Ballerina Read online

  “Amis, la nuit est belle” (Friends, the night is beautiful).

  “Sur le rivage, assemblez-vous” (Assemble yourselves on the shore).

  Mario joined his voice with the singer playing Pietro to sing the famous duet “Amour sacré de la patrie” (Sacred Love of the Homeland).

  As soon as the song ended, Emma prepared to take her place backstage on a rock from which she would appear in the next scene, gazing out at what was supposed to be the Bay of Naples. She never made it.

  When she stood up from the bench, she shook out her skirts to make them look full and round for her entrance. The act of fluffing her costume fanned the flames of a nearby gaslight. The skirt ignited like dry straw, instantly engulfing Emma in flames.

  Crazed with fear, she ran out from the wings, looking, according to one terrified eyewitness, like a human torch. Her running served to fuel the fire, which licked upwards around her body, burning her legs, her back, and her upraised arms. She let out three blood-curdling screams, described by a doctor who was in the house that night as a “sound the ear would not soon forget.”16 She kept running in circles around the scenery as horrified cast members watched helplessly.

  A backstage fireman rushed to grab Emma. But fear had made her strong, and she pushed him away, sprinting away like a madwoman. One of her fellow dancers, Edouard Pluque, later to become a ballet master at the Paris Opéra, tried in vain to save her himself, burning his hands in the effort. The other cast members were by this time frightened of losing their own lives and had rushed out onto the street in their costumes.

  Another fireman (nineteenth-century theatres illuminated by candles and gaslights commonly employed firemen) ran from behind the wings and tackled Emma to the ground. He rolled her in a moistened blanket, succeeding finally in snuffing out the flames. His name was Jacques Muller, and the emperor would decorate him for bravery, rewarding him with a cash gift of 300 francs. For his efforts, Pluque got 200 francs.17

  Amazingly, Emma was still alive, despite sustaining burns on up to 40 percent of her body. As soon as the blanket was off her she stumbled to her knees to say a prayer, saying later, “Quand j’ai vu ces flammes, je me suis sentie perdue” (When I saw the flames, I thought myself lost).18

  Two doctors of the Paris Opéra, Laborie and Rossignol, carried the dancer to her dressing room to immediately offer first aid. Painstakingly, they removed what remained of her costume. She had been wearing a leotard, eleven fine-cloth skirts, and a corset.19 All that remained was a fragment of her belt and some strips of fabric, the remnants of which can today be seen in the Paris Opéra Museum, where what is left of Emma’s costume has been preserved in a tiny coffin-like box. The stays of her corset had become encrusted into her flesh. These the doctors painfully removed, one by one. Célestine reportedly took one look at her daughter stretched out in her dressing room, writhing in agony, and fainted.

  Wrote Laborie in his medical notes, “Le feu avait déterminé des brûlures d’une très grande étendue, envahissant les deux cuisses, les reins, le dos, les épaules et les deux bras... Son état paraissait très grave, non par le fait de la profondeur des brûlures, mais par le fait de leur étendue” (The fire had caused burns which extended over both thighs, the loins, the back, the shoulders and both arms. Her condition appeared very grave not so much from the depth of the burns as from their extent).20

  Taglioni, desperate to help in some way, grabbed a jar of makeup grease and began applying it to Emma’s charred flesh. The doctors also applied cotton wool over Emma’s body, which appeared to them as an open wound.21 She lay cocooned for thirty-six hours, before being carried home on a stretcher to her modest apartment. There, she was placed on her stomach, arms stretched out at both sides of her charred torso, and there she lay for 131 days, watched over by two nuns and attended to by three physicians, who ordered her be fed with juices from meat provided by a local butcher.22 Her mother also paid the city to cover the street below with straw to soften the sounds of horses and carriages passing by.

