Lamant aux yeux bleus - Rendez-vous à Chicago (Harlequin Passions) (French Edition)

Such reading thus generates a kind of metahistorical backsliding from word to word. In encounters with the texts of Shakespeare or Joyce, phonemic reading constitutes at times a relapse to the primitive status of a writing which, as it were, gave the decipherer no break.

Phonemic reading—reading as we inevitably read—thus undoes that same economy of scriptive demarcation which writing, in imitation of vocal inflection, was only gradually to develop. Phonemic reading might thus be said to replay, if not the birth of modern consciousness in something like Hegel's sense of the inward articulation of mind, then the birth of its localized correlative in a private, an inner, an asocial reading.

In a written text, as it is augmented and recontoured by silent reading, we descend into the origins of the reading activity as we know it. From late antiquity through the early to late medieval period, the oral processing, if not delivery, of texts eventually metamorphosed into silent reading, with the parallel shift from composition by dictation, or self-dictation, to composition by writing. In the present state of civilization, ontogeny now recapitulates phylogeny, with each child or preliterate reader being tutored in what the culture had once to discover for itself: Transformed at the same period in the Middle Ages, too, was the representation of reading in the visual arts, its earlier iconography having frequently included the pictorial trope of a dove hovering at the ear of a reader, suggesting audible voicing.

It is hard to overestimate the contribution of textual word division to such historical change. In this light, those cross-lexical slippages actuated, whether intentionally or not, by a later literary writing generate an aural ambiguity that does indeed return writing to the condition of orality without the predetermined inflections of public oratory or private vocalization.

Scholarship on the scribal tradition, as a matter of fact, often instances errors of transcription which have the form, if not the force, of poetic transformation. As one would expect, running words together without breaks runs the continuous risk of "assimilative" misreading. Discussing the career of Chrysanthus after his sudden death, one of Petronius's speakers in the Satyricon says "Quid habet quod queratur? Ab asse crevit," given by the Loeb translation as "What. He started with twopence" the "as" a basic unit of monetary measure. At a late point in its manuscript history, this speech was anachronistically transformed by a Latin scribe to "Quid habet quod queratur?

Whether or not this ecclesiastic imposition on the Roman text is taken as a kind of direct dictation from the scribe's unconscious, its medium is still the shifting phonemic base of language. It is this very basis in the phonetic alphabet—especially given the fact that scribes regularly mumbled the undivided words out loud to aid in differentiating them—which permits the displacements that lead to junctural ambiguity.

Another "classic" example of scribal error, combined again of ecclesiastic transformation and syllabic malformation, happens to occur later in this same epic by Petronius. A curse is being delivered, a promise of sure vengeance—even "though you may have a gold beard like a god" "barbam aureum habeas" [chap. This misprision may have occurred, commentary suggests, because of the preceding s at the end of the "habeas," inducing the "dittography" of a false liaison.

The point is finally that even when word breaks were introduced into the manuscript tradition and reading went internal, its operations under cover of silence, there remains a sense in which private text production is always a response to writing as "interpreted" by voicing. Writing is received first by the retina and then "copied," reconstituted as language, along the palpable surfaces of the vocal apparatus, however much inhibited by silence—and well before any secondary graphic recording that might follow.

Reading is thus a transcoding, if not a transcription, of the graphic into the alphabetic, the scriptive into the morphophonemic—and all the while, of course, the linear into the syntagmatic. By speaking out loud in order to facilitate his graphic replications, the scribe merely ritualizes that detour through "reproduction" at the root of all reading.

In view of the unsteady link between the phonotext and its graphic determinants, the scribal epoch and the post-Guttenberg computer age enjoy at least one point of near—and illustrative—convergence. Without the typewriter's mechanical interposition of the impressed page between the moment of input and the legible text, the fluid "screen" of one's thoughts is open to continual and virtually instantaneous self-revision. What we see on the computer's display panel is a cursor speeding along just fractionally ahead of the words we think—and think we are finished with.

Precisely because such textual production is more completely at our "disposal" than any set of typed lines, its momentum remains at the perpetual mercy of a spacing that can lop and fob off a stray grapheme, make a word by breaking another, or, for instance, where "a void" is meant, "avoid" it by nudging forward the gap. In continual play is the cursor as "pace bar" sparring with a space bar for the disposition of the text. Letter by letter, the incremental articulation of words in syntagmatic sequence can, therefore, in their electronic manifestation, activate a felt relativism of word division that bears closest comparison, outside of technology, to the work of the inner ear in reading—for which of course "word processing" might also serve as another name.

To summarize these curious intersections of philology, technology, and the physiology of reception: In this sense, the contingencies of computer "writing" can serve to visualize, precisely because they do not stabilize, the fluxions of such reading—of reading as such. With the history of word division in mind, to evocalize a text is therefore to travel a major cultural advance in reverse, and to do so in the private space, the lag or slack, between the scripted demarcations of a text and its aural processing.

The perpetual risk of ambiguity being introduced into the system, however, since it would not be scriptive, hence visible, does not, as it did for the medieval scribe, so much require a deceleration in reading speed as incur an inevitable oscillation in the read field of wordplay.

From Hegel's phenomenology of mind to this somatic phenomenality of reading is a leap for which a quintessentially modernist passage from Virginia Woolf should provide some mediating intuition. With its unique struggle of mind against body, sickbed reading even to oneself struck Woolf as a rather astonishing reversion to the temporality of sound production, a dis-ease of the signifier—in other terms, a rematerialization of Hegel's "two aspects," aural and visual, as no longer a unified "basis. In yielding to the phonic grip of poetry, Woolf is transgressing a latter-day Hegelian law of literacy that will be formulated at its most rigid a little more than a decade later, in Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature , whose authors dismiss as "absurd" any "behavioristic" attempts to deny what "all experience shows," namely, that "unless we are almost illiterate.

By a calculated ironic reversal, she writes of "health" as if it played the role of foreign invader in her psychopathology of silent reading: Our intelligence dominates over our senses. Woolf moves from textuality to reception in order to speak about a troubling of sense by sensuality. In this fine madness of a reading at once debilitated and hypersensitized, phonology obtrudes upon script, delays the denotative by the delirious, keeps meaning at bay. It thereby induces a poetically restorative encroachment of sound upon cerebration. In fact, it does just what Barthes hopes for from textual "listening": With the anti-body, so to speak, of silent textual processing no longer immunizing the mind against letters as the signs of sounds as well as of semic elements, reading finally for Woolf, and in more than the ordinary way, makes sense: What Saint Ambrose may have thought to escape, what Hegel theorized into subordination, Woolf turns round to embrace—and at her desk as well as upon her sickbed.

Idiom once again has it right, especially for literary texts: I read to myself. When John Russell, in Style in Modern British Fiction , attempts to expose the excesses of Stanley Fish's brand of "affective" or "reader-response" stylistics, he drives Fish's premises to what he considers their reductio ad absurdum: The very attentiveness the mind gives to words will be to portions of words chiefly. We will be examining the combined somatic and cerebral "affect" generated in the reader by the exertion of one syllable or phoneme upon another at its border.

With the eye as "cursor" and the ear as "space bar," now making space,. It invites an "affective stylistics" that—far more palpably than Fish ever intended by the title of his influential essay—does indeed locate "literature in the reader. And it is there in me as I am present to its meaning: In breaking with the verbal "icon" of the New Critical enterprise, and in replacing it with a very different kind of kinetic "artifact," the magnitude of Fish's departure has to do with our own uprooting as readers.

To process a text at full engagement may well be claimed "to use it up" , in the sense that its whole purpose is eductive: It is thus a self-consuming artifact" At a deeper, because also more superficial, level than Fish explores, however, such an artifact "consumes" the readerly "self" as well—and in both senses: Literature thus takes its place "in" the reader to the exclusion of the existential "self," doing so—at the most rudimentary level of psycholinguistic operation—through the tremble and blend of what could well be called "affective phonemics.

Literary language often goes forward by marking the perpetual danger of a collapse back from structure into origins: Literary textuality, when self-consciously foregrounding the relation of literature to language, may be read—which is a way of defining a certain kind of reading as well — as the continual confrontation, within writing, of the phonic and the graphic.

A confrontation variously elastic or implacable, placid or explosive. At this point a graduated formulation is in order, one which should explain why so much of what follows may seem preoccupied with semantic denotation, with referential activity, however much carried out in the name of phonological analysis. For this is exactly where the anarchic possibilities of phonemic reading encounter directly, only to diverge from, a more familiar stylistics of motivated and thematized authorial effects. A threefold understanding, then: If 1 speech is the coordination of noise into articulate utterance, and 2 poetic language is understood to be a recovery in part of the acoustic aspect—.

Such a challenge is posed most directly not through the irruptions of musicality into meaning, since this is merely one classic reckoning of the poetic function in general. The challenge is triggered instead by the dragging of meaning back toward its source in a dispersion of phonetic material awaiting articulation. Significance at work, with its saliencies and evasions, its foregroundings and conversions, yields place to signifying. The pulse of language itself is thus heard beneath utterance, heard bringing itself to utterance.

This sense of a regressive rather than transgressive style, this whole logic of textuality, immediately points up the denotative as well as the acoustic issues at stake. Hence the need well before any thematized stylistics sets in for a partly semantic surveillance of phonic modulation. Textuality submits to attention in this vein as the continual churn of wording beneath and between the chain of words, the rumble of utterance as it passes in and out of possibility, of potentiation. Where the first phase of formalism was concerned with the "roughening"—the estrangement or alienation—induced by style upon discourse, the microlinguistic attentions of this book will treat the narrower abrasions of language against itself.

