While I was making a “cure” last year at Lamalou,
an obscure Spa in the Cevennes Mountains, Madame Calvé, to
whom I had expressed a desire to see her picturesque home,
telegraphed an invitation to pass the day with her, naming the
train she could meet, which would allow for the long drive to her
château before luncheon. It is needless to say the
invitation was accepted. As my train drew up at the little
station, Madame Calvé, in her trap, was the first person I
saw, and no time was lost in getting en route.
During the hour passed on the poplar-bordered road that leads
straight and white across the country I had time to appreciate
the transformation in the woman at my side. Was this
gray-clad, nunlike figure the passionate, sensuous Carmen of
Bizet’s masterpiece? Could that calm, pale face,
crossed by innumerable lines of suffering, as a spider’s
web lies on a flower, blaze and pant with Sappho’s guilty
love?
Something of these thoughts must have appeared on my face, for
turning with a smile, she asked, “You find me
changed? It’s the air of my village. Here
I’m myself. Everywhere else I’m
different. On the stage I am any part I may be playing, but
am never really happy away from my hill there.” As
she spoke, a sun-baked hamlet came in sight, huddled around the
base of two tall towers that rose cool and gray in the noonday
heat.
“All that wing,” she added, “is arranged for
the convalescent girls whom I have sent down to me from the Paris
hospitals for a cure of fresh air and simple food. Six
years ago, just after I had bought this place, a series of
operations became necessary which left me prostrated and
anæmic. No tonics were of benefit. I grew
weaker day by day, until the doctors began to despair of my
life. Finally, at the advice of an old woman here who
passes for being something of a curer, I tried the experiment or
lying five or six hours a day motionless in the sunlight.
It wasn’t long before I felt life creeping back to my poor
feeble body. The hot sun of our magic south was a more
subtle tonic than any drug. When the cure was complete, I
made up my mind that each summer the same chance should be
offered to as many of my suffering sisters as this old place
could be made to accommodate.”
The bells on the shaggy Tarbes ponies she was driving along
the Languedoc road drew, on nearing her residence, a number of
peasant children from their play.
As the ruddy urchins ran shouting around our carriage wheels
and scrambled in the dust for the sous we threw them, my hostess
pointed laughing to a scrubby little girl with tomato-colored
cheeks and tousled dark hair, remarking, “I looked like
that twenty years ago and performed just those antics on this
very road. No punishment would keep me off the
highway. Those pennies, if I’m not mistaken, will all
be spent at the village pastry cook’s within an
hour.”
This was said with such a tender glance at the children that
one realized the great artist was at home here, surrounded by the
people she loved and understood. True to the
“homing” instinct of the French peasant, Madame
Calvé, when fortune came to her, bought and partially
restored the rambling château which at sunset casts its
shadow across the village of her birth. Since that day
every moment of freedom from professional labor and every penny
of her large income are spent at Cabrières, building,
planning, even farming, when her health permits.
“I think,” she continued, as we approached the
château, “that the happiest day of my life—and
I have, as you know, passed some hours worth living, both on and
off the stage—was when, that wing completed, a Paris train
brought the first occupants for my twenty little bedrooms; no
words can tell the delight it gives me now to see the color
coming back to my patients’ pale lips and hear them
laughing and singing about the place. As I am always short
of funds, the idea of abandoning this work is the only fear the
future holds for me.”
With the vivacity peculiar to her character, my companion then
whipped up her cobs and turned the conversation into gayer
channels. Five minutes later we clattered over a drawbridge
and drew up in a roomy courtyard, half blinding sunlight and half
blue shadow, where a score of girls were occupied with books and
sewing.
The luncheon bell was ringing as we ascended the terrace
steps. After a hurried five minutes for brushing and
washing, we took our places at a long table set in the cool stone
hall, guests stopping in the château occupying one end
around the chatelaine, the convalescents filling the other
seats.
Those who have only seen the capricious diva on the stage or
in Parisian salons can form little idea of the proprietress of
Cabrières. No shade of coquetry blurs the clear
picture of her home life. The capped and saboted peasant
women who waited on us were not more simple in their ways.
Several times during the meal she left her seat to inquire after
the comfort of some invalid girl or inspect the cooking in the
adjacent kitchen. These wanderings were not, however,
allowed to disturb the conversation, which flowed on after the
mellow French fashion, enlivened by much wit and gay
badinage. One of our hostess’s anecdotes at her own
expense was especially amusing.