  As freakish as such an accident might seem today, death by fire was a common occurrence for ballerinas throughout the nineteenth century. It was just one of many backstage dangers that routinely threatened dancers’ lives. Taglioni once narrowly escaped being maimed or killed when an overhead piece of scenery came crashing down during a performance of Robert le Diable; she saw it coming and was able to jump away in the nick of time.23 Dancers in Romantic ballets were often hoisted aloft on wires, which sometimes became entangled in sets and scaffolding, leaving the poor creatures dangling precariously in midair before a horrified audience. The risks associated with the Romantic ballet were so great that the Paris Opéra offered danger pay to those dancers brave or desperate enough to be yanked by pulleys some thirty feet above the ground without a safety net. Opéra director Louis Véron says in his memoirs that the airy illusions of the Romantic ballet used to cause him anxiety, worried as he was for dancers’ safety: “I had personally inspected all the safety locks, the chain links, and the stays by dint of which the sylphs were attached to a number of metal wires, and though I attended all the trial runs, made with weights much heavier than those of our young dancers, I trembled lest some accident expose our twelve or fifteen flying corps girls to peril,” he writes. “As they each were accorded a salary of ten francs, practically the entire corps de ballet—courageous women and children—begged for the favor of being suspended.”24

  But fire was a more elusive foe. Gaslighting, also known as limelight, was a relatively new piece of stagecraft, introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The subtle and mysterious effects of gaslighting played no small role in the development of the Romantic ballet. Gaslighting allowed for house lights to be dimmed for the first time in theater history, giving rise to a heightened sense of onstage illusion. Choreographers of the day took advantage of the innovation, creating supernatural spectacles whose phantasmagorical imagery was augmented by the softly glowing light. But while gaslighting brought radiant drama and otherworldly atmosphere to Romantic ballet, it also ushered in a new set of risks for ballerinas, dozens of whom caught fire when their flimsy tutus brushed too close to an open flame. Scores perished as a result. Among them was the English dancer Clara Webster, who died after catching fire backstage at London’s Drury Lane Theatre during a performance of The Revolt of the Harem on December 14, 1844. Two half-sisters of the famous playwright Oscar Wilde, both dancers, also died this way; one reportedly tried to help the other when her costume caught alight but was burnt to death herself.25 There were gaslighting victims also in North America, on September 14, 1861, at the Continental Theater in Philadelphia, where seven young ballerinas at once caught on fire, all subsequently dying.26 Emma had herself witnessed a fiery backstage accident involving a fellow ballerina, which had taken place during a dress rehearsal for Le Papillon, about a year before her own catastrophe. The skirt of Maria Baratte, a petit sujet, had ignited on an open flame, setting her instantly on fire. Luckily, she was saved from death by a quick-thinking stagehand but not before her hand was badly burned.27

  The situation was so dire that the medical establishment rallied to draw public attention to what it called “this holocaust of ballet girls.” An article that appeared in 1868 in the British medical journal The Lancet entitled “The Ballet-Girl’s Hardship: A Needless Fate” sounded the call to arms:

  Have our readers ever reflected on the courage required by the ballet-dancer’s profession? The risks she runs are hardly less frequent and far more formidable than those which the soldiers of the line or the man o’ war’s man gets so much credit for facing. It is but one thing to take your chance of being sabered or hit by a bullet; but it is another (and to our mind) a much more terrible ordeal to pirouette in combustible gauze before the foot-lights, or, worse still, to be pinioned to an iron niche in some precarious perch, amid a blaze of light and within leap of the flame from a thousand burners. Yet this
is the experience which myriads of poor girls have to encounter night after night that juveniles may be entertained and bawdy crowds amused.28

  And yet precautions had been put in place in many theaters, including the Paris Opéra, which, not coincidentally, had also caught fire, burning twice to the ground before the end of the nineteenth century. Stage curtains were laced with steel to help contain fires if and when they broke out on stage. In 1859, the French state issued a decree demanding all people employed by theaters use a newly invented chemical bath retardant in which props and costumes were dipped to make them more fire resistant. The process, known as carteronising after its inventor, Jean-Adolphe Carteron, was effective. But it had a major drawback, at least where the dancers were concerned: the chemical yellowed their muslin skirts, making them look dark and dingy. The chemical also stiffened them, compromising the illusion of lightness and buoyancy ballerinas of this era worked so hard to achieve. Many dancers consequently refused to follow the government order:

  “Bah!” wrote the corps de ballets dancer Mlle Schlosser in a letter to Opéra management that survives in the theatre’s archives, “On ne brûle qu’une fois, mais on porterait tous les soirs de villains jupons” (Bah! We’ll burn but once, but have to suffer those ugly skirts every night).29

  Emma was among those who protested against the forced use of le carteronage. In a handwritten letter to management on Friday, November 23, 1860, asking to be exempt from having to dip her costumes in the fire retardant, Emma argued for the triumph of aesthetics over safety:

  Je tiens absolument, Monsieur, à danser les premières représentations du ballet avec mes jupons de danse ordinaires et je prends sur moi la responsabilité de tout ce qui pourrait m’en arriver. Pour le dernier tableau, je ne le danserai avec un jupon carteronisé. Je ne peux pas m’exposer à des jupons qui seraient laids ou qui n’iraient pas bien. Comme je trouve que l’administration a raison dans le changement qu’elle veut opérer, au bout de quelques représentations je demanderai moi-même à opérer, la substitution pourvu qu’elle ne nuise pas à l’effet des costumes, ce que je crains.

  Mille compliments empressés, Emma Livry30

  (I insist, sir, on dancing all first performances of the ballet in my ordinary ballet skirt, and I take it upon myself all responsibility for anything that may occur. In the last scene, I am willing to dance in a treated skirt, but I cannot wear skirts that would be ugly, or that would not become me. However, as I feel that the management is quite right to bring into force the proposed alterations, I will ask myself after a few performances, for a substitution to be made, provided that it will not spoil the effect of the costume, which is what I fear.

  With best wishes, Emma Livry)

  She had effectively authored her death sentence.

  When the end drew near, Emma seemed increasingly prescient of her impending doom. When French writer Ernest-Aimé Feydeau (father of comic playwright Georges Feydeau) came to the home she shared with her mother on rue Lafitte to interview her as part of his research for his 1865 novel, Le Mari de la danseuse, Emma told him she didn’t fear death by fire.31 This macabre confession was sparked when Feydeau explained to her how in his book the dancer-heroine burns to death. Emma allegedly then turned to her mother, always hovering in the background, and said, “Mourir brûlée... cela doit bien faire souffrir” (To be burnt to death, that must be very painful). She paused before adding, perhaps with a note of delicious melancholy as befitting a dancer molded in the Romantic tradition, “C’est égal, c’est une belle mort pour une danseuse” (All the same, it is a fine death for a dancer).32

  It was a case of being careful of what you wish for.

  Indeed, Emma seems to have resigned herself to her fate. Throughout her long recovery, during which she lay face down for months on a makeshift stretcher, her arms spread out by her sides, she endured without question the agonizing treatment of fresh lemon juice squeezed into her wounds to keep them bacteria-free;33 she never screamed, as instructed by her doctors who had warned her that any movement she might make could rupture the tender tissues newly forming across her back and lower limbs. “Je veux vivre! Dieu! donnez-moi du courage” (I want to live! God! Give me courage), she whispered to a family friend who had come to visit her during her convalescence.34

  Her main concern, it seems, was for her courtesan-mother, whom Emma had recently convinced to take her first communion, at age thirty. One can only imagine the depths of despair in which Célestine had been plunged, watching helplessly as her only child, her pride and joy, the daughter she had tried desperately to keep from being consumed by the predatory men at the ballet, was devoured by flames. She remained by Emma’s side, and when it was all over, she ended up as she had started—poor. Montguyon did what he could for her, but after the accident their relationship was never the same. He was said to be devastated by Emma’s tragedy. During her recovery, he stood watch over her and was quick to make sure that reports about her demise were seen as premature. He is probably responsible for a string of incredible news reports that followed soon after the accident, claiming that Emma was on the mend and would soon be dancing again. It was even suggested that the Paris Opéra was preparing for her imminent return to the stage. It was wishful thinking, a final act of airy illusion. Montguyon always was a gambling man. But the die had been cast.

