The poor girl never could win.
3. Bonfire Ballerina
Deadly Dangers of the Romantic Ballet
There are perils dire
Which oft beset the Ballet Girl,
And worst of all is Fire!
Most deadly of the deadly foes that threaten player folk,
An enemy who never sleeps, whose power is ne’er broke,
While of the groups Theatrical, the greatest risk who run
Are lightly costumed ballerinas—Escape for them is none.
A spark upon the muslin dry, then instantly it lights into a flame,
Like lightning’s flash, at sea, on summer nights,
A blazing mass of agony, all maddened, quick they fly,
Yet fly not from the enemy who dooms them thus to die
That shrivels up the glowing limbs, and face and form, alas!
Leaving of female loveliness a charred and calcined mass.
Ah, happy if they die at once, and from Life’s stage retire,
Than linger on in torment from the all-remorseless fire.
—Anonymous Victorian poem
Célestine Emarot was another petit rat of the Paris Opéra. When the theater’s director, Louis Véron, spoke of young corps de ballet dancers who were abandoned by their abonné lovers once they became pregnant, he may well have been thinking about her. Born in 1824 as Marguerite-Adélaïde Emarot, she had changed her name to Célestine as early as 1837—the first time her name appears on a list of the École de Danse students.1 She enjoyed a fourteen-year career with the parent company, dancing minor parts in works by Jean Coralli (1779–1854), Jules Perrot (1810–1892), Joseph Mazilier (1801–1868), and Arthur Saint-Léon (1821–1870).2 She had been a pretty adolescent but not a particularly good dancer. Her reviews were mixed, if not scathing. She was considered a mediocre talent at best: Charles de Boigne described her as “rococo,” or old-fashioned, in his book, Petits mémoires de l’Opéra.3 Others were less kind in describing her shortcomings: “She filled secondary roles adequately enough but failed miserably when called upon to take an important part, such as the Abbess in Robert le Diable,” writes dance historian Ivor Guest, an authority on ballet of the Second Empire. “Many gentlemen whose memories of Taglioni were still vivid could not bear to watch her in the role and retired to the Foyer, while laughter was heard from the pit.”4
She doubtless owed her career more to the first in a series of her protectors, Baron Charles de Chassiron (1818–1871), a French diplomat and prominent member of the Jockey Club de Paris. Like his titled peers, Chassiron was an habitué of the notorious foyer de la danse, where sexual assignations between dancers and certain privileged members of the audience were openly arranged. There, the comely Célestine had caught his eye. She was fifteen, he twenty-two when they started their affair. The liaison was encouraged by Célestine’s mother, Jeanne-Léontine Emarot, an unmarried linen worker from Dijon who had come to Paris in 1834 in search of a better life for herself and her illegitimate child. Getting her daughter into the Paris Opéra and pimping her to male ballet patrons of means was how Jeanne-Léontine had hoped to save them both from poverty. But all her hopes appeared dashed after Chassiron abandoned his teenaged lover when, nine months after their first encounter, she gave birth to a baby girl on September 23, 1842 (some accounts say 1841). Chassiron refused to claim paternity for the child, who (pity for her) grew up to be his spitting image—receding chin and all.5 He later shuffled off to marry in 1850 Princess Caroline Laetitia Murat, the daughter of Prince Napoléon Lucien Charles Murat, himself the grandson of Caroline Bonaparte.6 Chassiron also abandoned his wife when, as an attaché of the French Embassy, he embarked on a long journey through Asia, about which he wrote a book, Notes sur le Japon, la Chine et l’Inde: 1858–1859–1860—a carefree adventurer until the end of his days.7
Célestine eventually moved on, netting a new lover, also a member of the Jockey Club, who would keep her, if not in luxury, at least spared from having to prostitute herself—and, more importantly, her own daughter—to survive. Becoming mistress to Vicomte Ferdinand de Montguyon (1808–1876), a fervent balletomane, was, in fact, largely motivated by a need to protect her daughter, an only child whom she had baptized Jeanne-Emma Marie Emarot at the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris on December 14, 1843. Célestine might have been spotty as a dancer, but as a mother she was a veritable diva of domestic control. Regardless of her middling dancer’s salary of between 3,000 to 6,000 francs a year, she personally saw to it that her daughter got an exemplary education at the Institution des demoiselles Cathonnet, a convent run by nuns on the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, tapping Chassiron for the funds. For the rest of her life, Célestine would do all that she could to safeguard her child from following in her mother’s footsteps.