Whereas ordinary stylistics concerns the difference between what is said and what might alternatively have been expressed, the kind of aural reading undertaken here operates within the invisible differential between what is said and what is otherwise said. So it is that lexemes are not always taken at their word.

In this sense, phonemic reading moves beyond—or behind—"style" altogether. Its concern is more with linguistic accident than with aesthetic craft, the lottery of letters and sounds as they pour in and out of lexical molds. When segmentation no longer holds firm, a trans-segmental—by elision: Even if we had external evidence that a poet like Tennyson calculated such a textual ambiguity at a given point, its reading effect would still fall under the category of linguistic accident.

The conceivably strategic effect is no more certain of reception than is such an irrelevant distraction as this from Tennyson's own preceding line: By contrast, phonemic reading of the more operable sort is densely overdetermined. Even though it catches textual utterance on the verge of radical dispersion, utterance on the cusp of mumble, it tends to honor both syntactic and semantic constraints—if and where it can. Countless phonemic strays and filaments wash perpetually across any passage of verse or prose, neither premeditated nor preventable, relentlessly unattended, both irrevocable and at the same time unvocalized.

Indeed, it is in the nature of phonemes to surrender all real discreteness to the rippling flow of speech. It is also in the nature of phonemes in a given speech act to blur at their borders, creating there the possibility of more paradigmatic choices than can simultaneously be made. This is what causes a systemic overload, as it were, in the differential process itself. Only when such an overload actively discharges a new morphological option, an alternate syllable or lexeme, does the phonemic condition take semantic shape, however momentary and malleable, as an effect in phonemic reading: The effect is not, as in Mikhail Bakhtin, a dialogism of voices, a fugal braid, but rather a weft of voicings tucked under each other's edges.

These evocalizations are looped or cross-stitched, folded or seamed, across a loose fabric of morphological ambiguity. They inscribe there a dual logic of juncture, a dual logging of enunciatory options that eludes the ordinary purview of stylistic study. Stylistics is a discipline of long standing, of course; phonemic reading only a hypothetical project of the current study, a hunch, a blueprint of tentative possibilities.

But let me speak for a moment about the latter as if it were already established in full acknowledgment of its natural parameters—and thus in clear distinction from that "rival" methodology which it would in fact hope to revive, by revising, from within. Where stylistics operates always in view of the normative, phonemic reading engages the formative. Stylistics is concerned with the lexicon recruited by syntax, words arrayed in sequence; when it takes up the single letter, it is usually only to calibrate a recurrence or symmetry such as alliteration deployed to brace or inflect the syntactic structure.

With a quite different importance accorded the letter as signifying marker, phonemic reading enters the perpetual dialectic between lexicon and syntax, their mutual tension and erosion. Stylistics studies the language act; phonemic reading intersects the action of lingual formation itself, its increments and transformations: Stylistics is concerned at most with phonological patterns, while phonemic reading takes up their morphological implications, the junctural overlaps and detachments that both.

Stylistics in this sense examines surface structure; phonemic reading overhears its dual and often divided basis, the league and leak of acoustic matter delegated from word to word. Stylistics is distributional, phonemic reading differential; the one focused occasionally on phonetic units, the other on phonemes themselves as the fundamental increments of word formation.

In stylistics the lexical code usually stays in place and only the message is submitted to examination. In phonemic reading, the lexical code remains perpetually in play. While stylistics might at times consider verse or prose "rhythm," phonemic reading depends upon the very tempo of cognition as it may actually imperil the order of syntactic contiguity. Stylistics is thus aimed at the sequential, while phonemic reading gravitates toward the segmental. Whereas stylistics tends in this way to establish and certify itself as a branch of poetics, phonemic reading emerges more as a subdiscipline of linguistics.

At issue, in short, is the errand of meaning versus the errancy and hazard of signifying. In all this difference from stylistics in response to a perceived spillage of syllables, I am not of course proposing a difference from everyday reading practice so fundamental and confounding that the very notion of reading as regularly understood, of reading as understanding, would become inoperable.

Reading Voices contemplates a sensory—encroached upon a cognitive—processing of texts whose intermittent inevitability says nothing about the prevalence, feasibility, or likely force of its recognition. Reading voices primarily what it is told to by script: Deviant voicing may occur, yes, but no one would or could in the ordinary sense "read" that way often or for long. One couldn't do so, that is, and still call it reading.

Literature disallows it as much as any other textual form, though unlike others, literature may program—or if not, may openly tolerate—an occasional phonic counterplay on the near side of chaos. To note this in a critical discussion is thus to offer no alternate way of reading but rather to expose the alternating resistances that get in the way of reading, the energies that reading as we know it must for the most part override, counting as it does, as it must, on all the deafness one can muster across the stroboscopic—hence also strobophonic—flutter of textual sequencing.

In the work of Barthes and Kristeva, prominently, the understanding of a "text" is based on a model of production rather than communication. A text is seen to actualize its semiotic operations by the manifestation of "significance" through a linear and discursive succession of words: Working within the model of produced textuality as well, this book will consider that dimension of the phenotext which is regularly ignored in discussions of the phenomenality of reading.

Ignored, no doubt, because it seems to open a less direct access from surface features to the foundational genotext—but ignored at some cost to a materialist apprehension of textuality's dual "phenomena. This phonotextuality is inherent, it bears repeating, in the very nature of so-called phonetic writing. In alphabetic language, the "glyphs" are not of course pictograms but rather the indication rather than transcription of acoustic though not vocal signifiers; they are phonetic marks that become phonemic in a given language, as we have seen, only when they are lexically "relevant," when they mark "distinctive" or "pertinent" features in the construction of morphemes.

Only such linguistically functional differences between sounds, such phonemic values, are engaged when reading operates at the level of—and so in the transitive sense may be said directly to operate—the momentum of the phonotext. Everything here depends on silent pronunciation, on "endophony," even in the unspoken registration of a written text. This is just where phonemic reading comes in, where quite literally it intervenes. The silent sounding of a text of course often matches exactly, but often at other points crosses athwart, the lexical track of the inscribed text.

As opposed to the "graphotext," what I am isolating under the name of the phonotext has precisely that degree of independence from the scriptive aspect of writing which allows for the kinetic, wavering tensions of phonemic reading—especially in a language of such orthographic irregularities as English. By contrast, one can imagine a purely graphic equivalent to phonemic drift that would carry no phenomenal charge—that would simply not be engaged by silent or sounded reading.

In normal reading, that is, only such effects emerge as can be manifested by the slippery interdependence of phonemes and graphemes, not by their radical divorce. The phonotext is thus a materialized part of the phenotext, accessible only in phonemic reading. It is within the activity—and activation—of phonemic reading that the exemplary case of the transegmental drift comes into play: In Derridean grammatology, to be investigated further in Chapter 3, it is this blank that is meant to serve as the irrefutable proof that meaning is carried, even in speech, by the graphic or "grammic" rather than phonic signifier.

Without confuting in practice this theoretical claim, the read phonotext of any written "utterance" still an entirely dead metaphor nevertheless does move, always in motion as it is, to contest the articulatory reign of the blank, to render word division unreliable, contingent, dispersive. Generated only by the latent musculature of silent enunciation, the phonotext, then, is the general field of this study. Which is a way of saying that the subject of these chapters the transegmental drift is only part of its project phonemic reading.

Such a project can best begin by convoking earlier studies in textual "audition" and intertextual variants. Chapter 1 will therefore bring into dialogue perhaps the most suggestive experiment to date in phonologically oriented reading, the "microstylistics" of Geoffrey Hartman, with both the more sustained theoretical work of Michael Riffaterre in the semiotics of poetry and the less systematic investigations of Christopher Ricks into the impinging alternatives that inflect a line by their very exclusion as "anti-puns.

Once this approach is extended further yet into the realm of phonemic alternatives subtending even lexical sense, the premises of their work will contribute directly to, and from different perspectives help to clarify, the possibilities of phonemic reading. At various points in the research for this project, I tended to think of the particular effect under scrutiny, the transegmental ambiguity or drift, as a kind of "styleme," the smallest measurable unit of "style" very loosely defined , a feature which would, to be sure, cause no few problems for the procedures of traditional stylistics.

But given that style is itself unquantifiable, the very idea of a stylemic "unit" seemed to falsify the differential operations in question. The idea of a "styleme" simply did not claim the same status as, say, a "phoneme. My concentration upon just such a narrowly deliminated and liminal function as transegmental slippage within the whole field of phonotextual effects—one. The sense to be tested is that phonemic reading can serve to read that moment of strain and give in a text when style is reduced to more rudimentary and still fluctuant processes of word formation.

Back again to Freud's example. It is the nature of a portmanteau like "alcoholidays" that its morphemic transgressions get recuperated by the logic of lexical coinage. The phenotext here is a word, but the genotext is implicitly a syntactic breakdown: At the level of the phonotext, another way to account for the portmanteau conflation of lexemes is to speak of a wavering displacement of one syllable by its double, a wavering that takes place—instates its displacement, that is—as a clear-cut superimposition of common morphemic elements.

This of course is apparent at the level of the written as well as the phonic text, which is why the cut and paste is so clear. Unlike such homophonic puns as "holy" and "wholly," say, the reciprocal elision in Freud's "hol" from one lexeme or the other by simultaneous turn is a visible doubling up as well as a phonic multiplication. Its interest for phonemic reading, however, is its status as a mutual overlapping rather than a fixed span of overlap.

