Chateaubriand was thus drawn to the vaulting mystery of Gothic art. Ruins, the immensity of nature, reverie, and “the exaggerated love of solitude” became prominent themes in his life and writings: “Imagination is rich, abundant, full of marvels, existence poor, dry, disenchanted. One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world.” Hoping to weld the freedoms of the 1789 Revolution to the spiritual power of this mythical past, Chateaubriand served the Bourbon Restoration monarchs and was bitterly depressed by their failure and fall. After the 1830 Revolution, he abandoned public life and retreated to writing and intermittent periods of exile.22
In 1832 he turned to his memoirs, first begun in the early years of the century: there he wrote of despairing suicidal reveries and indulged in distraught, feverish broodings on nature, love, and the state of his own anxious and euphoric mind. His melancholy ruminations were marked by passionate encounters with an imaginary woman, a “phantom of love” and suppressed desire. She had been there in the earliest versions of his memoirs, but in 1832 he wrote of her with renewed passion. That same year, Chateaubriand had attended the opening of La Sylphide at the Paris Opera and was profoundly moved by Taglioni’s performance. Henceforth, his phantom had a name: she was la sylphide.23
His sylphide, he explained, first came to him in the “delirious years” of his adolescence, when he spent long and solitary hours at the family’s medieval château in Combourg, surrounded by dark forests and breathtaking vistas. She remained a constant figure in his life, a steady if unnerving presence that pervaded his existence: she was, he explained, “composed of all of the women” he admired, and he constantly “retouched” her image as he saw fit, adding here the eyes of a becoming village girl and there the graces of the Virgin, or the elegance of the “grandes dames” depicted in portraits from past eras of monarchical grandeur. This invisible “masterpiece” of a woman—who resembled so closely the lost worlds Chateaubriand regretted—followed him through life. She was not, however, a comforting figure: rather, she was a “magician” and “elegant demon” who led him into frenzied states of uncontrolled imagination and desire.24
One night in Combourg, for example, he invoked her presence and followed her into the clouds: “Embroiled in her hair and her veils, I traversed storms, rattled the roofs of forests, shook the summits of mountains, or boiled the seas. Plunging into empty space, falling from the throne of God to the gates of Hell, the power of my loves consumed worlds.” When he came out of this trance-like state, he collapsed in anguish: she was not real and he would never transcend his own “vulgar” existence. He returned home for dinner, hair wild, shirt covered in sweat, face swept with rain, and sat alienated at the family table, sinking into a state of near insanity and unable to bear the contrast between his glorious sylphide and the stolid, emotionally flat domestic world of the château. On other occasions, the lovers departed on imaginary adventures to the banks of the Nile, the mountains of India, and other exotic points. His sylphide, he elaborated, was at once pagan and Christian, lover and virgin. “An innocent Eve, a fallen Eve, the source of my madness was an enchantress, a mix of mysteries and passions: I placed her upon an altar and I adored her.”25
She was also, at least in part, real: Chateaubriand modeled her on Juliette Récamier (1777–1849), with whom, beginning in 1817, he had a long and absorbing affair that lasted until his death in 1848. Juliette was a bourgeois girl, convent raised, who during the Terror married her mother’s lover, the wealthy Récamier. Beautiful and remote, she always wore a simple Grecian-style gown gathered under the bust and a narrow headband—Sainte-Beuve called her a “white enigma.” Hostess of a prominent literary salon, she was respected for her “antique” image, which bespoke pudeur and piety. She was a “woman in white” and (quite self-consciously) a work of art, who was often rendered by artists hoping to capture her mystery in paint or stone.26
But Juliette was not just a sculptural monument. She was intelligent and well read, with strong political views, and in her most private moments she too was prone to melancholy and waves of passion. Sought after by many prominent men (including the liberal political theorist Benjamin Constant), she was notoriously aloof and unattainable—her erotic allure depended on her sylphide-like inaccessibility, independence, and freedom. Madame de Staël, who knew her well, recalled Juliette’s dancing when she wrote Corinne: in sharp contrast to the formal elegance of French social dance, Corinne (Juliette) moved with freedom and spontaneity, her steps full of “imagination” and “feeling.”27