As it turned out, her daughter fulfilled her mother’s wishes—but with a twist. She became a dancer but avoided the corps de ballet entirely, on the basis of her extraordinary talent. Fate had blessed the ballerina who would become known the world over as Emma Livry, a name chosen to distance herself from her mother’s risible reputation, with an abundance of innate talent as well as a wiry and plastic body. Unfashionably thin for her time and extraordinarily plain, Emma was nonetheless possessed of a pliancy and buoyancy that would quickly distinguish her from her peers. There was much expectation that Emma, a French-born dancer, would restore to Paris the prestige it had fast been losing in favor of a new generation of pyrotechnical ballerinas from Italy who were giving the dancers of the Second Empire a run for their money.
Montguyon was Célestine’s lover, but he also took on the role of father-figure to young Emma, helping to raise her but ultimately micro-managing her career as a ballerina in whose interests he had invested heavily. He had the reputation as a gambling man, and in Emma he saw his winning hand, a chance at making his mark. He wagered that she would be the greatest ballerina of all time, and to make good his bet he scrupulously stage-managed her public image and her career at the Paris Opéra. He used his status as a member of the Jockey Club to influence management to give his protégée special attention, leveraging his relationship with Napoléon III to tighten the screws. He also made sure the royal couple were aware of Emma, apprising them of her progress through written correspondence and inviting them to see her take class.
Montguyon’s masterminding of Emma’s career was unfolding almost a decade following the bloody events of 1848, a year marked by revolutions across Europe but particularly in Paris, where the citizens had overthrown the “bourgeois monarchy” of Louis-Philippe I (1773–1850), replacing it with the Second Republic, under the leadership of an elected president. Montguyon was closely associated with this new and increasingly conservative political organization, his best friend being its leader’s half-brother. In 1851, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (nephew of the first emperor, Napoléon I) disbanded the Second Republic to establish the Second Empire, crowning himself Emperor Napoléon III. Montguyon was there, close to the source of power, and knew how to exploit the reigning sentiments of the day. As Friedrich Engels has written on this period of French history, “The Second Empire was the appeal to French chauvinism... a French empire within the frontiers of the old monarchy.”8
Anything that stoked the fires of French pride at that time was sure to get the public’s attention, if not support. By publicly bruiting the fact that Emma was Paris-born. Montguyon launched a public relations campaign, promoting her at the expense of Italians then headlining the art, namely Guiseppina Bozzacchi (1853–1870), Amalia Ferraris (1830–1904), Carolina Rosati (1826–1905), and Fanny Cerrito (1817–1909), dancers known for their virtuosity and bravura displays of technique. The French school, as had been epitomized by Taglioni, was more vaporous and more poetic. Emma, while as technically proficient as the Italians, would be cast as Taglioni reborn, dancing in ways that were deliberately understated, to stress the poin
t that she was innately a French ballerina, an artist as opposed to an acrobat. The public would eat it up.
The upshot of all this backstage maneuvering was that Montguyon ultimately convinced the French author and dramatist Alphonse Royer, then director of the Opéra, to take her into the company not as a member of the corps de ballet, as was usual for newcomers recruited from the school, but to promote her straight to the top, to the vaunted position of principal dancer. The girl had talent, and so there was little fear that she would sully the company’s reputation as a result of incompetence. She was a child prodigy, hand-picked for greatness by her first teacher, Caroline-Dominique Venetozza (born Caroline Lassiat), Célestine’s former colleague within the corps de ballets, and later one of the most sought-after dance instructors in all of Europe. She had also coached Adèle Grantzow (1845–1877), Léontine Beaugrand (1842–1925), and, later, Guiseppina Bozzacchi (1853–1870), other notable ballerinas of the Second Empire who also rose to the top as a result of her guidance. But Emma, whom she first started training when the dancer was eleven, was Mme Dominique’s most brilliant student, surpassing all expectations in her mastery of classical dance. She had quickly endorsed Montguyon’s suggestion that Emma bypass ballet’s lower ranks in making her debut as a principal dancer.