In standard homophony, the phonotext "says" exactly twice as much as the scriptive level of the phenotext. By contrast, in the visible elision of a portmanteau, the pure doubleness is dilated to a morphophonemic biplay. The same is true of the more specialized case yet, the transegmental drift, even though its effect is never visible or clear-cut—never clear to the unaided eye in its lexical recutting—but available only to phonemic reading. The transegmental drift can thus be read as a cross-lexical homophony that shifts the very lexical boundaries upon which it depends, effecting condensation only by a displacement of the gap, operating with all the alogicalities and covert agendas of the unconscious.

Such lexical drifting is activated only by a homophonic pun on silence itself, a double reading of the gap. In this way, phonemic reading attends in general the slack between morphemic and sheer graphic structure: Its elusive limit case, the transegmental drift—the cutting edge, as it were, of the phonotext—is the more narrowly read crisis of lexical boundary in which paradigmatic alternatives for a morphemic unit intrude phonemically upon the read text through the contamination of adjacency.

The transegmental drift defies the scripted, the visible, the graphemic form of words in sequence, defies especially their constitutive dependence on inscribed gaps, the very logic of junctural breaks. This drift of the phonotext is therefore, as we have seen, not a component but an exponential interplay, less a microsegment than a differential segue, part one word, part the next.

Such drifting is generated by diction under read duress from syntax, but in a way that puts syntax itself at risk. It undercuts the spaced succession of words by cutting across them at an angle oblique to inscription, generating in the phonotext an ambiguously inflected contiguity, severing and assimilative at once. Whereas traditional stylistics is the study of words or sometimes, say, "rhyming" syllables in sequence, phonemic reading acknowledges an in ter dependence, and hence potential discrepancy, between two parallel textual sequences: Whereas the smallest measure of style is the verbal option , the irreducible crux of phonemic reading is an alternation still in process as our eyes move across the text.

In the extreme case of a transegmental slippage, this differential play is realized—both senses—as a problematic tension. The conjoint foundation of a text in phonemes and graphemes becomes instead a reciprocal con-founding of that very wording toward which they are meant to collaborate, a "graphonic" contrariness.

As this transpires, signifying falls between the cracks of wording. Null values are invaded by full, while adjacent ones are invalidated in their turn. Such is the contestation of style at its inner horizon, an affront by language itself at the bedrock of lexical segmentation. The transegmental drift is not an irruption of discourse into language, one traditional hallmark of style, but rather the breakthrough—through vanishing breaks—of linguistic materiality into style itself. The blanks that make wording possible are processed instead as a sequential mirage that dissipates into new mergers.

Some very broad apprehensions in every sense may accrue to the narrowness of such attention. Acknowledging in this manner a reading eccentric to writing may finally provide one of the most convincing ways to localize the no longer metaphysical but no less mythologized status of writing, as a crisis of the decentered subject, in the work of Blanchot, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze, and others.

In a melodramatic often little more than metaphoric scenario, writing in this way becomes the imputed emptying out of identity always incident to inscription, a traumatic alterity. It becomes indeed that proto-schizoid alienation from the presence of self to oneself necessitated by being presented—by representation—in language. Writing is thus variously the site place or scene enactment of otherness, dispersal, dis-integrity, annihilation: The emphasis is always on writing, on the letter, on script and its determinant blanks.

Instead of the blank as inscribed void, a fatal hole in continuity, however, phonemic reading would give a different weight, a differential force, to the blank, one all the more subversive for being less figurative, more actively linguistic. The work of this book is thus to specify further many of the contentions of po stst ructuralist thought—as they come to be constellated around just such a graphonic fold as that reciprocal assimilation of the doubled st sound in the word itself.

Consider again the death of the subject in our revised sense of the "self-consuming artifact," that self-effacing fact of verbal art. The supposed neutral simulacrum of self, of the "I" who speaks, that sign rather than vestige both instituted and constituted by writing, that evacuated trace of identity, finds the best justification for its hyperbolical treatment as the lethal instantiation of nonidentity in the fact actualized only by reading, not by script alone of writing's own internal decenteredness, its difference from itself in process.

This is a difference, often a morphemic deferral, produced by precisely that bivalent momentum of the phenotext, graphic and phonic at once, which can at any time materialize as a graphonic friction, a dyslocution. It is one thing to recognize that writing never says what one means. It is quite another to know that you can never be there where it does its saying.

It is still another perhaps even more actively disruptive thing for a text not to say what it says, to be at odds with its own processes from within the logic of wording itself. Here may be the most powerful apparition of the unconscious in its full threat to reason and ego. Nothing hones to the expected efficiency of the communicative will.

The most obvious identity crisis figured forth by writing is in this sense the lack of identity between its own material co-presences, the friction of phonemic against letteral articulation. In this sense to read lire could well appear to rescind the presumption of a coherent signifying subject abolir by abrogating the very rule of diction. Reading along a written sequence could thus sweep away the bracketing gaps that hold the lexeme in place, abolishing the tyranny of the blank by emancipating the stream of phonic continuity that is ordinarily regimented by the halting system of script: In this sense, at least, the relation of the phonotext to the graphic stratum of signification—the relation of our reading to what we think we read—bears comparison with the workings of the unconscious, fluid, diffusive, perverse, beneath the discipline of conscious expression.

With preternatural directness, the phonemic enactment of a text audits the voice of the other. Reading always with an alien ear, it brings the alien near. This verbal stream in which otherness mutters to us is of course Virginia Woolf's experimental trademark. It is related to that dis-ease of reading in which, no longer policed by script, the sounds of language return again, encroaching on vocalization.

Wellek and Warren notwithstanding, countless silent readers of literary texts since Ambrose and even well before must have known this, must have heard it for themselves. Woolf's illness, like her art, simply takes this awareness to a certain limit in English writing. On the other side of which, though arrived before her according to a different agenda, glimmers the polyglossolalia of James Joyce.

Past the early phase of the Joycean "revolution" and on toward the feminist bearings of Woolf's studied and heroic ill-literacy, as a final stand against the gender-straitened body of the positioned reader, this book of readings theorized—and of theorized reading—now makes its way.

The support it gains not only from precursors at the intersection of literature, linguistics, and psychoanalysis but from moments of revisionary verbal responsiveness in practical criticism cannot be missed. Nor is it unencouraging to find that, in his role as poet rather than critic, one of our most astute and nuanced readers of acoustic play in English verse has just last year in the New York Review of Books 2 February published "An Old Counting-Game" poem in which numerals are sequentially deconstructed by way of transegmental phonemic junctures.

That John Hollander should sound more like Lacan than like a mathematician in his assimilative biplay—his lexical as well as lineal enjambment—"Three: The textual evidence to follow is arranged in a graduated and interpenetrating relation with the theory that both grows from such examples and calls for more in clarification. Chapter 1 begins with a reading of a Shakespearean sonnet designed to contrast and extend a classic instance of New Critical methodology with approaches drawn alternately from late formalism and poststructuralism.

Once having developed a vocabulary of intensive reading freed from the authorial orientation of New Critical stylistics, the chapter moves to apply its "phonemics" of the text to Hamlet. In turning from a sonnet to a stage play, the emphasis shifts from silent reading, of course, to a virtual prompt text for dramatic vocalization and, hence, to the different effects permissible within the range of such phonemic ambiguities as elision and liaison.

At the same time, sonnet and play together offer a kind of proof text for our traditional idea of literary reading or theatrical reception, for that matter , with its verbal expectations of kinetic variety, ambiguity, phonic. Building on the Shakespearean text whether privately read or publicly intoned as a touchstone of literary signifying, Chapter 2, on rhyme, moves to proven phonological territory in order to isolate a phonemic widening of the rhyming unit—as an exemplary case of lexical slippage in the written text.

The way is then prepared for the theoretical overview of Chapter 3, in which the divergent claims of such writers on language as Saussure, Jakobson, Jespersen, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Barthes, Foucault, and Lucette Finas are weighed and negotiated under pressure of the evidence so far amassed about script's vocalic subtext. This forum on the graphic versus the phonic dimension of textuality paves the way in turn for the second phase of this study: Following a survey of such effects in verse from Donne to Dylan Thomas Chapter 4 , a comparable experiment is performed Chapter 5 on three centuries of English fiction from Sterne through Dickens to Lawrence, including related material on homophonic wordplay in the Victorian popular press.

This investigation of both dialogue and description in novels and their punning intertexts is designed to discover how much leverage on narrative prose can be achieved by the linguistic orientation of phonemic reading—before confronting, that is, the metalinguistic prose poetry of James Joyce Chapter 6 and the very different phonemic modulations of Virginia Woolf's verbal wavelengths Chapter 7. Throughout both parts of this book, on as many fronts and with as much focus as possible, the effort is to give theory back to literature by giving literature back to language. Eliot, The Waste Land [1].

The first phase of my subject is that authorial idiolect, or "style," which has come to be the measure of literary language in English. Acoustically textured to the point of distraction, it is a verbal medium full of a phonemic fury of sound signifying not nothing—but signifying more energetically than any signified requires. This is a sense of the commanding "Shakespeherian Rag" that haunts all our literary writing and reading. When Eliot in The Waste Land spells out, stretches out, the incantatory Bardic name, he does so without the punning "hear" and "ear" which are there, nonetheless, to be read.

The answer is obvious enough to elude most literary study: Who can doubt it? How, though, to prove it? This chapter will attempt in some measure to close the distance between credence and demonstration. It remains a humanist truism that literature speaks to us. The work of deconstruction might be understood to have resurrected the dead metaphor of such a notion in order to lay its ghost for good.

Literature has no voice.

It is text, not talk. But what is left in the wake of this widely successful campaign against phonocentrism? Let's take an extreme case. Who would deny that the rest of us read to ourselves differently from the case of a sighted reader deaf from birth? What then is it that we think we hear, or hear in thinking?

