Another very attractive household was the one near the Observatory, where Reichardt was entertained to dinner one evening and was delighted to find the patriarchal customs of pre-Revolution days still observed.
Here children and parents addressed one another by 'thee' and c thou*. A pretty girl of fifteen, not above taking a "canard' from her father's cup when coffee was served, told the visitor that he had once taken her to the theatre, but disguised as a boy in her brother's clothes, to save the expense of a frock. As for her mother, although a Parisian, she had never been to the Opera, but she loved music all the same, and proved it by singing a little song over the dessert. Here was the kindly gaiety of the old days.
It was aH the more suited to the occasion, in that the Carnival had just begun. An excellent opportunity to introduce their guest to the game of beignets. In the lovely golden fritters being passed round, some pieces of playing cards had been slipped under the slices of apple. Every time one of the guests pretended to choke there was a shout of 'Caught!' and everybody laughed, Reichardt, who evidently liked simple jests, laughed like the rest, grateful for the excellent dinner he had just been given; he had counted no less than sixteen dishes, washed down with generous wine.
Anybody who might be surprised to see people in such modest circumstances offering such a copious bill of fare, would only have to look at the account-books of the housewives of the First Empire, to see that food was ridiculously cheap at that time. Eight pounds of boiling beef cost about five francs; two pounds of ham, two fifty. For twenty sous one could pluck a partridge; for twice that sum, roast a chicken or a duck. A pound of butter cost twenty-eight sous, a quarter of ordinary eggs twenty-two. If you liked oysters you could get ten dozen at the market for four francs. And heavy drinkers were fortunate in France, for claret cost them twelve sous and ordinary brandy three francs.
The only produce costing a little more seems to have been that imported from a distance, such as oil and oranges from the Midi. The continental blockade was to prove a far more important factor in the increase in market prices. All colonial products,, such as rum, coffee, chocolate, would suddenly go up, and sugar, that unfortunate sugar that people found it so difficult to do without, was to become one of the heaviest expenses for small purses.
So as not to waste it, some families had recourse to a most ingenious plan. From the ceiling of the room where they drank their coffee they hung a piece of sugar at the end of a string., and each person had the right to dip it in their cup for a moment before passing it on to a neighbour.
A very old lady we knew in our childhood told us she had seen this sort of egalitarian sugaring being practised when she herself was very young. The duration of each dip was carefully checked, with no mercy shown to the egoist who exceeded the legitimate time and had to be called to order by his neighbours.
And our venerable friend could still hear the reprimand addressed to her by a cross-grained uncle. 'Zenaide, I kept the piece for twenty seconds less than you. That sort of delicacy is the sign of good breeding and true family spirit/
CHAPTER XI. THEATRE AUDIENCES
Fondness for the theatre - Time of performances - The golden age of gate-crashers - Actors and managers —Pit audiences — The claque — Miles George and Duchesnois - The origin of the crochet — Tragedy and its applications — A drama at Gros-bois - Whims of the censorship
WE ARE fond of the theatre today, but to nothing like the same degree as under the First Empire. With many of our contemporaries this ancient passion has dwindled to a mild, intermittent temptation — with women when they have a dress to show off, with men when they have been given complimentary tickets.
It was otherwise in the days of Talma and Mile George. The theatre was then considered by all classes of society as the essential element of their daily pleasures. Not a bourgeois, not a shop assistant, not a student but could be reduced to tears by a drama of Pixerecourt's, or to helpless laughter by some farrago of nonsense by Brunet.
The reason for this concentration of evening amusement behind the footlights is not far to seek. We have only to picture Paris to ourselves as it was around 1800: a Paris without a cinema, without a music-hall, and with cafes which, in spite of their reputation, would remind us today of provincial pubs. Picture this city of feeble lanterns, lugubrious after nightfall, and ask yourself where our great-grandfathers could have found a little liveliness, noise and light except at the theatre.
There was usually one at their door, offering every attraction— convenient hour of opening, cheap seats within the reach of every purse, frequent change of programme.
It was towards the end of the afternoon, when the family dinner had been dispatched, that the curtain went up everywhere. Six o'clock was still the usual hour towards 1800. Later on there was a tendency to delay the three hammer-strokes at some of the theatres, notably at the Comedie-Frangaise, where the signal was not given till seven.
But a more radical reform attempted by Devisrnes, the manager of the Opera, met with no success. The rash man had conceived the extraordinary idea of waiting till nine o'clock to open his doors, which he announced in a style inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
'Audiences and artists', he wrote, 'will thus have time to dine at their ease with their friends, to visit walks and gardens and admire the bewitching sex whose grace and elegant dress contribute to the ornament of these places. After breathing this pure air they will take their seats at the Opera, which will not open its spectacle until Nature has closed her own/
This romantic effusion aroused universal mirth, and Geoffroy, in his article in the Debats, dealt it a shrewd blow. 'When it granted you protection, Monsieur, the Government had no intention of sheltering you from censure, or even ridicule/ The subject was dropped, and the Opera remained faithful to its old habits.
It was also ordained by the Central Bureau of Police that all performances should end more or less at the same time. The curtain must be rung down everywhere towards half-past nine, to make the journey home through the dark streets sss troublesome. A few theatres only, with very full bills, managed after a time to have the curfew delayed: the Ambigu, for example, with its interminable dramas in which murder was committed fifteen to twenty times every night. Steeled by so many emotions, the audience would be able to return to their homes without dread of nocturnal attack.
As far as the practical life of the theatre was concerned, many customs under the Empire were much the same as those of today. Multi-coloured bills announced the plays to be given, but instead of being pasted on Morris pillars they were stuck up at street corners, on sixty-seven specially reserved sites familiar to all theatre-goers.
Then as now, ticket-sellers plied a shameless trade outside the box-office. In 1802 the unfortunate Reichardt complained of having been robbed, near the Frangais, by 'a sort of commissionaire, fairly well dressed', who sold him tickets at three times their original price.
As in our day, too, the theatres took a day off at intervals, but the official ones had not yet formed the habit of long
holidays; they merely allowed themselves a short respite when the weather was too hot. The posters then referred prettily to the 'fineness of the season'.