Montguyon then went a step further, inciting some ballet observers of the day to accuse him of hubris when he insisted that for her premiere Emma dance the lead role in La Sylphide, the work intrinsically linked with ballet’s still reigning queen, at least in memory, La Taglioni, who by then was living in retirement at her estate in Lake Como. Montguyon negotiated the inclusion of the ballet into Emma’s initial contract with the Opéra: “Engagement as première danseuse for one year, starting from 1st July, 1858. Debut to be in La Sylphide. Only to dance in pas de deux, or in pas seule and pas de deux, with corps de ballet. No other person whatever to be allowed to dance her role. These conditions accepted, the Director of the Opéra shall himself fix her emolument after the third performance of La Sylphide.”9
Adept at promotion, Montguyon then got word to Taglioni herself, idling in Italy, that there was a new dancer in Paris, said to be as great as she had been in her halcyon days as a ballerina superstar. Taglioni had a well-known jealous streak; she was notorious for having carefully guarded her ballet roles, possessing them fiercely against all rivals for her crown as the world’s pre-eminent Romantic ballerina. She had been known also to sideline male dancers who she worried had a talent equal to hers and who might get more applause. It is how she, early on, had managed her celebrity status within society. The idea of an upstart, a mere wisp of a girl, threatening now to overtake her legend was perhaps too much for her. Up she got from Como to head straight to Paris, probably planning to cause a scene. But one peek at Emma in class preparing for rehearsals for La Sylphide was enough to stop the great Taglioni dead in her tracks. She knew instantly that she had met the next great ballerina of France. Believing she had seen herself reincarnated in Emma, she wrote in her diary, “Il est vrai que je ne me suis jamais vue danser, mais je devais danser comme elle le fait” (It is true that I never saw myself dance, but I must have danced as she does).10
La Sylphide, as performed by the precocious Emma, took place at the Paris Opéra’s Salle Le Peletier on October 20, 1858, and the reviews were unanimously ecstatic. For critics who had grown accustomed to the flashy, bravura style of the Italians, Emma’s gentle grace and airiness—which hearkened back to ballet’s origins as a French court art, redolent of dignity, decorum, and, above all, restraint—struck them as something new and fresh, a complete surprise. Critic Paul de Saint-Victor wrote in La Presse.
Mlle Emma Livry est de l’École française, de l’école aérienne. Elle s’enlève une plume qu’on souffle; en retombant, la plume devient flèche et se pique dans le parquet sur les pointes d’acier. Ses entrechats sont nets, ses parcours arpentent la scène avec une rapidité fantastique. Elle a, dans les temps penchés, cet aplomb de marbre qui fait songer à ce que serait l’inclinaison d’une statue. Elle a surtout cette chaste et correcte élégance qui est la distinction de la danse française.11
(Mlle Emma Livry is of the French School, of the light and airy school. She rises, wafted up like a feather. In its descent, the feather becomes an arrow and pierces the floor with its tips of steel. Her entrechats are neat, her progress across the stage strides with fantastic rapidity. Her penchés have a marble-like composure that makes one imagine a bending statue. She has especially that pure and correct elegance that is the distinct attribute of French dance.)
Poet Théophile Gautier also praised Emma’s debut, writing that she captured the transparency of her French-made ethereal art:
Elle appartenait à cette chaste école de Taglioni qui fait de la danse un art presque immatériel à force de grâce pudique, de réserve décente et de virginale diaphanéité. À l’entrevoir à travers la transparence de ses voiles dont son pied ne faisait que soulever le bord, on eût dit une ombre heureuse, une appearance élyséenne jouant dans un rayon bleuâtre; elle en avait la légèreté impondérable, et son vol silencieux traversait l’espace sans qu’on entendît le frisson de l’air.12
(She belonged to the pure school of Taglioni who made dance an art that is almost ethereal thanks to its chaste gracefulness, its proper reserve and its unsullied translucence. On glimpsing her through the transparency of her veils of which her foot lifted only the edge, one would have said she was no more than a lucky shadow, an Elysian presence playing in a beam of bluish light. She had the imponderable weightlessness of a shadow, and her noiseless flight traversed the space without the audience hearing even the tremor of the air.)