Not the author's voice, granted. Yet if literature cannot be fairly said to speak to us, perhaps it speaks through us. Our being there in front of it is the precondition not of its existence but of its function. Or another way of putting our relation to a text: A less extreme case.

Imagine a cultural context within the use and dissemination of the English language in which the written words of that language, while referring to the same known entities or concepts as they do now for us, are nonetheless quite consistently different in aural quality. Easily done, since this. Readers silently ventriloquize a text according to the linguistic conventions of their time. To borrow from Shakespeare's sonnet 23, the role of the reader is "to hear with eyes.

Such is the auditory leeway opened precisely by the lack of literature's inherent voice. This chapter will eventually close in on a very particular and particularly eccentric effect, the transegmental drift: To attend to such phonic drifting is to track the smallest node, in effect, of a deconstructed writing's so-called difference from itself. In Shakespeare's sonnet 15, the speaker, after a sustained contemplation of transience in its organic aspects, summons a specular image, though entirely undetailed, of his beloved young man, promising him, or it his image , the immutability otherwise stolen from the youth, from any and all youth, by the violence of time: I choose this sonnet because it happens to have most of an entire chapter devoted to it, the last and summary chapter, in Stephen Booth's Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets and to be thoroughly and expertly glossed in Booth's subsequent edition of the sonnets.

To begin with, the lyric in question:. Booth's compressed editorial gloss on the syntactic duplicity of the opening lines is more expansively investigated in his Essay. The note in his edition of the sonnets—to the effect that "under pressure of syntactical necessities. Shortly after Stanley Fish argues in Surprised by Sin for a cognizance of similar crossed signals in readerly responses to Milton, [3] Booth writes that this syntactic self-revision "requires an easy but total reconstitution of the reader's conception of the kind of sentence he is reading" ESS, There is, however, something more cannily to the point—or is it uncannily?

If only implicitly, Booth here parts company from Empson. Though sensitized to "double grammar" in the sonnets, the favored Empsonian mode of analysis, Booth would apparently resist the notion that such vacillating syntax is ever finally "resolved" into stability and coherence. Instead of saying that what seemed to be the sense of the first line turns out not to have been after all, Booth intriguingly suggests that what seems in retrospect to be the reconstituted first line is still only an "as if. Rethinking is not revision; the "last word" on a set of lines does not supplant, only subdues, our first impression; what is is not necessarily what was.

To unload these implications from Booth's editorial gloss is to appreciate at how narrow and elusive a range he can detect what he has claimed in his earlier Essay about such snags in the "syntactic fabric" of the sonnet: This too is an unusually suggestive phrasing, at least from the hindsight of contemporary discussion.

Such double grammar in the sonnets does not mime inconstancy, or even thematize it, but performs it autonomously in the linguistic sphere. At the risk of "double reading" Booth himself—or paraphrasing, that is, from a vantage two decades further along in critical history, what it seems as if he meant—it must nevertheless be remarked that the "real sense" of mutability in the lines has little to do with grammar developing a mimetic analogue of transience based on floral and astral prototypes.

Rather, the ephemeral in language is its primary experience, as "real," as material, as any other. Its evocation is at most homologous with the declared themes of the poem, not subordinate to them. In this latter sense, style does not "answer to" theme—except by enacting its counterpart in words. Just this line of thought also serves to underwrite Booth's attention to Shakespeare's phonemic and syllabic as well as syntactic play in the sonnets.

Pursuing this interest, Booth's approach demonstrates as much congeniality, if not direct allegiance, to the Jakobsonian as to the Empsonian tradition, with the former's more systematic commitment to Booth's phrase "phonetic and ideational interplay" SS, One word is selected over another from the paradigm of alternatives not just to fill a space in the grammar of progression but to secure an equivalence or resemblance with some other word previously set in place, as in the aurally looped sequence in sonnet 15 likening, as well as linking, "consider" to "conceit" through the intermediary syllabic matter of "perceive.

Plotted by such choices in succession, the poetic is the crossing of the contiguous by the interchangeable. Working back, like Jakobson, to the binary linguistics of Saussure, Michael Riffaterre's more recent investigations into the language of literature also concentrate on pertinent oppositions as they are spread out across the syntactic line. In true formalist manner, style is sidelined by questions of literariness, itself in Riffaterre a kind of binary alternative to literalness: True to semiotics, too, literary textuality is constituted by an array of associations that can be traced only through "signs" of meaning, clues, gestures, vestiges.

Rather than searching out, as Saussure did, [8] the anagrammatical displacements of a Latin verse line—dismemberments of sacred or heroic names to be reassembled in the reading—Riffaterre. For Riffaterre, "Saussure's stroke of genius. When Riffaterre himself looks beyond rather than behind the text, however, what he finds is a veiled revelation far less encrypted than Saussure's anagrams. He finds a semiosis mobilized without being literalized. Rather than radiating centrifugally from some occulted core, the text is generated from point to point by its variance from a paradoxically external and unwritten center.

The relevance of this notion to Booth's edition of the sonnets grows quickly clear. The editor's scrupulous logging of those contemporaneous proverbs and aphorisms that "underlie" Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance, witnesses to an intertextual pressure which Riffaterre would theorize as the semiotically definitive relation of a given sonnet to its decentered matrix. More specifically, this relation is understood by Riffaterre as a semiotic reaction formation variously characterized in terms of denial, avoidance, suppression, conversion, condensation and displacement, all with their openly courted Freudian associations, including especially the return of the repressed.

Since it is lexical, this expansion occurs in the form of words linked together grammatically, and is not phonetic or graphemic, as in Saussure's paragram" TP, Evident here is Rifaterre's tacit holding action against exactly the kind of phonemic reading which this chapter finds invited by the Shakespearean text—as the clear if pulsing signal of its literariness.

Between full semantic security and syllabic mayhem, then, lies the domain of phonemic reading. A Riffaterrean take on the opening quatrain of sonnet 15, for example, might read the mentioned "comment" of the stars their legibility as a sign system to reveal the whole figural sequence of astrological reference in the text as the expanded variant of the proverbial notion that we read our destiny in the stars.

Though Riffaterre himself does not very often pursue matters even to the level of the syllable, let alone its constituent phonemes, his method would seem to allow for this in principle. The end of sonnet 15 offers a test case ready to hand. As the text moves into the monosyllabic tread of the closing couplet, one word stands out. The disyllabic verb "engraft" is a horticultural trope that at the same time marks the sonnet's deepest predication: Booth annotates by paraphrase the likely pun on poetic engraphment: He goes on to suggest, however, that to become operable the pun needs intertextual support from the opening of the next sonnet: But the metaphor itself, even if we catch its general application, is not very clearly pointed.

The "cutting" by which a graft takes place harkens back in its derivation to the Latin stylus on its way to the Greek root for carve. Booth is surely right in supposing the line to allude to the "practice of replacing the wasted limbs of old trees with slips that grow to be new boughs" SS, But if this allusion in turn alludes to the speaker's expressed hopes for the marriage and propagation of the young man, then it cannot be the speaker who is to engineer this new grafting of a scion. Not only won't the whole metaphor thereby come to rest where we expect it to, but the apparent transitive grammar of its vehicle is internally unsettled.

If the speaker's meaning is that by writing about you I "engraft you new," then this can mean—following Jakobson's treatment of similar ambiguities of the predicate in sonnet —either that "I make by engrafting you new again" an adjectivalized adverb or "I graft you anew " an adverbalized adjective.

In neither case, however, does the figural logic, as governed by the transitive grammar, come quite clear. Does the speaker mean that I cross something with you, or implant something in you, or attach something to you, or otherwise extend you by means of something—or, if you are the sole direct. And even in this last case, what could possibly be disclosed as the tenor of that metaphoric vehicle—or of any of the preceding grammatical alternatives, for that matter—except the whole of you in renewal? We are thus thrown back on the verb's punning application, which makes, albeit in its less idiomatic format, more syntactic sense after all.

It does so precisely by its near-homophonic collapse of vehicle upon a tenor spelled out at last: But phonemic too, aurally overdetermined. The closing verb phrase thus manifests climatically in this sonnet—and not, we shall later see, for the first time—that graphonic interplay which will eventually come to dominate this commentary: The phrase "I engraft you new" can, in other words, just faintly be heard, be "produced" upon the inner ear of the reader in what might be termed a para phonic variant actualized by liaison of the t and tacit elision of an unwritten o as the phrase "I engraph t' you new.

Yet this is a scriptive fabrication whose confession comes about only through a phonic pulling against the grain of the very graphic lines that have let such an admission slip. In his generally admiring review of Riffaterre's semiotic methodology, Paul de Man objected mostly to what he saw as a consistent sheltering of description from the deconstructive fact of sheer inscription.

In view of Shakespeare's explicit thematizing in this sonnet of such a giving and preserving of face through a nondescriptive engraphment, through sheer apostrophe, it is further worth noting that de Man bases his tropologically oriented critique of Riffaterre indirectly on Saussure's interest in the Greek root hypographein —or "signature"—as an important source for the "hypotextual" variants of Saussure's inscribed anagrammatic ciphers What de Man objects to in Riffaterre's retreat from such an admitted graphological emphasis is that the resulting method subserves without proper qualification "the determined, stable principle of meaning in its full phenomenological and cognitive sense" But how stable is this principle?

The burden of the present discussion is that, in the phenomenality of a text when read, cognition. A stress on inscription may be one corrective to a semiotics of description, but then so, on the other hand, is an emphasis on reception. The path through a text taken even by a resolute tropological reading, deconstructing all stable reference as it goes, will be phenomenologically impeded at every "turn," or troping, by the phonic as well as graphic materiality of the language in process—impeded, in short, by "text production" at the cognitive if often subliminal level.

