Paris in the Twentieth Century (19 page)

So
it was to the Grand Entrepôt, lawfully recognized as an establishment of
public utility, that Michel Dufrénoy made his way, a letter of recommendation
in his hand.

The
company's offices were located in the Rue Neuve-Palestro and occupied an old,
unused barracks. Michel was shown into the Director's office. The Director
himself was an extremely serious man, quite imbued with the importance of his
functions; he never laughed or even smiled at the liveliest repartee of his
vaudevilles; hence he was said to be quite bombproof; his employees reproached
him for his somewhat military leadership; but he had so many people to deal
with! comic authors, tragic authors, vaudevillians, librettists, not to
mention the two hundred workers in the copying office, and the legion of
members of the claque.

For
the administration also furnished claques to the theaters, according to the
nature of the plays performed; the most learned experts had instructed these
carefully disciplined employees in the delicate art of applause, and they had
mastered the entire range of its nuances.

Michel
presented Quinsonnas's letter. The Director read it through and said:
"Monsieur, I am well acquainted with your protector, and I shall be
delighted to do him a favor in this regard; he mentions your literary
aptitudes. "

"Monsieur,
" the young man modestly replied, "I have as yet produced nothing.
"

"All
the better—in our eyes, that is a virtue. "

"But
I have some new ideas. "

"Of
no use, Monsieur! We are not concerned with novelty here; all personality must
be dispensed with; you will have to blend into a vast ensemble, which produces
collective works, of an average appeal. You will understand that I cannot, in
your case, depart from established rules; you must take an examination in
order to qualify for a position. "

"An
examination!"

"Yes,
a written composition. "

"Very
well, Monsieur. I am at your disposition. "

"Do
you think you are ready for the examination today?"

"Certainly.
Right now. "

The
Director gave orders, and soon Michel was installed at a desk with pen, paper,
ink, and a composition subject. He was left alone in the room.

Imagine
his astonishment! He had expected to deal with a bit of history, to summarize
some product of dramatic art, to analyze a masterpiece of the old repertoire.
How childish! His assignment was to imagine a striking effect—a curtain line,
say, in a given situation; to compose a song with a witty refrain; and to
invent a play on words that would draw a laugh!

Michel
took his courage in both hands and set to work.

For
the most part, his composition was poor and incomplete—he lacked dexterity,
what was still, in the Parisian theaters, called la patte; his curtain line
left a great deal to be desired; his refrain was too poetical for a vaudeville;
and his pun quite missed the point. Nonetheless, thanks to his protector, he
was given employment at eighteen hundred francs; since his curtain line was
the least inadequate part of his examination, he was put in the Comedy
Division.

This
remarkable organization, Le Grand Entrepôt Dramatique, consisted of five major
Divisions: (1) high and genre comedy; (2) historical and modern drama; (3)
vaudeville, strictly speaking; (4) opera and operetta; (5) reviews, pantomimes,
and official occasions.

Tragedy
had been eliminated.

Each
Division included specialized employees; their nomenclature will explain the
mechanism of this great institution, where everything was foreseen, organized,
and operated on schedule. A genre comedy or a Christmas review could be
produced within thirty- six hours.

Michel
was therefore installed in an office in the first Division. Here the talented
employees were assigned, one to Exposition, one to Denouements, another to
Exits, still another to Entrances; one man was assigned to formal rhymes, when
verse was insisted upon; another was responsible for occasional rhymes and prose,
in cases of simpler dialogue.

There
was also an administration specialty, in which Michel was expected to take
part; these highly skilled employees were required to rewrite the plays of
previous centuries, either actually copying them or somewhat altering the
characters.

It
was in this fashion that the administration had just gained an enormous success
at the Théâtre du Gymnase with
Le Demi-Monde,
ingeniously transformed; the Baroness d'Ange had become a naive and
inexperienced young woman who nearly fell into Nanjac's nets; without her
friend, Madame de Jalin (the said Nanjac's former mistress), the trick would
have been turned; moreover the episode of the
apricots,
and the
description of this world of married men whose wives were never seen, took the
house by storm.

Gabrielle
had
also been reworked, the State having been concerned to spare the feelings of
lawyers' wives in some circumstance or other; Julien was about to abandon
hearth and home for his mistress, when his wife, Gabrielle, came to him and so
vividly described the horrors of a life of infidelity that he abjured his crime
for the highest moral reasons, ultimately invoking the family pieties, in
words of plaintive address: "O mother of my family, O poet, I love
you!"

This
play, entitled
Julien,
was actually crowned by the Acad
é
mie-Fran
ç
aise.

Discovering
the secrets of this great institution, Michel felt his talents dissolve; yet he
had to earn his keep and was soon assigned a considerable task: he was to
rework
Nos Intimes
by Sardou.

The
wretch sweated blood; he saw the situation clearly between Madame Caussade and
her friends, those envious, selfish, and debauched women; he supposed that he
could replace Dr. Tholozan by a midwife, and in the rape scene Madame Maurice
could keep Madame Caussade's bell from ringing... But the denouement! The
impossible denouement! No matter how hard he tried, he would never manage to
work it out so that Madame Caussade would be killed by that famous fox! He was
obliged to give it up and confess his failure.

