A Dramatic Funeral

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Title:     A Dramatic Funeral
Author: Francois Coppee [More Titles by Coppee]

For twenty-five years he had played the role of the villain at the Boulevard du Crime,[A] and his harsh voice, his nose like an eagle's beak, his eye with its savage glitter, had made him a good player of such parts. For twenty-five years, dressed in the cloak and encircled by the fawn-colored leather belt of Mordaunt, he had retreated with the step of a wounded scorpion before the sword of D'Artagnan; draped in the dirty Jewish gown of Rodin, he had rubbed his dry hands together, muttering the terrible "Patience, patience!" and, curled on the chair of the Duc d'Este, he had said to Lucretia Borgia, with a sufficiently infernal glance, "Take care and make no mistake. The flagon of gold, madame." When, preceded by a tremolo, he made his entry in the scene, the third gallery trembled, and a sigh of relief greeted the moment when the first walking gentleman at last said to him: "Between us two, now," and immolated him for the grand triumph of virtue.

[Footnote A: A nickname given to the Boulevard du Temple, on account of the numerous melodramatic theatres situated there.]

But this sort of success, which is only betrayed by murmurs of horror, is not of the kind to make a dramatic career seductive; and besides the old actor had always hidden in a corner of his heart the bucolic ideal which is in the heart of almost all artists. He sighed for an old age of leisure, and the comfortable dignity of a retired shopkeeper; the house in the country, where he could live with his family, with melons, under an arbor; cakes and wine in the winter evenings; his daughter a scholar in a convent; his son in the uniform of the Polytechnique; and the cross of the Legion.

Now, when we had occasion to know him, he had already nearly realized his dreams.

After the failure of the theatre where he had been for a long time engaged, some capitalists had thought of him to put the enterprise on its feet again. With his systematic habits, his good sense, his thorough and practical knowledge of the business, and a sufficiently correct literary instinct, he became an excellent manager. He was the owner of stocks and a villa at Montmorency; his son was a student at Sainte-Barbe, and his daughter had just come out of Les Oiseaux; and if the malice of small newspapers had retarded his nomination in the Legion of Honor by recalling every year, about the first of January, his old ranting on the stage, when he played formerly the villains' parts, he could yet hope that it would not be long before the red ribbon would flourish in his button-hole. He had still preserved some of the habits of a strolling player, such as being very familiar with everybody, and dyeing his mustaches; but as he was, on the whole, good, honest, and serviceable, he conquered the esteem and friendship of those with whom he came in contact.

So it was with sincere grief that the whole dramatic world learned one day the terrible sorrow which had smitten that excellent man. His daughter, a girl of seventeen, had died suddenly of brain-fever.

We knew how he adored the child; how he had brought her up in the strictest principles of family and religion, far from the theatre, something as Triboulet hid his daughter Blanche in the little house of the cul-de-sac Bucy. We understood that all the hopes and ambitions of the man rested on the head of that charming girl, who, near all the corruption of the theatre, had grown up in innocence and purity, as one sees sometimes in the scanty grass of the faubourgs a field-flower spring up by the door of a hovel.

We were among the first at the funeral, to which we had been summoned by a black-bordered billet.

A crowd of the people of the neighborhood encumbered the street before the house of the dead, attracted by the pomps of the first-class funeral ordered by the old comedian, who had preserved the taste of the _mise en scene_ even in his grief. The magnificent hearse and cumbrous mourning-coaches were already drawn up to the sidewalk, and under the door, and in the shade of the heavy fringed and silvered draperies, amid the twinkling of burning candles, between two priests reading prayers in their Prayer-books, the form of the massive coffin could be seen under its white cloth, covered with Parma violets.

As we walked among the crowd we noticed the groups formed of those who, like us, were waiting the departure of the cortege. There were almost all the actors, men and women, of Paris, who had come to pay their last respects to the daughter of their comrade. Undoubtedly nothing could be more natural; but we experienced not the less a strange sensation on seeing, around the coffin of that pure young girl who had breathed away her last breath in a prayer, the gathering of all those faces marked by the brand of the theatre.

They were all there: the stars, the comedians, the lovers, the traitors; nobody was lacking: soubrettes, duennas, coquettes, first walking ladies. Wearing a sack-coat and a felt hat on his long gray hair, the superb adventurer of all the cloak and sword dramas leaned against the shutter of a shop in his familiar attitude, and crossed his arms to show his handsome hands; while a little old fellow with the wrinkled face of a clown spoke to him briskly in the broad, harsh voice which had so often made us explode with laughter. By the side of the aged first young man, who, pinched in his scanty frock-coat, and with trousers trailing under foot, twirled in his gloved hands his locks of over-black hair, stood a great handsome fellow, beautiful as a model, who had not been able to renounce even for that day his eccentricities of costume, and strutted in a black velvet cape and the boots of an equerry. Oh, how sad, tired, and old they seemed in the gray light of that winter morning, all those pathetic heads, graceful or laughable, which we were only in the habit of seeing when transfigured by the prestige of the stage. Chins had become blue-black under too frequent shaving; hair thin and dry under the hot iron of the hair-dresser; skins rough under the injurious action of unguents and vinegar; eyes dull, burned by the glare of foot-lights--blinded, almost fixed, like those of an owl in the sunlight.