The full implications of this in connection with sonnet 15 we must hold for a few pages longer in abeyance. For now, we need to expand still further the critical and theoretical context within which the play of phrasal alternatives in poetry can be addressed.

We turn from Riffaterre's paragram including here the "paraphone" as well to the frequent stylistic investigations of two very different critics. In their divergent vocabularies and allegiances—the one a leading promulgator of poststructuralist theory in America, the other an inveterate British humanist—Geoffrey Hartman and Christopher Ricks each nurture in their work a sense of potentially subversive lexical free play that resembles Riffaterre's "agrammaticality" as the very definition of literariness.

In "The Voice of the Shuttle: One of the characters stepped forward, bowed, gallant- ly placed his hand over his heart, moved his lips and said nothing. He then bowed again and drew a scroll from his pocket, unrolling it before the spec- tators, who beheld these lines: The play then commenced and whenever it became necessary or desirable to give any verbal explanation the actors would resort to their scrolls, upon which the verses were written in enormous letters that could be easily distinguished by the audience.

The ceremony consisted in drawing from the right-hand pocket the scroll to be read and returning it to the left-hand pocket after reading. Experience improved upon the system. Three contemporaries of the initiators, Fuselier, Lesage and Doroeval, evolved a means of giving voice to the scripts.

When the scrolls were displayed, the "orchestra" of two or three musicians swung into a familiar popular tune and guided by leaders "planted" in the audience for this purpose, the audience itself was soon sing- ing the words. Against this device the Comedie Francaise could do nothing, for there was no dialogue. The hands of the Opera were likewise tied, since it was not the actors but the audience who did the singing. The writing was applied on a piece of cloth rolled on a stick. These were fastened to the flies and were lowered at need, usually be- ing unrolled by two children representing little Cupids, who were likewise sus- ded to the flies and balanced by counterweights.

As each scroll was unrol- ed, the orchestra took up the music, the audience joined in the singing of the couplets and the actors performed in pantomime. This was a parody, very freely drawn, of the opera Iphigenie en Tauride. In Lesage T s version the scene takes place not in Tauride, but in Serendib, sup- posedly a mysterious island of Arabia. The play opens as Arlequin, sole sur- 1 N. He is somewhat consoled in his misfortune by having es- caped not only with his life but also with a well-filled purse belonging to a procurator who is by this time at the bottom of the sea.

YVhile he is count- ing his money, a suspicious-looking individual with a patch over one eye and a formidable blunderbuss over his shoulder appears, bows politely, throws his turban on the ground, pantomimes to Arlequin to throw some money into it, takes aim with his gun and cries out ferociously, "Gnaf f , Gnaff J" Jargon, not being classifiable as dialogue, was permissible. Terrified, Arlequin tosses a few coins into the turban and the individual, after another courte- ous bow, withdraws. Immediately afterward, a second creature appears, this one with one arm in a sling, a wooden leg, and a large cutlass slung at his side.

Reading Voices

His procedure is the same as that of the first, except that his ex- clamation is "Gniff, Gniff I" Arlequin parts with more money and the second thief withdraws. Arlequin is congratulating himself upon having got off so easily when a third brigand appears before him, a cripple seated in a wooden bowl cul de jatte , with a pistol at his belt. Take care, sir, that Justice, in its turn, does not take it from you. The three dance about Arlequin and discuss what his fate is to be, while their victim falls to his knees and implores mercy. One of the captors suggests that they kill Arlequin, and brandishes his cutlass in prepa- ration but another proposes that they imprison him in a cask which chances to be handy, explaining that the wolves will soon find him and eat him.

Accord- ingly, Arlequin is put into the cask and abandoned to his fate. As Arlequin is lamenting and rolling about in the cask, a famished wolf appears, smells fresh meat, and sniffs at the cask. Sticking his hand out of his prison, Arlequin succeeds in catching the wolf by the tail.

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As the enraged beast pulls himself free and runs off, leaving his tail in Arlequin' s hands, the cask breaks apart and Arlequin escapes on the opposite side of the stage. It appears that it is the custom in Serendib that every stranger who arrives by hazard on the island must serve for one month as king. According- ly, Arlequin is accorded a triumphal entry to the palace, which scene gives opportunity for a splashing display of pageantry, enlivened by the accompani- ment of a dialogue in jargon, the whole an obvious steal from Moli era's Bourgeois gantilb The law of the island decrees that at the expiration of the month's reign the pseudo-king must be sacrificed by the high priestess to the god Kesaya.

It develops that the high priestess is none other than Mezzetin and his confidante is Pierrot. These two have disguised themselves as women in order to escape a kingship of which they knew the disagreeable consequences. As the sacrifice is about to begin, Uerazetin asks Arlequin from what country he comes and when the latter replies, C'est a Bergame, helasl en Italie, Qu'une tripiere en ses flancs m'a porta, the knife falls from the hands of the executioner Mezzetin, who, with Pierrot, falls into the arms of their long-lost compatriot.

The trio then decides to sack the temple but as they attempt to carry off Kesaya, the god vanishes, 52 leaving in its place a suckling pig. The temple itself then falls to pieces as Mezzetin, Pierrot and Arlequin make a successful escape and the piece ends.

In the forain theaters progressed a step beyond the pieces a eoritaux. The Opera, badly in debt following the death of its director, Guy- enet, conceived the idea of constituting a new revenue for itself by selling privileges to the forain theaters permitting them to use songs and music in their representations. The result of this development was the birth of comic opera. Two years later, in , a newly organised Italian troupe played be- fore the Regent and was subsequently again permitted to play regularly in Paris, resuming its former fascination for the populace.

The battle between the forain theaters and the regular theaters of Paris was far from over, however. It reached a conclusion only in with the proclamation of liberty for the theaters during the Revolution.

When- ever the popularity of the forain presentations reached a high point and that of the Comedie-Francaise or the Opera sank to a correspondingly low ebb, hos- tilities flared up anew and restrictions were again imposed. The forain the- aters, therefore, continued to fluctuate between spoken farces, comic operas and - when they could do nothing else - pantomimes. Just as the pantomime of the commedia dell' arte was an outgrowth of the farce pantomimes of the ancient Roman mi mi, so the pantomime of the ballet was a development of the serious mimo-dramas of the pantomimi in the days of Augustus.

Introduced by Catherine de Medici s from her native Italy shortly after the advent of her comedian compatriots, the Italian ballet was also adopted by the French and achieved a tremendous popularity. Aside from a desire to satisfy her own craving for sumptuous enter- tainment, it was also to Catherine's interest to distract the attention of her son, Henri III, from affairs of state and consequently she spent large sums of money on devising performances of this nature.

The most famous of them was the Ballet comique de la Reine. The libretto was adapted from Agrippa d'Aubigne's Circe by Baltasarini, otherwise known as Beaujoyeulx, a Neapolitan violinist and favorite of the Queen, aided by La Chesnaye, the royal almoner. This production marks an epoch, not in the his- tory of pantomime proper, but in that of ballet and opera, for in it we find for the first time in modem history the unification of the three essential elements of ballets music, dance and coordinated dramatic action.

From this time on until , when Lulli became director of the Opera, ballets were in increasingly great favor as court entertainment. The ballet de cour was a poetic fantasy, combining song, dance and music. It drew its themes from mythological historical and allegorical subjects. Frequently it descend- ed to outright licentiousness.

On occasion it resorted to buffoonery, though this was the exception rather than the rule. Its protagonists, who wore con- ventional masks, represented legendary kings and princesses, mythological gods and goddesses, shepherds and shepherdesses such as are portrayed in Watteau's paintings. Since at this period the ballet was developed as an entertainment for and by the nobility, it reflected strongly the court influence in its cos tumes.

These were elaborate, heavy and hampering to any real bodily expres- sion. In effect, pantomime occupied a very negligible place in the ballet during this early period. The ballet de oour reached the peak of its popularity during the reign of Louie XIV but became highly formalised, artificial and as un-spontaneous as its rival in the field of farce was spontaneous and free. When Louis XIV finally grew too fat to dance any longer himself, the popularity of ballet waned at court and was then taken up by schools and colleges, which resorted to it on special occasions, most notably on days of distribution of prizes.

Three years later, in , Lulli became its director and for fifteen years Lulli was French opera. During his incumbency the ballet element in opera was strong. Lulli was also responsible for the daring innovation of introducing women into ballet performances. Hitherto, women's roles had been impersonated by male dancers. The entertainments sponsored by this popular lady in her chateau at Sceaux were justly famous and this social leader was constantly in search of something new to add to their glory.

She conceived the idea of presenting a dumb-show as a novel in- novation, or rather as a resurrection of an art which had been esteemed by the ancients. The vehicle selected by her was the fourth act of Comeille's les Horaces, the scene in which the young Horace kills his sister, Camilla. The episode was set to music for the orchestra as if to be sung but was pre- sented as a dramatic dance without vocal accompaniment. Unable to procure veritable pan tomi mists to enact it, two women dancers from the opera were J Specially trained.

The duchesse du Maine labelled the performance a panto- mime-ballet. From this time on, but particularly during the latter part of the 18th century under the dancer Noverre, the ballet became a dance in which a story was interpreted by action, constituting a veritable mimo-drama, com- plete in itself, independent of song or dialogue.

