Enter Fabre, Pursued by a Bear
Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris 6me. February 1996. 2°C. The air hushed and still with the promise of snow. Beginning above Montparnasse and rolling downhill in a wave, all color bleeds out of the landscape, anticipating by a few seconds the white flakes soon sifting down, turning what had been pastel Monet to a monochrome Brassaï.
BEING AN ACTOR OR ACTRESS AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH century was not what every mother would wish for her child.
Owning money or land was the only serious test of a person’s worth. They signified that the owner need do nothing in life but enjoy it. For those forced to work, there were the professions: medicine, law, the army or navy, the church—followed by the last, worst choice, trade: making and selling things. After that, nothing much remained but crime and show business. People didn’t take up the stage so much as descend to it.
Philippe Fabre was born in 1750 in Carcassonne, in the far south. His father, a wool merchant, worked for his wife’s father and hated it, a resentment he took out on his son, the only child of six to survive to adulthood. “I was raised by a father who detested me and a mother I detested,” Philippe wrote.
Local schools educated boys only to age twelve, after which they were deemed old enough to work. (Women were seldom educated at all. Their mothers taught them to cook and sew.) Promising male students continued their studies in church schools. Philippe was sent to the Jesuits in nearby Limoux. From its priests, the church’s intellectual elite, he learned to speak Greek and Latin, to draw and write. Since he possessed an exceptional voice, with a range from bass to countertenor, they also taught him to read music and sing.
At twenty Fabre was tall for the time, with a mass of brown hair and a face unmarked by the smallpox that scarred so many. Unlikely to flourish in either the wool trade or the priesthood, he was saved from having to choose by the arrival in Limoux of a traveling theater troupe. He left with it.
Wandering companies under an actor/manager were a feature of life in Europe. Marlowe and Molière learned their trade on the road; as did Shakespeare, who put such a company into Hamlet. But people of their talent were the exception. Most troupes, grumbled one magistrate, were “little better than traveling brothels.” He didn’t exaggerate. “Actress” was synonymous with “prostitute,” and the average actor was a rootless vagabond who strutted in ragged costumes, clowning and declaiming as he debated whether to pick your pocket or ravish your wife.
Fabre soon made himself useful. His voice and musical skill helped in writing and performing the one–act playlets with music known as “operas,” and he could dash off rhyming verse almost to order. Perhaps it wasn’t top quality, but a road company wasn’t the Comédie–Française.
He also upheld the profession’s reputation for bad behavior with women. “A good talker,” conceded a colleague, before observing sourly that “his seductions were conducted with a certain brutality.”
A letter to Fabre from a woman named Sophie Proudhon, dated September 29, 1776, has survived. “My dear friend,” she wrote, “how happy I am. I could die of joy. What a charming letter, to tell me that before the Feast of Saint John, my friend, my tender friend, will be with me. How I will count the hours.”
If Sophie hoped to marry her “dear friend,” she was out of luck. So were Jeanette in Grenoble, Marie in Versailles, an anonymous brunette in Bordeaux, and a blonde in Troyes. Fabre jilted them all in favor of his latest conquest, Catherine Desremond, known affectionately as Catiche.
The attraction of Catiche was that of forbidden fruit. Only fifteen, she was the daughter of the couple who managed the troupe. The more her parents discouraged it, the stronger the attachment became, until in 1777 when the company was playing at Namur, Belgium, under the patronage of the local archbishop, they eloped.
The constabulary caught them and brought them back. Fabre, who had deflowered Catiche and, what was worse, tried to deprive her parents of her services as an actress, was charged with theft and condemned to hang. His fellow performers appealed for clemency, and the conviction was reduced to lifetime banishment from Belgium.
Fleeing back to his native south, Fabre didn’t show his face in the north until 1787. That year, now styling himself Philippe Fabre d’Églantine, with a florid new signature to go with it, he turned up in Paris with a wife, the actress Marie Nicole Godin–Lesage, and a valise full of unperformed plays. Having flirted in the meantime with running his own theatrical troupe and also managing a couple of regional theaters, he was heavily in debt.
News traveled slowly in those days, so details of his past took some time to catch up with him. They may have arrived with the soldiers of the south who made their way from Marseilles to join the revolution in 1789.
In peacetime, these rural clods would not have voyaged any farther than the next village, but a pike and a uniform of sorts—sometimes no more than a blue, white, and red cockade or sash—could carry you a long way. As they marched, they sang a belligerent new song that its composer, Rouget de Lisle, named “La Marseillaise” in their honor. It would be adopted in 1795 as the anthem of the new French state.
Someone in these new arrivals may have recognized Fabre and confided over a bottle of wine that the former actor was a fraud. In coming to Paris, he was fleeing from a mountain of debt, not to mention numerous jilted young women. As for winning the golden rose at Toulouse, he had in fact received only second prize, the silver lily. The same men hooted at the claim that Clémence Isaure had presented it. Clémence Isaure didn’t exist. She was a character created to personify the festival—a synthetic figure, like Marianne, the symbol of the revolution.
If anyone confronted him with his lies, Fabre probably argued that lilies were the emblem of the disgraced Bourbon monarchy and therefore to be shunned. Also, “Fabre d’Églantine” had a nicer ring. The debts and the women he just shrugged off. He could afford to do so, since he had become one of the overnight sensations of prerevolutionary Paris.
He owed his new reputation to a song for which he wrote the words. “Il pleut, bergère” (It’s raining, shepherdess) appeared in a one–act comic opera, Laure et Pétrarque, written in 1780, with music by Louis–Victor Simon. The show flopped, but the tune flourished. It was even taken up as a marching song by the National Guard, the revolutionary force that replaced the royalist army, and it is still sung by schoolchildren more than two centuries later.
Anyone raised in a rural society would have recognized the story told by the song.
Il pleut, il pleut, bergère
Rentre tes blancs moutons
Allons sous ma chaumière
Bergère, vite allons.
J’entends sous le feuillage.
L’eau qui tombe à grand bruit.
Voici, venir l’orage.
Voici l’éclair qui luit.
(It’s raining, shepherdess. / Round up your white sheep. / Shelter in my cottage. / Shepherdess, come quickly. / I’m waiting under the thatch. / The rain is falling loudly. / See the lightning flash.)
By the sixth verse, the singer has maneuvered the shepherdess into bed with the promise that once the storm subsides, he will ask her father for her hand in marriage.
If one didn’t have to sit outside in all weathers, constantly rounding up the flock, fending off predators, and extricating the animals from bogs and thornbushes, the life of a shepherdess might seem idyllic. Marie Antoinette, at least, thought so. In the Hameau de la Reine, a stylized village on the grounds of Versailles, she and her ladies played at being peasants, grooming animals chosen for their pulchritude and milking cows into pails of porcelain made to order at the Sèvres factory.
Marie Antoinette must have heard “Il pleut, bergère” and may have taken the song as a kind of tribute. This would help explain why, on February 22, 1789, her husband, the king, signed a surprising document that, literally at the stroke of a pen, made Fabre’s financial problems disappear. It read, “His Majesty, wishing to give to ’sieur Fabre d’Églantine the means to order his affairs, gives him safe conduct for the period of six months, during which His Majesty forbids his creditors to exercise any claims against him; likewise also all bailiffs and sergeants to arrest or trouble him.” By the time this amnesty ran out, the revolution had begun, and with it a new way of life for Fabre.