“When in Venice,” she told us, “most prima
donnas are carried to and from the opera in sedan chairs to avoid
the risk of colds from the draughty gondolas. The last
night of my initial season there, I was informed, as the curtain
fell, that a number of Venetian nobles were planning to carry me
in triumph to the hotel. When I descended from my
dressing-room the courtyard of the theatre was filled with men in
dress clothes, bearing lanterns, who caught up the chair as soon
as I was seated and carried it noisily across the city to the
hotel. Much moved by this unusual honor, I mounted to the
balcony of my room, from which elevation I bowed my thanks, and
threw all the flowers at hand to my escort.
“Next morning the hotel proprietor appeared with my
coffee, and after hesitating a moment, remarked: ‘Well, we
made a success of it last night. It has been telegraphed to
all the capitals of Europe! I hope you will not think a
thousand francs too much, considering the
advertisement!’ In blank amazement, I asked what he
meant. ‘I mean the triumphal progress,’ he
answered. ‘I thought you understood! We always
organize one for the “stars” who visit Venice.
The men who carried your chair last night were the waiters from
the hotels. We hire them on account of their dress
clothes’! Think of the disillusion,” added
Calvé, laughing, “and my disgust, when I thought of
myself naïvely throwing kisses and flowers to a group of
Swiss garçons at fifteen francs a head. There was
nothing to do, however, but pay the bill and swallow my
chagrin!”
How many pretty women do you suppose would tell such a joke
upon themselves? Another story she told us is
characteristic of her peasant neighbors.
“When I came back here after my first season in St.
Petersburg and London the curé requested me to sing
at our local fête. I gladly consented, and, standing
by his side on the steps of the Mairie, gave the great
aria from the Huguenots in my best manner. To my
astonishment the performance was received in complete
silence. ‘Poor Calvé,’ I heard an old
friend of my mother’s murmur. ‘Her voice used
to be so nice, and now it’s all gone!’ Taking
in the situation at a glance, I threw my voice well up into my
nose and started off on a well-known provincial song, in the
shrill falsetto of our peasant women. The effect was
instantaneous! Long before the end the performance was
drowned in thunders of applause. Which proves that to be
popular a singer must adapt herself to her audience.”
Luncheon over, we repaired for cigarettes and coffee to an
upper room, where Calvé was giving Dagnan-Bouveret some
sittings for a portrait, and lingered there until four
o’clock, when our hostess left us for her siesta, and a
“break” took those who cared for the excursion across
the valley to inspect the ruins of a Roman bath. A late
dinner brought us together again in a small dining room, the
convalescents having eaten their simple meal and disappeared an
hour before. During this time, another transformation had
taken place in our mercurial hostess! It was the
Calvé of Paris, Calvé the witch, Calvé the
capiteuse, who presided at the dainty, flower-decked table
and led the laughing conversation.
A few notes struck on a guitar by one of the party, as we sat
an hour later on the moonlit terrace, were enough to start off
the versatile artist, who was in her gayest humor. She sang
us stray bits of opera, alternating her music with scenes
burlesqued from recent plays. No one escaped her inimitable
mimicry, not even the “divine Sarah,” Calvé
giving us an unpayable impersonation of the elderly
tragédienne as Lorenzaccio, the boy hero of Alfred
de Musset’s drama. Burlesquing led to her dancing
some Spanish steps with an abandon never attempted on the
stage! Which in turn gave place to an imitation of an
American whistling an air from Carmen, and some
“coon songs” she had picked up during her stay at New
York. They, again, were succeeded by a superb rendering of
the imprecation from Racine’s Camille, which made
her audience realize that in gaining a soprano the world has
lost, perhaps, its greatest tragédienne.
At eleven o’clock the clatter of hoofs in the court
warned us that the pleasant evening had come to an end. A
journalist en route for Paris was soon installed with me
in the little omnibus that was to take us to the station,
Calvé herself lighting our cigars and providing the wraps
that were to keep out the cool night air.
As we passed under the low archway of the entrance amid a
clamor of “adieu“ and “au revoir,” the
young Frenchman at my side pointed up to a row of closed windows
overhead. “Isn’t it a lesson,” he said,
“for all of us, to think of the occupants of those little
rooms, whom the generosity and care of that gracious artist are
leaning by such pleasant paths back to health and courage for
their toilsome lives?”