Taglioni allowed herself to be carried along by the Emma-mania then sweeping the nation. She asked to return to the Paris Opéra and in 1860 was appointed inspectrice des classes, a position she held until 1870. She also made preparations to choreograph her first and only ballet, Le Papillon, which she was creating as a vehicle for Emma, whose training she had taken over; it was said that Taglioni shared with Emma all her airborne secrets during private classes, just the two of them, held at the Opéra behind locked doors. She loved her like a daughter and wanted the best for her. She was willing to step aside to let the younger dancer shine. Taglioni gave Emma a gift that elegantly summed up her feelings, a portrait of herself on which she had written, “Faites-moi oublier. Ne m’oubliez pas” (Make me forgotten, but don’t forget me).13 It was the ultimate compliment, coming as it did from the greatest ballerina in the world.
With an eye fixed on her protégée’s future, Taglioni determined that Emma should have her own signature ballet, just as she had had, and with composer Jacques Offenbach creating his first and only score for ballet, she set out to make a full-length, three-act work that, like La Sylphide, would feature a winged creature of the imagination as the central motif. Just as she had been identified with the sylph, she wanted Emma to be associated with the butterfly. Taglioni believed this role would enhance Emma’s ephemeral allure and get audiences once again talking about the ballet which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, had started losing ground to French grand opera, then in the ascendant. She wrote the libretto in collaboration with Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, one of the creators of Giselle and of Le Corsaire.
The story concerned Farfalla (Italian for “butterfly”), a girl turned into a butterfly by a wicked sorceress whose spell can only be broken by a lover’s kiss. At one point in the convoluted story, Farfalla’s wings are singed when she draws close to a burning torch, which almost kills her. Emma played the part only too well. No one knew it at the time, but the scene was prophetic and would be responsible for making Le Papillon, an otherwise forgettable ballet, known in history as the work that unintentionally predicted the tragic end to Emma’s life. The rave reviews that accompanied the November 26, 1860, premiere gave no hint of the tragedy to come: “[La danseuse] acquit la seule chose qui lui eût un pe
u manqué jusque-là: une grâce parfaite,” wrote Paul d’Ambert in Le Nain jaune. (The dancer acquired the only thing she had slightly lacked up to then: perfect gracefulness.) Emma alone made Le Papillon an instant success. Napoléon III himself came twice to see it; the sculptor Jean-Auguste Barre, who had made a practice of immortalizing select French ballerinas of the Romantic era in statue form, created a figurine of Emma as the Butterfly (a delicately painted, hard-paste porcelain version of is in the Theatre Museum in London).14 Inspired by the success of Le Papillon, Taglioni was said to be embarking on a new ballet that would again star Emma, this one tentatively entitled Zara.15 The world lay at her feet.
But there never would be a sequel. Within a few short years of the ballet’s premiere, Emma would be dead, after colliding with an open flame on the stage of the Paris Opéra, later succumbing to her wounds after eight long months of agonizing suffering.
The accident took place on November 15, 1862. The occasion was a revival performance of Daniel Auber’s rabble-rousing opera La Muette de Portici, scheduled to be performed at the Paris Opéra with an all-star cast. The night in question was a dress rehearsal but a hot ticket, nevertheless. The seats in the theater’s auditorium were filled with spectators, including Célestine, sitting next to Montguyon in his private box. Taglioni was also in the audience, awaiting the debut of her protégée in the role of Fenella, the mute in the opera’s title, a mimed part always played by a dancer. Taglioni had herself previously performed it (the role was created for her in 1828), and she thought it would suit Emma; Taglioni had personally coached her, believing again that the role would further enhance Emma’s reputation as a neo-Romantic ballerina. Besides Emma, the attraction was the tenor, Giovanni Matteo Mario, one of the most celebrated singers of his time. Everyone in the house that night was brimming with excitement, including Emma who, in advance of her entrance in Act II, came down earlier than usual from her dressing room, fully dressed in her bouffant tarlatan skirt costume with corset, to sit on a bench she had especially requested be placed for her in the wings. Backstage, she sat quietly as she listened to Mario raise his voice to the rafters:
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