Chateaubriand’s agitated meditations on his beloved sylphide can sound extravagant today, but at the time his rapture for this “phantom” was part of a widespread and fervent critique of the seductions of rationalism and a society based on material wealth devoid of moral and spiritual content. Chateaubriand wanted to retrieve what he took to be the beauty, grandeur, and honor of a chivalric and Christian past, albeit imagined. It was a distinctly counter-Enlightenment impulse, harshly excoriated in other quarters: Karl Marx reviled Chateaubriand’s insufferably “coquettish sentiment” and “theatrical sublimity.” But for many French Romantics, including Nodier and Gautier, Chateaubriand was a touchstone. And as Gautier liked to point out, Marie Taglioni had made her mark on Chateaubriand’s imagination: in her he saw a clear expression of his own desires.28
Chateaubriand was not the only one impressed by Taglioni’s Sylphide: the public response to the ballet was overwhelming. Over and again critics described her as a timeless “religious symbol,” a “Christian dancer” (Gautier), and a “celestial angel” of virginal purity who shone as a beacon in a “skeptical” age. A long poem published in the journal L’Artiste cast her as a “white virgin” who promised to redeem France from a “hideous” age that had lost touch with an idealized pastoral life and succumbed to urbanization and its vices. Véron was quick to register the appeal of the ballet’s Romantic imagery and noted that ballerinas flying across the stage sold more tickets than earnest pantomimes on domestic themes. But there was more to Taglioni’s success than bittersweet encomiums or commercial interest. For she was not only a dream figure in the Romantic imagination, she was also—as Gautier aptly observed—“a woman’s dancer.”29
This meant several things. Taglioni’s public, thanks in part to Véron, was increasingly bourgeois and respectable, and they had strong views on the place of women in public life. The sartorial and legal freedoms granted to women during the French Revolution had been brief and illusory, and by the 1830s a new bourgeois morality was firmly in place. It was now widely accepted that men and women belonged in different spheres: men were naturally rational and suited to preside over business, government, and the affairs of state, while women were wives and mothers, keepers of a family’s spiritual and emotional life. His world was public and material; hers private and moral. It was her task to control children, unruly passions, ambitions (her own), and desires, and to appear modest and virtuous. As one etiquette manual put it in 1834,
No matter what her worth, no matter that she never forgets that she could be a man by virtue of her superiority of mind and the force of her will, on the outside she must be a woman! She must present herself as … that being who is inferior to man and who approaches the angels.
For women at the time, however, this was not always a restrictive “on the pedestal” situation: some were also emboldened. These “new women,” as they were frequently called, gathered in groups (unaccompanied by a man) to go to the theater or supper, and a few started women’s journals or found their way into an emerging socialist-feminist politics. Roles may have been rigidly fixed, but many women also had powerful yearnings and ambitions—in their own way, they too belonged to the Romantic era.30
Taglioni appeared to be an ideal bourgeois woman. She was hailed for her simple and gracious demeanor, which did away with coquettish grins and the flirtatious airs assumed by other dancers. Moreover, she was “decent”—a word repeated like a mantra by critics and writers to describe the unornamented qua
lity of her dancing. But “decent” also had to do with her private life, in which the press took an avid interest: they were pleased to report that she was an exemplary woman and devoted mother who managed to set aside several hours of her busy day for self-improvement in the womanly arts of painting and needlework. Her house was meticulously kept and modestly furnished, and she was said to prefer its quiet interior to the public spotlight. She wore attractive but unassuming dresses and left her jewelry in the drawer. Her costume for La Sylphide was a case in point: it was a simple and diaphanous bell-shaped dress cut just below the knees, with a wasp waist and short puff sleeves. She wore a flowered headpiece and a discreet string of pearls with matching bracelets. Indeed, her costume was so typical of the fashions of the day that Taglioni seemed, as Janin observed, more like a woman than a dancer—close kin, as it turned out, to the bourgeois ladies who flocked to her performances.
