The Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II | Page 7

promised, though I have not fixed my day. But do you know you alarm me! There was a time when I was a match for Madame de Mirepoix at pharaoh, to any hour of the night, and I believe did play with her five nights in a week till three and four in the morning--but till eleven o'clock to-morrow morning--Oh! that is a little too much, even at loo. Besides, I shall not go to Paris for pharaoh--if I play all night, how shall I see everything all day?
[Footnote 1: Schouvaloff was notorious as a favourite of the Empress Catharine.]
[Footnote 2: Mdlle. Clairon had been for some years the most admired tragic actress in France. In that age actors and actresses in France were exposed to singular insults. M. Lacroix, in his "France in the Eighteenth Century," tells us: "They were considered as inferior beings in the social scale; excommunicated by the Church, and banished from society, they were compelled to endure all the humiliations and affronts which the public chose to inflict on them in the theatre; and, if any of them had the courage to make head against the storm, and to resist the violence and cruelty of the pit, they were sent to prison, and not released but on condition of apologising to the tyrants who had so cruelly insulted them. Many had a sufficient sense of their own dignity to withdraw themselves from this odious despotism after having been in prison in Fort l'Ev��cque, their ordinary place of confinement, by the order of the gentlemen of the chamber or the lieutenant of police; and it was in this way that Mdlle. Clairon bade farewell to the Com��die Fran?aise and gave up acting in 1765, when at the very height of her talent, and in the middle of her greatest dramatic triumphs." The incident here alluded to by Walpole was that "a critic named Fr��ron had libelled her in a journal to which he contributed; and, as she could not obtain justice, she applied to the Duc de Choiseul, the Prime Minister. Even he was unable to put her in the way of obtaining redress, and sought to pacify her by comparing her position to his own. 'I am,' said he, 'mademoiselle, like yourself, a public performer; with this difference in your favour, that you choose what parts you please, and are sure to be crowned with the applause of the public; for I reckon as nothing the bad taste of one or two wretched individuals who have the misfortune of not adoring you. I, on the other hand, am obliged to act the parts imposed on me by necessity. I am sure to please nobody; I am satirised, criticised, libelled, hissed; yet I continue to do my best. Let us both, then, sacrifice our little resentments and enmities to the public service, and serve our country, each in our own station. Besides, the Queen has condescended to forgive Fr��ron, and you may therefore, without compromising your dignity, imitate Her Majesty's clemency'" ("Mem. de Bachaumont," i. 61). But Mdlle. was not to be pacified, nor to be persuaded to expose herself to a repetition of insult; but, though only forty-one, she retired from the stage for ever.]
[Footnote 3: Quin was employed by the Princess of Wales to teach her son elocution, and when he heard how generally his young sovereign was praised for the grace and dignity of his delivery of his speech to his Parliament, he boasted, "Ah, it was I taught the boy to speak."]
[Footnote 4: Garrick was not only a great actor, but also a great reformer of the stage. He seems to have excelled equally both in tragedy and comedy, which makes it natural to suppose that in some parts he may have been excelled by other actors; though he had no equal (and perhaps never has had) in both lines. He was also himself the author of several farces of more than average merit.]
Lady Sophia Thomas has received the Baume de vie, for which she gives you a thousand thanks, and I ten thousand.
We are extremely amused with the wonderful histories of your hyena[1] in the Gevaudan; but our fox-hunters despise you: it is exactly the enchanted monster of old romances. If I had known its history a few months ago, I believe it would have appeared in the "Castle of Otranto,"--the success of which has, at last, brought me to own it, though the wildness of it made me terribly afraid; but it was comfortable to have it please so much, before any mortal suspected the author: indeed, it met with too much honour far, for at first it was universally believed to be Mr. Gray's. As all the first impression is sold, I am hurrying out another, with a new