When
the Director learned this result, he was quite disappointed, and it was decided
try the young man in the Division of Drama; perhaps he would turn out to have
some abilities in this line. After fifteen days of employment in the Grand
Entrepôt Dramatique, Michel left the Division of Comedy for that of Drama,
which included both historical and modern plays. The former included two
sections, quite distinct from each other: one in which actual history was
transcribed into the works of good authors; the other in which history was
outrageously falsified and denatured, according to this axiom of a great
nineteenth-century playwright:
History must be raped if she is to bear a child.
And she was made to bear any number, who themselves bore no resemblance to
their mother!

The
chief specialists of historical drama were the employees assigned to curtain
lines and dramatic effects, especially those of the fourth act; they were
handed the situation roughly sketched out and managed to shine it up in no
time; also much valued in this Division was the employee assigned to the Grand
Tirade, known as the Grandes Dames Special.

Modern
Drama included plays in formal dress and those in everyday clothes, even
overalls; occasionally the two genres combined, but the administration frowned
on such mesalliances, which disturbed the employees' habits and made them far
too liable to put in a dandy's mouth the language of a day laborer. And that
would have encroached on the specialty of the argot expert.

A
certain number of employees were assigned to murders and assassinations, to
poisonings and rapes; one of the latter was unrivaled for getting the curtain
down at the last possible moment; a second late and the actor, if not the
actress, risked being seriously embarrassed. This expert, a good fellow
moreover, about fifty years old, father of a family, paid about twenty thousand
francs, honorable and honored, had worked variations on this one rape scene for
thirty years, with a matchless sureness of touch.

For
his first effort in this Division, Michel was assigned the complete reworking
of the drama
Amazampo, or the Discovery of Cinchona,
an
important play which had first been performed in 1827.

The
task was considerable: he had to transform the play into an essentially modern
work, an undertaking considerably hampered by the discovery of cinchona, which
rather dated matters.

The
employees assigned to this project were all at their wits' end, for the work
was in very poor condition. Its effects were so worn, its devices so stale,
and its construction so weakened by a long retirement in the stacks, that it
would have been easier to write an entirely new play; but the administration's
orders were incontrovertible: the State wanted to remind the public of this
important discovery at a period when periodic fevers were ravaging Paris.
Hence the play had to be revised to satisfy contemporary tastes.

The
employees' talent and experience prevailed: the thing was a tour de force, but
poor Michel counted for nothing in its success; he had contributed not the
smallest idea, nor was he able to exploit the situation; he manifested no
talent whatever in such matters, and he was declared incompetent.

A
report that was anything but complimentary was sent to the Director, and it was
determined, after a month of Drama, that Michel was to move down to the third
Division. "I'm good for nothing, " the young man moaned; "I have
neither imagination nor wit! But all the same, what a way to write plays!"

And
he despaired, cursing this organization and forgetting that collaboration in
the nineteenth century contained in germ the entire institution of the Grand

Entrepôt
Dramatique. Here it was merely collaboration raised to the hundredth power.

Michel
thus descended from Drama to Vaudeville. Here were collected the funniest men
in France; the clerk in charge of rhyming couplets competed with the clerk in
charge of punch lines; the section of naughty situations and of blue
wisecracks was occupied by a most agreeable young man; the Department of Puns
functioned to perfection. Moreover there was a central office of jokes, witty
repartee, and preposterous phrases; it fulfilled all the needs of the service
in all five Divisions; the administration tolerated the use of a funny line
only if it had not been used for at least eighteen months; according to
regulations, clerks incessantly ransacked the dictionary and collected all the
terms, Gallicisms, and special phrases which, diverted from their usual meaning,
produced an unexpected effect; at the company's last inventory, it reported an
accumulation of seventy- five thousand plays on words, one quarter of which
were entirely new and the rest still presentable. The former, of course, were
more expensive.

Thanks
to this economy, and this accumulation, the products of the third Division were
excellent. When Michel's lack of success in the upper divisions was learned, he
was deliberately assigned to an easy role in the confection of vaudevilles; he
was not asked to think up new ideas or to invent clever lines; he was provided
with a situation and his task was merely to develop it. His first job was a
curtain raiser for the Palais- Royal theater; the piece exploited a situation
still fresh in the theater and full of the surest effects. Sterne had already
sketched it in Chapter Seventy-three of Book Two of
Tristram Shandy,
in the
episode of Phutatorius.

The
mere title indicated the premise; the play was called
Button Up Your Trousers!

It
may readily be observed how much humor could be drawn from that piquant
position of a man who has forgotten to satisfy the most imperious requirement
of masculine habiliment. The terrors of his friend introducing him into a
salon of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the embarrassment of the mistress of the
house, added to the skill of the actor who was able to play on the audience's
fear that at any moment... And on the hilarious terror of the ladies who...
Here was the substance for an enormous success!  [Author's Note:
This play was performed some months later and earned a lot
of money.
]
Yet Michel, at
grips with this highly original idea, was horror-stricken and actually ripped
to shreds the scenario which had been entrusted to him. "Bah!" he
decided, "I shall not stay another minute in this charnel house! I'd
rather starve to death!"