And flock they did. The Romantic poets aside, it was not men who most admired Taglioni: it was women—something which, to judge from Taglioni’s own writings, was a source of pride. These women gathered like groupies and—armed with bouquets—“invaded” (as one amazed journalist put it) the parterre, which had hitherto been the province of men. The Comtesse Dash, a spirited literary figure, wrote passionately and at length about Taglioni’s special hold on women’s imaginations, and Taglioni carefully transcribed the comtesse’s remarks into her notebooks. Women, Dash explained, did not adore Taglioni because she was perfect and proper; to the contrary, her dancing expressed an irrepressible truth about their own lives. Good, decent women, she said, had to settle for a subdued and controlled life, but underneath they were desperate to “abandon their soft and calm existence” for “storms of passion” and “dangerous emotions.” Taglioni lived what they could only dream: a public, independent, and fully expressed life that nonetheless seemed to uphold the tenets of feminine decency and grace. The comtesse, like so many others, found herself overwhelmed by Taglioni’s dancing: in a trance-like state, Dash “threw herself” forward, reaching for her idol in a sentimental gesture of self-recognition.31
Fittingly, Juliette Récamier (by now very middle-aged) was among the first to see Taglioni’s appeal. She and the women who frequented her salon donned scarves, lace, and veils and coiffed their hair “like a cloud” to give themselves a light, immaterial look. Fashion houses rushed to provide suitable accoutrements, such as the turban sylphide. Part of appearing airy, it seems, was being thin and pale, and La Sylphide dovetailed with a vogue for wan and spiritual looks: “One did not eat, one survived on water; self-important ladies claimed to live on nothing more than rose petals.”32
Angling to cash in on the trend, Jean Hippolyte Cartier de Villemessant, future editor of the prominent newspaper Le Figaro and a powerful figure in journalistic circles, approached Taglioni to begin a fashion magazine with a literary tilt, to be printed on fine scented paper. She consented, and naturally he called the short-lived journal La Sylphide—“an elegant title, airy and vaporous”—and targeted it to the well-to-do bourgeois women who identified so keenly with her image. Other entrepreneurs followed suit. After her performances in England the fast stagecoach from London to Windsor was named the Taglioni. There were paper dolls for little girls, and lithographic prints depicting Taglioni in La Sylphide spread her image with unprecedented speed and efficiency.33
Ironically and in spite of her pristine image in the press, Taglioni’s personal life was often difficult and unhappy. In 1832 she married an impoverished nobleman named Gilbert de Voisins. We don’t know if this was a love match: Taglioni later claimed that it was, but Bournonville recalled that she really loved an Italian musician and bowed to her parents, who were set on acquiring a title. In any event, the marriage certificate included an inventory of Taglioni’s considerable personal possessions and wealth, along with a carefully worded stipulation that they should remain her own, the marriage notwithstanding. Four years later, the couple was estranged and eventually separated: Voisins was a drunken gambler who routinely ate through Marie’s earnings and made embarrassing public scenes. Once they were separated, however, she continued to support him.
She then fell in love with one of her devoted fans. Eugène Desmares was a perfect stranger when he first defended Taglioni’s honor in a duel, after which the two became constant companions and lovers. They had a child (illegitimate) in 1836, but three years later Desmares died in a hunting accident. Taglioni gave birth again in 1842, and although the birth certificate recorded the father’s name as Gilbert de Voisins, the real father is unknown—and may have been a Russian prince. Taglioni’s own account of these events is discreet. In her (unpublished) memoirs she mostly “pulled the curtain” on her private life, as she put it, limiting her public comments to her art. But her notebooks are more revealing, and the passages she neatly transcribed indicate a tempestuous and ardent personality and an ongoing inner struggle to reconcile her temperament with an equally strong sense of bourgeois propriety. There are, for example, anguished descriptions of the “miseries” of adultery and unrequited love, and sentimental tributes to marriage and motherhood. Tellingly, there was also an extended meditation, carefully copied in Marie’s hand, by the feminist author Fredrika Bremer on the perils faced by “passionate” women whose aspirations led them to break from the “suffocating circle” marked out for them: they would suffer. So, it seems—and in great Romantic style—did Taglioni.34
