Queens of the French StageWilliams, H. Noel (Hugh Noel)
History
Queens of the French Stage
Williams, H. Noel (Hugh Noel)
Actresses -- France -- Biography
At length, Lady Craven left for Paris. Soon afterwards, the Margrave
announced his intention of visiting the French capital; Mlle. Clairon
decided to accompany him. In Paris, the Margrave favoured her with so
little of his company that she felt constrained to inquire the reason.
The prince returned an evasive answer; Mlle. Clairon caused a watch to
be kept upon his movements, and discovered the fatal truth. So long as
the Margrave remained in Paris, the deceived sultana, by a great effort
of will, succeeded "in concealing beneath a countenance always calm, and
sometimes laughing, the rending tortures of mind and body." But when the
prince returned to Anspach, she declined to follow him, and sent instead
a long and reproachful letter, wherein she informed him that "his
frenzied passion for a woman of whose character, unfortunately, he alone
was ignorant, his indifference to public opinion, the license of his new
morals, his want of respect for his age and his dignity, obliged her to
see in him only one who had thrown aside all restraint and decency in
compliance with the dictates of a depraved heart, or as one whose
disordered intellect, while it excited pity, evinced also the necessity
of restraint; that the veil was now lifted, and she knew herself never
to have been anything but the hapless victim of his egotism and his
divers caprices; and that, therefore, with infinite pain, she laid at
his feet all the boons she had received from him, and bade him adieu ...
adieu for ever."
And so ended the last romance of Mlle. Clairon, and the only souvenir of
her seventeen years' residence at Anspach is a kind of fancy bread,
which is called "_Clairons Weck_" unto this day.[209]
As for the faithless Margrave, he was too happy in the society of Lady
Craven, who shortly afterwards took up her residence at Anspach, to care
much what became of her predecessor in his affections; and so infatuated
did he become with that lady that, on his wife's death in 1791, he
married her. In the following year, the prince--in the face of an
eloquent letter of remonstrance from Mlle. Clairon--sold his margravates
of Anspach and Baireuth to the King of Prussia, and migrated, with his
wife, to England, where he died in 1806. The Margravine survived her
husband more than twenty years, and died, at Naples, in 1828.
In 1785, during one of the visits to Paris which she had paid in company
with the Margrave, Mlle. Clairon had purchased a country-house at Issy,
and it was here that she now took up her residence. She lived a very
quiet life, receiving and visiting a few old friends, and occupying the
rest of her time with collecting objects of natural history, which had
always been one of her favourite occupations, and the writing of her
_Mémoires_.
Madame Vigée Lebrun, the painter, who met Mlle. Clairon soon after her
return to France, at the house of her former pupil, Larive, has left us
the following impression of the famous _tragédienne_ in her old age:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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