Toward the middle of the century opera attempted to gain a monopoly over pantomime, in consequence of the popularity of this genre among the Ital- ian companies and the forain theaters. Time and again, it seems, pantomime was being "re-discovered". Jean-Georges Noverre was a dancer, bom in Paris in 17 After studying at length the history of pantomime, No- verre travelled extensively throughout Europe endeavoring to discover some i c 57 stray remnants of the ancient pantomime of classic Rome, particularly the art of Fylades and Bathyllus.

His search proved fruitless and he concluded that the art of pantomime was dead. It then became his ambition to restore it to the stage as an independent species. In this respect, his project failed but he did succeed in regenerating the ballet, giving to pantomime a place and a character unknown to the French ballet before his time. Noverre' 8 first original work was composed for the Opera-Comique in , when the dancer was but twenty years old.

He was a prolific creator, responsible for a long list of elaborate ballets, which were often elaborated pantomimes of classical subjects treated in heroic or lyric manner. In his libretti he made wide use of emotional situations and constructed plots of great dramatic movement, Voltaire was a particular friend of Noverre, as were also Frederick the Great and the English actor, David Garrick. The latter termed Noverre "the Shakespeare of the dance". In Noverre discussed with Voltaire his ambition to adapt a part of the Henriade into a ballet pantomime. His in- tention, in accordance with that of the ancient Roman pantomimists, was to choose a well-known piece which would be recognized and easily understood by the audience, Voltaire approved the project and encouraged Noverre to carry it through, at the same time expressing regret that the infirmities of his ad- vanced age prevented him from aiding actively in the adaptation and witnessin its representation.

Deprived of the collaboration of the author of the Henri ade. Noverre subsequently abandoned this plan. In Noverre was made director of the ballet at the Paris Opera, where he remained until , Following the success of his ballet les Ca- prices de Galatea, in It was presented as pure pantomime, not dance.

Noverre tried it out first for the court, where it was politely received, but unfortunately it achieved a succes d'estime rather than an ap- preciation on its own merits. Deceived by this reception at the court, No- verre decided upon a presentation at the Opera before a public audience. Here it met with a very different fate. One facetious commentator suggested that Noverre next attempt to put La Rochefoucauld's Maodmes into pantomime. Undaunted by this initial failure, however, Noverre persevered and achieved success with sub- sequent productions, not alone in Paris but also in other parts of Europe when he took his troupe on tour, appearing at Vienna, Wurtemberg end Milan.

Under Noverre the pantomime-ballet reached a high degree of develop- ment. It was due to his revolutionising influence that the original type of the Italian ballet became transformed, the dancing being more and more sub- ordinated to the dramatic elements. In addition to the drastic changes in the treatment of the plot, Noverre was also responsible for important modifi- cations in costume. His contention was that dress, music and action should be inter-interpretative. This was impossible in the stiff and cumbersome cos tunes of the period of Louis XIV.

Some progress had already been made in this direction by the famous dancer Camargo, who between and had accom- plished a methodical stripping process, eliminating the heavy foundation gar- 38 1 Charles HACKS, Le Geste. Noverre completed the revolution and in addition to dispensing with the cumbersome court costumes with their ham- pering paddings and paniers, also did away with the wearing of the convention- al masks, Noverre 1 s theories are exposed in his Lettres gar les arts en general et 8ur la danse en parti culier, published in , and in De la Dense et des Arts imitateurs, in two volumes, published in and dedicated to the Empress Josephine, Upon reading the first, Voltaire wrote to Noverre, "Cost d'un hosnne de genie.

Both of these works of Noverre are highly meritorious and can still be read today with both in- terest and profit. In a moat had been construct- ed at this point on the outskirts of the city as protection against invaders. In a quadruple row of trees was planted between the moat and the city and toward the middle of the succeeding century this pleasantly shaded spot constituted a popular promenade for the proletariat of Paris.

As early as Jean-Baptist e Nicolet, a forain actor, established a permanent little theater on the Boulevard du Temple, specialising originally in spectacles musts, pantomimes and ballets. Before long he became more am- bitious, the main attraction of his theater consisting of farces of the forain type but still including pantomimes as entr'actes. The Foire Saint-Germain was destroyed by fire in and the other famous feirs disintegrated by degrees, their theaters finally extinguished as a result of the interdictions imposed upon them following the absorption of the Qpera-Comique by the Com6die-Itslienne.

The clientele of the f orain theaters now flocked to the Boulevard du Temple and particularly to Nicolet 1 s theater, which acquired a special reputation. Louis XV heard so much about this troupe that he summoned it to perform for him at Choisy in and was so delighted with its performance that he authorised Nicolet to appropriate the title of Theatre des Grands Danseurs du Red. A little later Nicolet attached to his theater as dramatic author one Robin eau, known professionally as Beaunoir.

Beaunoir was the son of a notary at the Chatelet and had begun his career in dignified fashion as abbe and li- brarian to Louis XVI. He was to finish it as secretary to Jerome, king of Westphalia, but in the interim this versatile individual, independently or with the collaboration of his wife, turned out for Nicolet some two hundred pantomimes, comedies, farces and parades, "toutes plus litteraires et plus decentes que ce qui avalt ete jusqu'alors joue sur le Boulevard. It became the rendes-vous a la mode not only for Parisians of all classes but for the manv foreigners who were flocking to Paris during the pre-revolutionary epoch.

When the original building was torn down wit the demolition of the Boulevard du Temple in , this theater moved to the Square des Arts-et-Metiers, where it now stands. Shortly after the Revolu- tion, upon changing hands, it became known for a brief interim as the Theatre d'Qnulation but in it again resumed its previous title and its original specialties in program material, Voila done ce theatre rendu a sa premiere denomina- tion, a son institution primitive. La Gaite, a la- quell e il semblait jadis consacre, va y rappeler tous les amateurs de la foire, de la pantomime italiexme et des tours de force.

Still another theater on the Boulevard which began exclusively with pantomimes in the Italian style, later adding melodramas, vaudevilles and comic operas, was the Theatre des Varietes Amusantes, founded in A separate realm of pantomimic entertainment associated with the Boule vard du Temple was the Cirque Olympique, which opened in Although trained horses, dogs and other animals held a large place, by elaborate pantomimic spectacles comprising enormous casts of characters, reminiscent of our late New York Hippodrome performances, had become exceedingly popular.

With the outbreak of the Revolution the aristocratic clientele disap- peared from the Boulevard du Temple but the populace remained faithful. Many of the little theaters here were converted into political tribunes and meetia places for the different political parties. The Directoire returned the Boulevard du Temple to its former status.

Hungry for pleasure and entertainment, and particularly for thrills, all Paris again thronged the little theaters here until, under Napoleon, their liberties were once more temporarily restricted. The founding of the Theatre des Acrobates by Madame Saqui in brings us to the even of the birth of true French pantomime. Madame Saqui was the daughter of a former f orain acrobat and had been herself a popular dancer in Nicolet's troupe. She was highly esteemed by Napoleon, who called her his "enragee" and conferred upon her the title of premiere danseuse of France. Profiting by her influence upon those in high places who admired her talents, Madame Saqui secured authorization from Louis XVIII to establish a sails de spectacles on the Boulevard du Temple, this privilege being accorded upon condition that she restrict her entertainments to tight-rope dancing and pantomimes, or harlequinades in the Italian manner.

Meanwhile, in addition to being the special preserve for pantomime, this popular theatrical center had also become the realm of melodrama. Its founder was one Nicolas Michel Ber- trand, who had begun his career modestly as a butter merchant in Vincennes. Stepping up a rung or two in tho social ladder, he became in time a carriage maker. To further augment his means of livelihood, he made a practice of transporting passengers by carriage between vincennes and Paris.

Among his passengers one day was Madame Saqui, owner and star tight-rope dancer of the recently founded Theatre des Acrobates on the Boulevard du Temple. During the course of the journey an argument arose between the two, which soon de- veloped into a noisy quarrel. Madame Saqui insulted the worthy Monsieur Ber- trand, accused him of concocting his butter out of veal fat and called him a highway robber. Little did the lady dream what consequences her sharp tongue was to evoke. From this moment, Bertrand had but one thought; revenge. The ideal retaliation could only be one which would destroy the professional prestige of his fair enemy and this meant nothing less than the establish- ment of a competitive theater.

It was an ambitious enterprise for the modest carriage maker and re- quired more capital than he had at his own command. Accordingly, he sought out a friend, Monsieur Fabian, an umbrella merchant by trade, who was an ardent devotee of the spectacles of the Boulevard theaters. To him Bertrand confided his scheme. The plot struck Fabian's fancy and he agreed to go into 47 partnership with Bertrand, putting up his share of the necessary funds.

Good fortune was in store for Bertrand at the outset, for it so hap- pened that at this opportune moment a location directly next door to Madame Saqui's Theatre des Acrobates became available. This building had housed the modest but famed establishment of Monsieur Curtius.

In striking contrast to the vitality and excess of movement in all the other forms of entertainment on the Boulevard was the immobility of that proffered by Monsieur Curtius, His specialty was waxworks. Into his museum trooped a steady stream of pa- trons curious to view reproductions of all the celebrities and famous crimin- als of the day. Curtius has been accused, and per- haps with reason, of simply changing the costumes and names on the placards of his political figures with each new regime, so that the same mannekin rep- resented successively Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X.

The waxworks museum had prospered and at the very moment when Bertrand conceived his scheme of revenge upon Madame Saqui, Curtius decided to move his establishment to more commodious quarters. Bertrand took over the prop- erty and in a little over a month had reconstructed it and was ready to open battle.

Authorisation for the use of the title was granted but not a bona fide theatrical licence. The little theater began its career with acrobatic entertainments. The neophyte pro- ducers soon took stock of the fact that if they were to wage a battle on equa grounds with Madame Saqui they must fight her with her own weapons. There- fore, they resolved to add acrobatic pantomimes to their own bill of fare.