In 1837 Marie Taglioni left the Paris Opera and devoted the rest of her career until her retirement in 1847 to international tours that took her across the Continent from London to St. Petersburg. The Opera allowed her to go because they had hired her biggest rival: Véron had brought the Viennese ballerina Fanny Elssler on board. Elssler’s style was markedly different from Taglioni’s: she was earthy and voluptuous, “pagan,” and a “man’s dancer” (Gautier again) whose appeal was overtly sensual and sexual rather than spiritual. Indeed, Elssler’s dancing pointed to a related Romantic obsession for exotic cultures and faraway places.35
She was famous for her colorful Gypsy dances, Italian tarantellas, Hungarian mazurkas, and—especially—her Spanish bolero. Her performance of this last dance, as Gautier noted, was far from authentic. The bolero had originated in eighteenth-century Spain: it was an urban dance of the lower classes that incorporated Gypsy forms, Italian acrobatics, and some refinements of the French noble style. Most important, the bolero carried an air of national pride, entangled as it was with opposition to French and foreign influences and a political interest in indigenous traditions. Elssler’s Parisian version of this dance aimed for a Spanish feel but was in fact perfectly balletic, a castanets-and-black-veil rendering of classical steps and vocabulary. The French were mesmerized, but when Gautier visited Spain, he was disappointed: “Spanish dances” he lamented, “exist only in Paris, like sea-shells, which are only to be found in curiosity shops and never at the seaside.”36
Like Taglioni, Fanny Elssler became an international star: her image was reproduced in prints and pasted on snuffboxes, decorative fans, and souvenirs. Keenly aware of her celebrity appeal, she never really settled: with her sister (who danced male roles and was her preferred partner) she performed at the Paris Opera on and off from 1834 to 1840, but she also danced in Vienna and London and eventually abandoned the French capital altogether for tours that took her as far afield as North America, Cuba (twice), and Russia. In the United States, she played in theaters up and down the East Coast to enormous acclaim, presenting a program that mixed classical ballet with Spanish folk dances and English hornpipes. Her carriage was pulled through the streets by admiring fans, and shops stocked Fanny Elssler boots, garters, stockings, corsets, parasols, cigars, shoe polish, shaving soap, and champagne. Boats, horses, and children were named after her, and in Washington the Congress recessed early to attend her performances.
Meanwhile, the young dancers who succeeded Taglioni at the Paris Opera imitated her style but failed to emerge from her shadow. Fo
r Taglioni really was unique: she had a kind of natural charisma that invested her dancing with a reach and depth difficult to replicate. It was an exceptional combination of innate ability and her own uncanny capacity to absorb and reproduce the emotional tone of her era in the forms and technique of ballet. Moreover, like charismatic figures in all areas of art and politics, Taglioni left a powerful aura and memory behind. Indeed, it was not long before La Sylphide itself became a subject for nostalgia and a new ballet: Giselle.
La Sylphide and Giselle are bookends. At one end stand Chateaubriand, Nodier, and early French Romanticism; at the other we find Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), coauthor of Giselle, who inherited and shared the earlier generation’s disenchantment but also pointed toward the “spleen” of Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du mal was dedicated to him. Younger than Chateaubriand or Nodier, Gautier had been profoundly disillusioned with the 1830 Revolution: Louis-Philippe’s reign seemed to him a fatal descent into bourgeois mediocrity. Moreover, like them, Gautier was drawn to dreams, fantasy (often erotic), and the supernatural. According to his daughter, “he saw himself as a man surrounded by mysterious forces and currents.” His own sometimes outrageous writings and sartorial statements, his flights of passion, and his interest in spirits, ghosts, and otherworldly experiences signaled a rebellious and persistent malaise. Upon his death, Flaubert commented that Gautier had “died of disgust for modern life.”37
Gautier and Heine were friends and the two men found common cause in their longing for an art that would be openly sensual, feminine, and luxurious. “The beautiful is the absence of the commonplace,” Gautier wrote to Heine in the early 1830s. “I dream of an elegant, aristocratic and scintillating literature.” Ballet became a lifelong obsession, and Taglioni’s La Sylphide seemed to Gautier a perfect expression of poetic longing and his own fantastic states of mind. It was, he said, the story of the artist in search of an unattainable ideal. To him, Taglioni ranked among “the greatest poets of our time”— a weighty responsibility, for in Gautier’s lexicon, poets were not merely writers but spiritual and emotional beacons. Giselle (1841) would be Gautier’s tribute to Romanticism, inspired by Heine, Hugo, and the memory of La Sylphide.38
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