The women were especially to be pitied. Obliged by the occasion to rise at a very early hour, and not having had the time for a careful and minute toilet, they gathered in groups of four or five, chilled and shivering in their fur mantles, muffs, and triple black veils. Notwithstanding the hasty rouge and powder of the morning, they were unrecognizable, and it required an effort of imagination to find in them a memory of that sublime seraglio of the Parisian theatres, exposed every evening to the desires of several thousand men. On all of these charming types appeared the mark of weariness and age. Some ossified into faded skeletons, others grew dull with an unhealthy weight of fat; wrinkles crossed the foreheads and starred the temples; lips were livid and eyes circled with dark rings; the complexions were particularly frightful--that uniform tint, morbid and sickly, the work of rouge and grease-paints. That heavy woman, with the head and neck of a farmer's wife (one almost sees a basket on her shoulder), is the terrible and fatal queen of grand, romantic dramas; and that small blonde and pale creature, so faded under her laces, and who would have completely filled a music-teacher's carrying roll, was the artless young woman whom all the vaudevillists married at the denouement of their pieces. There were the dying glances of the lorette in the hospital, the pose of the old copyist of the Louvre, and the theatrical sneer.

Soon the cabs drove up with the functionaries connected with the administration of the theatre, in black hats and coats, with an official air of sadness; young reporters, the outflow of journalism, staring at everybody and taking notes; dramatic authors, Monday feuilletonists--in short, all of those nocturnal beings, tired and worn-out, who are properly called the actives of Paris.

The groups became more compact, and talked animatedly. Old friends found each other; they shook hands, and, in view of the circumstances, smiled cordially, while the women saluted each other through their veils.

In passing, we could catch fragments of conversation like this:

"When will the affair begin?"

"Were you at the opening of the Varietes yesterday?"

Theatrical terms were heard--"My talents," "My charms," "My physique." Some business, even, was done. A new manager was quite surrounded; an old actress organized her benefit.

Suddenly there was a movement in the crowd. The undertaker's men had just placed the coffin in the hearse, and the young girls of the Sisterhood of the Virgin, to which the dead girl had belonged, arranged themselves in two lines, in their white veils, at the sides of the funeral-car. Preceded by the master of ceremonies, in silk stockings and a wand of office in his hand, the poor father appeared on the pavement in full mourning, with a white cravat, broken down by grief and sustained by his friends.

The procession set out and came to the parish church, fortunately near.

There was a grand mass, with music which was not finished. It was too warm in the church stuffed with people, and the inattention was general. Men who recognized each other saluted with a light movement of the head; conversation was exchanged in a low voice; some young actors struck attitudes for the benefit of the women, and the pious responded to Dominus Vobiscum droned by the priest. At the elevation, from behind the altar, rang out a magnificent Pie Jesu, sung by a celebrated baritone, who had never put in his voice so much amorous languor. Outside the church-yard the small boys of the quarter stood on tiptoe, and, hanging on to the railings, pointed out the celebrities with their fingers.

The office finished, the long defile commenced; and every one went to the entrance of the church to sprinkle some drops of holy-water on the bier, and press the hand of the old actor, who, broken by grief, and having hardly strength to hold his hat, leaned against a pillar.

That was the most horrible moment.

Carried away by the habit of playing up to the situation, all these theatrical people put into the token of sympathy which they gave to their friend the character of their employment. The star advanced gravely, and with a three-quarter inclination of his head flashed out the "Look of Fate." The old tragedian with a gray beard assumed a stoical expression, and did not forget to "vibrate" in pronouncing a masculine "Courage!" The clown approached with a short, trotting step, and shaking his head until his cheeks trembled, he murmured, "My poor old fellow." And the fairy queen, with the sensibility of a sensitive female, threw herself impulsively on the neck of the unhappy father, who, with swollen face, bloodshot eyes, and hanging lip, blackened his face and his gloved hands with the dye of his mustache, diluted by tears.

And all the time, a few steps from this grotesque and sinister scene, we could see--last word of this antithesis--the white figures of the young girls of the sisterhood, kneeling on the chairs nearest the coffin of their companion, and who undoubtedly were beseeching God, in their naive and original prayers, to grant her the paradise of their dreams: a pretty paradise in the Jesuitical style, all in carved and gilded wood, and many-colored marble, where one could see at the end a tableau in a transparent light; the Virgin crowned with stars, with a serpent under her feet, while little cherubs suspended in mid-air over her head an azure streamer flaming with these words: "_Ecce Regina Angelorum._"

[The end]
Francois Coppee's short story: A Dramatic Funeral

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