This was more easily decided upon than put into execution, for the mimes of real ability were all associated with the various already established theater; which specialised in this genre of entertainment. They did succeed, however, in enticing a small group of pantomimists away from other companies and the battle was on in earnest.

At this epoch the pantomime sautante was one of the rages on the Boule- vard du Temple, As the title indicates, it was a pantomimic expression in which acrobat ics and dancing predominated. As an interpretation, it was very largely a conventionalized and artificial expression, each bodily attitude, acrobatic trick and dance figure supposedly signifying some definite mental attitude or idea.

The scenario of a pantomime sautante reads much like that of a ballet dance routine, of which the following is a typical example: Arlequin appears and expresses self-pity because of his unrequited love for Colombine by executing three cabrioles. His rival, Leandre, essays in his turn to make a similar impression but is able to achieve only a few ineffectual and wholly unimpressive jumps.

Consequently, the palms, together with the hand of Coiombine, are accorded to Arlequin. The pantomime terminates with a veritable tour de force consisting of a human pyramid of which Pierrot and Leandre form the base, standing on their hands, and supporting Cassandre, who lies face downward across their feet; the happy lovers, Arlequin and Coiombine, form the apex of the pyramid, standing upon Cassandre 's back, enlaced in one another's arms, 1 The original licence secured by Bertrand at the opening of the Fun am- bules restricted him to the production of this type of pantomime and while the acrobatic element did tend to disappear somewhat toward the middle of the century, it was a special characteristic of all of the earlier panto- mimes and continued until after Gaspard Deburau's death.

The Funambules did, however, place greater emphasis upon dramatic plot in conjunction with the acrobatics than was common in similar theaters. The Almanach des Spectacles for gives the following appreciation; Theatre des Funambules: It has been remarked, however, that the pieces presented are of a more substantial nature than those at the Theatre des Acrobates. Usually, except that they lack dia- logue, they are a sort of melodrama in which ingenu- ous virtue is persecuted by black villainy, which goes to the most extreme lengths to accomplish its dastardly crimes.

In addition, there are dances, combats, scenic transformations and conflagrations. The single es- sential difference between these pieces and the legit- imate melodramas, which are considered vastly superior by their authors, is that the lover can take no part in the action, nor proceed in his love affairs, without first having executed a certain number of acrobatic stunts or dance figures. Theo- phile Gautier has defined and analyzed the traditional characteristic require- ments for the necessary pantomimic types as follows: Cassandre represents the head of the family; Leandre, the insipid fop, stupid but wealthy, who is Cas- sandre 1 s choice as suitor for the hand of his daughter, Colombine; Colombine, the heroine, daughter to Cassandre, and the very flower of youth and beauty; Arlequin, with the face of a monkey and the sinuous body of a serpent, usually wearing a black mask, his costume covered with bizarre, multi-colored patches and glittering spangles, the personification of love, spirit, bodily grace, dar- ing - a combination of all the brilliant qualities and vices; Pierrot, pale, pitted with smallpox, insignifi- cant, clothed in rags, always hungry, always beaten, the slave, the passive and mournful individual who looks on dejectedly and slyly at the fortunes and misfortunes of his masters.

Before the advent of Deburau, Arlequin was the principal comic character, always employed as servant or confidant of his master. The first important pantomime of the Theatre des Funambules was pre- sented on December 28, La Faux Ermite r on las Fanx Monnaveurs. Monrat, mise en scene par M.

Arlequin , his servant, asks the reason for this melancholy. The count replies that his heart is sick for love. To distract the count, Arlequin proposes that he bring a Gypsy to amuse his master but when the Gyp- sy turns out to be old and ugly Count Adolphe flies into a rage. Pretext for acrobatic pyrotechnics. To calm him, the Gypsy conjures up an appari- tion of a young and lovely peasant maid, beneath whose figure appears the in- scription: The count is warned, however, that before winning the girl in the vision as his bride he will have many difficulties to surmount, Isabelle's father is apprehended while poaching on his lord's pre- serves and is brought before the count, who pardons the culprit.

He is recoi pensed for his generous action by a smile from I sab ell e, whom he recognizes joyfully as the girl of his vision. He forthwith declares his love for her and departs to set in motion preparations for the wedding. It is at this point, naturally enough, that the first of the promised obstacles presents itself, A band of counterfeiters appears upon the scene. These desperadoes kidnap the innocent fiancee for the pleasure of their chief.

In the second act Rinaldi, chief of the counterfeiters, appears dis- guised as a hermit, Isabelle, having succeeded in eluding her captors, comes upon the hermit and is deceived by his disguise, She appeals to him for aid and unsuspectingly accompanies him into his cavern, from which there issues immediately a piercing cry of despair. Count Adolphe, being conveniently in the neighborhood at the moment, hears the cry and precipitates himself onto the scene. He questions the pseudo-hermit but is suspicious of his explana- tions.

The count, protected by his disguise, is permitted to enter the counterfeiters 1 stronghold unquestion- ed and succeeds in encouraging surreptitiously the damsel in distress. He then finds a pretext for leaving the cave long enough to issue orders to his arm men to mine the counterfeiters' hideout. At the moment when the infamous Binaldi has the lovely Isabelle in his fatal clutches and is about to work his will upon her, Count Adolphe re-enters, this time without his disguise.

A fierce duel ensues between the hero and the villain, at the height of which a terrific explosion occurs. The rocks of the cavern fall apart, the false hermit is killed and his troupe cast into irons, as the reunited lovers melt happily into each others 1 arms and the curtain falls. Naive as the plot of le Faux Ermite may seem to us today, it must be conceded that it ably sustains comparison with the plots of the majority of legitimate melodramas of the period, those of Pixerecourt not excepted.

Among the pantomimists inveigled away from near-by little theaters by Bertrand was a youth of seventeen years of age who had made his debut at the Varietes-Amusantes under the name of Prosper. This young mime did a suffic- iently creditable piece of work in a minor role in la Naissance d'Arlequin, ou Arlequin dans un Oeuf. While pursuing his courses at the Conservatory Lemaitre continued to reap glory for himself at the Funambules and contributed in no small degree to the establishment of the first success of the newly-founded theater.

In his memoirs Lemaitre expressed his appreciation of the training received during this apprenticeship at the little Theatre des Funambules. In accordance with the royal decree which restricted the privilege of the Funambules, all those who became members of its company were admitted as actors only upon con- dition that they still remained acrobats. Upon which Pericaud laments - Ainsi Frederick lui-meme, le grand Frederick. News was brought that they had fallen heirs to a legacy, an "est at 9" situated in France, near Amiens, But Neukolin was a long way from Amiens and a family of this size was expensive to transport, Monsieur Deburau, however, was not without a resourceful imagination and proved equal to the situation.

He conceived the idea of converting his family into a troupe of strolling players. In this way they could progress by gradual stages to their destination, traveling on foot and earning their living en route. The plan was put into execution. The boys were trained in juggling and tumbling and the girls in tight-rope walking and dancing. Poor little Gaspard did not take to the training as did his older brothers and sisters. He was the despair of the family and its disgrace. His movements were awk- ward and clumsy.

He was stupid and slow and seemed incapable of learning anything. Abandoning hope of ever making an acrobat of him, the family made the best of the bargain by casting the little fellow as a paillasse, or clown, where heretofore his stumbles and tumbles had been accidental, they now became intentional and poor Gaspard became the butt of the kicks and blows of the clever members of the family.

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The troupe did not amass a fortune during the journey across Bavaria to France but they did manage to keep body and soul together, buoyed up by thoughts of the fortune awaiting them at their goal, which served as a guid- ing star of hope. At the end of months of wandering, playing wherever they could assemble a crowd of curious onlookers, sleeping in bams or in the open air in true gypsy tradition, they arrived at last at Amiens.

But alas, the legacy upon which they had built such high hopes and journed so far to claim proved to be a heart-sickening disappointment. The dwelling itself was no more than a hovel, gone to rack and run, past all hope of repair. The plot of ground upon which it stood consisted of less than an acre of sterile soil in which even potatoes refused to grow.

Gone was the cherished dream of set- tling down in dignity as landed proprietors. The property was sold as it stood and its price at least provided a square meal for the weary wanderers. The meal settled for, there still remained sufficient funds to invest in a more or less broken-down nag and a basket cart into which were dumped indis- criminately properties, costumes, paraphernalia and Deburaus and the little troupe of mountebanks resumed their travels in style.

Journeying southward to avoid the rigors of winter, they arrived eventu- ally in Constantinople, where they experienced a brief moment of real glory. Playing to enthusiastic street crowds, their fame reached the ears of the Sul- tan, who commanded them to appear at the royal palace itself. They were led into a great hall which appeared to be completely deserted, except for scat- tered guards and attendants. At one end of the hall was hung a curtain, to- ward which the mountebanks were instructed to direct their entertainment.

This was undoubtedly the strangest performance ever given by the troupe. During the performance, not a soul to be seen, not a sound of encouragement or applause to be heard. Used as they were to the stimulus of the reactions of the crowd, this was certainly the most difficult performance these enter- tainers ever went through.

But for little Gas par d was reserved a surprising and wholly unintentional treat. During the execution of the most elaborate acrobatic pyramid, Gaspard, mounted upon the perilous summit, discovered him- self poised above the confines of the concealing curtain and his eyes alone were favored, quite unofficially, with a dazzling, magic glimpse of a scene from the Arabian nights.

