Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Friday, 24 November 1882

I have just left the Théâtre-Français — the second performance of Le Roi s'amuse. It is not well performed; it is even astonishing that it should be so poorly performed in such a theatre. Got as Triboulet is not tragic, not comic, not wicked. In the first act his jests [words blacked out: fall flat — it is not] the actor's fault. And I say that it is... The same jests are funny in the reading, and at the third performance as much as the first — well, not funny funny, but sufficiently so. I believe Coquelin would have been a perfect Triboulet. And in the second act, that exclamation: Ah! the curse! — it ought to be of a gripping, profound effect; like something fateful, superstitious; that punishment for his mockery of Saint-Vallier, and the father's curse taking hold. Got sings it as they do in inferior melodrama houses. And that terrible, piercing outburst: I want my daughter! — can you feel all that must be there of exhausted fury, of desperation, of terror? That man who, after straining to grimace and laugh, erupts in that tremendous cry: I want my daughter!!
One ought to hear, already in that supreme cry, the sobs about to burst forth at any moment... Everyone must understand this — each person has in their life been more or less in a position to utter an exclamation containing all those things, often even for trivial causes.
And here it is a jester — a disinherited creature, infirm, less than a man, a wretch.
Got asks for his daughter as one would ask for a beer. But where am I going, my God, and what is the point of this criticism? We were with the Gavinis, who find it natural that one should take them to every first night while half of us stay home. Those people irritate me — the husband takes his opinions from the Figaro and delivers them with extraordinary aplomb! And their furs smelled of mothballs!!
And they imagine we are going to take them to Sarah's first night and to Les Mères ennemies. Ah, no — these people of so little delicacy embarrass me as though it were my fault.

Notes

Got: Edmond Got (1822–1901), doyen of the Comédie-Française for fifty years, celebrated for comic roles. Marie's disappointment is pointed: he was the most distinguished actor available for the role, and she finds him inadequate. ↩
Coquelin: Benoît-Constant Coquelin (1841–1909), known as Coquelin aîné, generally considered the finest French comic actor of his generation and later the originator of Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Marie's suggestion that he would have made a perfect Triboulet shows her theatrical discernment. ↩
Saint-Vallier: in Hugo's play, the Comte de Saint-Vallier, whose daughter Blanche has been dishonoured by King François I. His solemn public curse upon the jester Triboulet who helped arrange the seduction is the pivot of the plot. ↩
A bock: a glass of bock beer — the quintessential offhand order at a Paris café, requiring no emotion, no urgency. Marie's comparison is devastatingly precise. ↩
Les Mères ennemies (Enemy Mothers): a play by Catulle Mendès, staged at the Odéon in 1882. Sarah: Sarah Bernhardt, whose Parisian first nights were social events of the first magnitude. ↩