  Emma took her final journey in the spring of 1863, supported by a brace of doctors hired to help her sit up, dressed head-to-toe in white, and waving feebly from her coach at the crowd of curious onlookers who had lined the road to watch her. She was on her way to Compiègne, where the emperor and empress had put their country house at her disposal, but she made it no further than Neuilly-sur-Seine, where her mother had rented an apartment. When the coach stopped, she was assisted into her mother’s home. There, she suffered another in a series of convulsions that had beset her for months. Emma knew she couldn’t go on.

  She ate a light supper on the night of July 26, 1863, and toward eleven o’clock that night, a slight smile on her lips, tears rolling down her cheeks, she died.35 The cause of death was said to be blood poisoning, brought on by the weakened state caused by her wounds.

  The funeral service took place three days later, at Notre-Dame-de Lorette. Emma, again dressed in white, was laid in a coffin cloaked in white cloth, a virgin’s farewell. The cortege that lead the way to Montmartre Cemetery was accompanied by a dozen young girls from the corps de ballet of the Paris Opéra, also dressed in white, holding the cords of the procession. Behind them walked the two nuns who had attended Emma while she lay ill, crossing themselves as they said their prayers. The whiteness of the funeral procession, symbolizing both Emma’s purity and the pristine values she fought to preserve in ballet, contrasted dramatically with the black of the many mourners who had come to bid Emma farewell.36

  Gautier covered the sad event for his newspaper, Le Moniteur, and wrote that he saw two white butterflies fluttering teasingly over Emma’s coffin, as if inviting her back to dance. He concluded by saying that the dancer who danced like a butterfly had become one—“a brûlé ses ailes à la flamme” (burning her wings in the flame).37

  It was flowery language, but in a strange way it was true: Emma had died as she had danced—in the heat of her chosen profession. The inscription on her tombstone was equally poetic: “O terre, sois-moi légère; j’ai si peu pesé sur toi” (Earth, tread lightly on me who so lightly weighed on you).

  As an epitaph, it summed up Emma’s dancing—light, ethereal, buoyant. Yet it also served to obscure the fact that far from being removed from terrestrial matters and concerns, Emma was very much of this earth: an artist strategically molded in the image of another, an emblem of French national pride, a victim of her own human frailty, if not her popular image as a diaphanous dancer.

  There was a starker reality: Célestine had to pawn her jewels to pay for Emma’s medical bills, totaling almost 27,000 francs. Montguyon
pleaded his mistress’s case to the emperor, who, on humanitarian grounds, granted Célestine a 40,000-franc gratuity plus a 6,000-franc annual pension. When the Second Empire fell in 1871, making way for the Third Republic, the new government refused to honor her pension, and Célestine was forced to move to a smaller apartment at 19 avenue de la Grand-Armée. There, the former dancer lived alone, dying of cancer in 1892, aged sixty-eight. 38 She had outlived her daughter by thirty years.

  Where ballet was concerned, Paris had changed for the worse. Emma’s death was the turning point. After she died, Paris would never again be the world capital of ballet. Even Taglioni moved away after Emma’s death, settling in England, where she became an instructor of dance and manners to members of the British elite, before returning to France via Marseilles, where she passed away in 1884. Emma remains a throwback to another time, her “imponderable lightness,” as Gautier put it, now almost forgotten except as a footnote to Le Papillon, a ballet rarely performed today. All ballerinas sacrifice something of themselves for their chosen profession. But Emma gave her entire life, dying needlessly as a result of wanting to preserve an immaculate ideal of ballet as a transcendent art form. At her funeral, Paris Opéra ballet master Lucien Petipa delivered the eulogy; he spoke of Emma’s brilliant career, emphasizing its brevity: “Quand tout te souriait, la jeunesse et le talent; quand la sagesse et la vertu étaient tes guides; quand, à seize ans, tu avais conquis la première place; quand les succès te tendaient la main à chaque pas, quand la presse et le public t’entouraient des plus vives sympathies, un accident affreux a suffi en un instant pour tout anéantir” (When everything—youth and talent—was smiling at you, when wisdom and virtue were your guides, when at sixteen years old, you had conquered first place, when successes greeted you with every step, when the press and the public enveloped you in warmest affection, a terrible accident was sufficient to obliterate everything in an instant).39