering multitude approaching Versailles, the first sounds breaking on the ears of the King and Queen, the rising confusion inside the palace, answering to the angry swell outside, the rapid speech, the crowding in of the officers and servants, the reports from without, the incessant cry of the Queen, "My children ! my children !" their hurried entrance, the rush of the mother to gather them in her arms ; the King's irreso- lution, the entreaties of his officers that he will give them orders ; the tumult, the howling of the unseen mob, the fainting Dauphin, Madame Elizabeth's agonised entreaties to the King to fly, and the sudden appearance of La Fayette ; all these rouse the audience to an almost painful pitch of excitement. When Marie Antoinette rushes with La Fayette to the balcony, and shows herself to the people, her son in her arms, and the tricolor sash of the General wound around her neck, the grandeur of the actress is fully re- vealed. Her face is inspired, her figure dilated with a proud and royal courage, her arms hold forth the child of France with an indescribable strength and majesty in the action, contrasting splendidly with the terror of the trembling crowd within the room, appalled at the daring of La Fayette, and the response of the Queen.
This is the last touch of her triumph, and the first revelation of her magnificent courage, to be fully developed throughout all the lengthened and various agonies of endurance, to the lonely end. To describe duly Madame Ristori's acting throughout would be to follow every look, gesture, and sentence. It is, of course, profoundly studied, and yet it bears no trace of study, and only once does it fall into staginess, through an ad- herence to conventionality unworthy of her, and from which we hope she will depart. It is at the end of the third act, when Santerre, taking the royal family to the National Assembly, carries the Dauphin in his arms, and the Queen drags herself along behind him, holding the child's hand over his shoulder. This is all too slow, and draws perilously near the absurd. When Santerre lifts up the Dauphin, who screams out "Mamma, mamma!" and he says, "Don't fear, Madam, nobody will dare to touch him in Santerre's charge ; " the act-drop should come down ; after that the measured exit is an unmeaning strut. But many beauti- ful effects have preceded that one blemish ; the strife in the heart of the Queen, the growing agony of the wife and mother, the brief hope of escape, the gleam of joy when Marie de Lamballe returns, succeeded by the unselfish fear for her friend's safety, the distrust and impatience with La Fayette, the revolt of the proud heart against the iron rule of the Revolution, the hor- rible sense that she is an accursed and hated creature, the utter surrender for her children's sake. We do not think any- thing much finer can have been seen On any stage than Madame Ristori's acting in Act Ill., scene XI., when the mob invade the Tuileries. As the infuriated women rush into the room, and the royal group shrink back into the embrasure of the window, the Queen seizes the Princess de Lamballe, who has placed herself before her, and with a movement of extraordinary quickness and strength, literally flings her back into a place of safety. It is as quick as thought, but it is never to be forgotten, any more than the gesture with which as Mary Stuart she wipes the waiting-woman's eyes with her fingers, when she begs that she may come with her to the scaffold, with that sweet, pleading, assuring "non piangera " that brings tears to every eye. The appeal of the fallen Queen of France to the women, as she kneels before them in advance of the Court group, is wonderfully fine in language and expression, and the sonorous and soft Italian tongue renders it doubly effective. It is impos- sible to think of it as a speech learned by heart ; it flows, it rashes, it pours over her trembling lips, and every line of the face is as eloquent. In the dreadful scene of the parting between Louis and his family, Madame Ristori achieves the utmost perfection of the expression of suffering ; the impossibility of bearing it, and the abject helplessness of the sufferer, the bewildered notion that it cannot be, and yet the knowleige effacing every other conscious- ness that it is the spasmodic strength, the prostration, the physical anguish defying control, the wormlike writhing, the sudden stricken stillness, the inarticulate moaning, the half-crazy doubt, and the frantic force of conviction ; the wailing, the wild shivering sob, the dragging weariness, and yet the horrid torturing conscious- ness of the remorseless flight of time. When she falls down on her husband's breast, and then, calling herself accursed, sinks on her knees ; when she solemnly blesses him for his love, his faith, his forbearance ; when she holds herself apart for a few moments consecrated to his children, shrinking against the wall ; when she drags herself at his knees, clutching him with the convulsive strength of unbearable agony ; when she dashes herself against the door which has closed on him ; when she kneels, in tumbled feeble- ness, with her children, during the time of his execution, and the girl prays aloud, but she can only gasp, " Dio, Dio mio, misericordia I" when she receives his last words from Malesherbes, and in the supremely horrible scene of the struggle with Simon when the Dauphin is torn from her, and she is left, stricken into the tem- porary fatuity of despair, clasped in her daughter's arms, with fixed eyes, stony limbs, and dropped jaw, the grand, horrid truth is almost too much to bear. Her tigress spring upon Simon, the bound from the exhaustion of sorrow to the mad, ferocious rage of maternal love, the swift succeeding helpless obedience, that she may win a little mercy for the child, are quite agonising. Probably nothing like them has been seen since the prison chamber in the Temple saw them, if it did see them, in reality. The scene in the Conciergerie is nothing to that scene, as indeed it was not in the true tragedy, though it combined the woe of the mother going to her death in ignorance of her children's fate, and the terror of the woman's absolute and unpitied loneliness. No criminal ever died so totally alone as did the Daughter of the Cmsars ; there was companionship in the huddling of the condemned, in the " batches " of the tumbrils,—but for her only the studied brutality of intrusion up to the moment which delivered her to the raving execration of the mob; the last sound to reach her ears an indecency, the last incident of her prison life an outrage. In the epilogue Madame Ristori's acting is quite as fine as in the five acts of the drama, and she looks the part to perfection. There is one great touch in the scene where she is brutally told of her condemnation ; it is the slightest step Torward, and a slow, gradual smile. The history of the broken heart, and the coming of the healer is there. Just at the last, the action is a little too slow ; after she has shrunk from Simon's touch, as she staggers under the pain of the cord with which Samson has tied her hands—offered meekly, after an instant's struggle with her- self—it would be better if she did not linger so much in crossing the stage, and if she did not turn that unquelled haughty gaze upon the wretches who are gloating over her misery. To pass out as if she saw them not, neither hurrying nor pausing, with the look which comes into her face when she says, "0 Luigi, oh, i raid figli !" unchanged, would be more noble and more true.
The piece is beautifully put upon the stage ; all the accessories are accurate, and in perfect taste. The general acting is very creditable, and the little girl who plays the Dauphin is remarkably clever. There is the making of a fine actress in the child, who never ceases to act her part, whose little face is never vacant nor absent, who listens and moves with a constant remembrance and realisation of her assumed character, very rare among grown-up actors.
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