The years passed and our troupers found themselves once more in France, this time in the capital city itself. They established themselves in a dingy little court in a popular quarter of Paris, the Cour Saint-Maur, and proceeded to dazzle the population with their prowess. They secured a licence authoris- ing them to appear in the popular street carnivals and fairs on festival days and became increasingly popular in their humble way. The two sisters won ad- miration by their grace and agility. The oldest son, Nieumensek, was dubbed "roi des tapis 11 , while the second son, Etienne, was accorded the title of "sauteur fini N , Gaspard alone remained in the shade.

No accolade was be- stowed upon him. He was only a clown. One day in the year a dress rehearsal at the Funambules was held up because one of the employes, a boy charged with looking after the proper- ties, failed to appear on time. Bert rand was a stickler for promptness and when the breathless delinquent finally put in his appearance the manager was ready to read him the riot act in style. The only excuse the culprit could stammer out was that he had completely lost track of the time, so enthralled had he been watching a troupe of acrobats who surpassed any of those at the Funambules.

Bertrand pricked up his ears, "Better than mine? This was sufficient for Bertrand. He inquired at once where these par- agons were to be found and upon receiving the information set out post haste for the Gour Saint-Naur, arriving at the precise moment when the Deburau fam- ily was again commencing its turn.

Properly impressed by the agility, grace and novelty of the perform- ers, Bertrand approached Monsieur Deburau and inquired rather abruptly, "How much do you earn per day? Undaunted by Deburau' s manner, Bertrand explained cordially, "I bring you good fortune. We manage to get along ell right on it. We do not regret having come here. Paris is the capital of the arts. The people here know how to appreciate artists and we flatter our- selves that we are artists.

Deburau shook his head.

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But since you admit that your receipts do not average more than fifteen it is more than you earn ordinarily, n protested Bert rand. We are subject to no master. We go where we please and as our fancy dictates. The whole outdoors is our kingdom. Why, only listen, sir; we have just returned from Constantinople, in Turkey, where we performed for the Grand Turk and 'Ifesdames les Turqueresses ses fiancees 1 , in the very harem itself. That's more than any of your tumblers can say. However, I'm a reasonable fellow. Give us a hundred and thirty francs a week, furnish the costumes and the Deburau family is yours.

Monsieur is one of the principal directors in the city and he has an honor- able proposition to make to us. The proprietor of the cafe had the greatest esteem for Deburau, who, upon entering, cried out heartily. Beneath the painting appeared an inscrip- tion, representing, in the words of Pericaud, "another duel, much less chiv- alrous in character but no less celebrated: To kill credit, my children, is to kill civilisation, or at least the soul of civilization, which is trade.

The result of the conference in the Cabinet des Gentilshommes. As the party prepared to break up, the chief of the tribe grasped Bertrand firmly by the hand and congratulated him. You have ac- quired five first-class artists, Monsieur Bertrand. That one there doesn't count. There was not much he could say in defense of him. He is stupid, per- haps. But he is really an excellent clown.

I'll put him in the pantomimes. Bertrand, ex- butt er-mer chan t , made a colossal fortune; his son also made a fortune there, and M. Billion himself threatens to turn into a Rothschild, To whom do they owe these fortunes which they have amassed? To that white Pierrot Deburau of whom I was speak- ing a moment ago. Do away with Pierrot and the pan- tomime withers away and dies and the Theatre des Fu- nambules would cease to exist.

He had not been trained in acro- batics and submitted to this regulation only because it was prescribed by the government and consequently unavoidable so long as he played in this theater. His engagement with the Cirque Olympique proved to be scarcely less hazardous, however, for in this theater he was required to make his entrance on a horse. Frederick was even less of a bareback rider than an acrobat and a fall from his horse hastened the termination of this second contract.

During his stay, nevertheless, he appeared in a number of outstanding roles in pantomimes and mimodramas and it was here that he was remarked by the great actor Talma, who recognised the youth's potentialities and was instrumental in making it pos- sible for Frederick to take his place in the legitimate theaters of Paris, commencing with the Odeon in With the addition of pantomime to hie program of acrobatic turns, aided in large measure by the growing popularity of Lemaitre, the Funambules had become an opponent for Madame Saqui to reckon with.

With the loss of Lemaitre, Bertrand now found himself at a distinct disadvantage, for many of his patrons transferred their allegiance to his ri- val. Thereupon, Bertrand combed the little theaters of the Boulevard for novelty turns which could be engaged for short periods as a supplement to his resident company. Among the varied specialists who followed one another in rapid succession was one Leclerc, a pantosdmist known professionally as a "physiomane". He performed alone and his specialty consisted in running the entire range of possibilities in facial expression, depicting in turn joy, grief, supplication, stupefaction, anger, rage and madness.

He hypnotised his audience, which responded sympathetically to his pantomime. As Leclerc smiled, chuckled, laughed aloud and then built to a paroxysm of hilarity, his audience followed suit until the result was a pandemonium of mirth. Then, without warning, there would fall a momentary lull as Leclerc composed his face into a blank mask. He would then run the gamut of depressive emotions, working to a dramatic climax of grief with tears streaming down his cheeks, until his audience could bear no more and here and there voices would cry out - "Enough - no morel" Another of Bertrand 's "fillers -in" during this transitional period was Lecoq, the n in combustible wonder", who accomplished the feat of remaining for approximately sixty seconds in a red-hot fire, withdrawing unharmed.

This was an anxious moment for Bertrand, for the fire hazard was great in these flimsy little theaters. Upon perceiving this, Bertrand began to risk spoken dialogues by members of his regular company. His innovation proved too successful to be of long duration with the lynx-eyed fciadame Saqui next door watching his every move. This lady lost no time in informing the proper au- thorities that Bertrand was violating the terms of his licence and the Funam- bules was threatened with the immediate revocation of its permit unless it put an end at once to these popular piecettes.

Prohibition of the spoken word was extended even to the making of announcements from the stage.

Whatever in- formation was to be given to the audience had to be written on placards, as in the forain theaters a century earlier. Once again ruses were resorted to in order to circumvent the restriction and since the regulation applied strictly only to the prohibition of the spoken word on the stage proper, explanations or announcements were frequently given from the wings, off stage. Before very long, however, toward the end of , Bertrand did obtain the official authorisation to play little vaudevilles or parades, provided they contained no more than three participants, and always on condition that the actors made their entrance on the tightrope.

At all costs, they were obliged to maintain strictly their classification of acrobats rather than actors. Many of the participants found themselves no more fortunate than Le- maitre had been and accidents increased to such an extent that it finally be- came customary for the actor to simply touch the tightrope with one foot upon making his entrance.

Seeing that the authorities closed their eyes to this side-stepping of the convention, even this formality was eventually abandon- ed. No longer put to practical use, the tightrope was ultimately elevated and 64 stretched across the stage well above the players' heads. It was in that Deburau, known on the bills at that time simply as Baptists, played the role of Pierrot for the first time.

Hitherto, he had been charged with the playing of very minor personages, usually that of a brigand. As such, he was deplorably unsatisfactory. Instead of striking ter- ror into the souls of his audience, as required by the script, he succeeded only in evoking peals of laughter, which resulted in the ruination of situa- tions intended to be dramatic. Vainly, Baptiste resorted to gigantic wigs, incredibly false beards, and made up ferocious eyebrow effects with burnt cork. Through this formidable assortment of foliage his thin, elongated, white face with its inimitably expressive eyes, peeped forth and despite ev- ery effort against it on his part, turned shivers of terror into gales of hi- larity.

The authors of the pantomimes became excessively annoyed. Baptists' a comrades, who took their roles very seriously, also stormed against this square peg in a round hole and demanded that he no longer be permitted to par- ticipate in serious dramatic pieces. He continued to be the despair of his family, who tried to shame him by reiterating the old plaint that he disgraced them all.

The official Pierrot of the Funambules at this time was Elan chard, a particular favorite with the public. The public got wind of the difficulty and was easily won over to the support of the favorite as he recounted his side of the story over a friendly bottle of rdne in a near-by caf 6.

With the opening of the performance the next evening. The audience was restless and noisy during the first number on the program. It anticipated the an- 65 nouncement of the change in program, for the pantomime originally scheduled, in which Bl an chard was to have appeared, had necessarily been withdrawn. As the second number of the evening commenced, a voice cried out from the audi- ence, "Where's Blan chard?

It was necessary to ring down the curtain and halt the number under way at the time. Frantically, Bertrand and Fabien consulted together. Then the latter stepped out into the auditorium. In a stentorian voice he demanded silence - and got it. When he could have heard a pin drop, Fabien began to speak. Throw the speaker out," bawled the crowd. And Fabien became forthwith the target for assorted pro- jectiles which began to rain down upon him from all directions.

Valiantly Fabien stood his ground. When the outburst showed signs of calming down somewhat he continued. We want Blanchard I We want Blan chard i" "My friends, Mademoiselle Virginie, a veritable little saint, an angel of purity, has barely escaped being seduced by Monsieur Blanchard, who was apprehended by Monsieur Bertrand last evening in the very act of dragging this young lady into a dressing room of this theater.

The crowd now lent its ears attentively as Fabian continued his narration in the best melodramatic tradition, "Which of you, gentlemen, has not a sister, a niece, a daughter? Which of you would hesitate an instant to throw out of your home a scoundrel found guilty of betraying your trust by endeavoring to besmirch the reputa- tion of that sister, that niece or that daughter? In spite of his talent, wa have dispensed with Elan chard 1 s services, without turning him over to the authorities as he so richly merited.

No sub- stitution for Blanchard had been pre-arranged, as the pantomime originally scheduled had been withdrawn. Suddenly, without rhyme or reason, the name of Baptiste flashed into Fabian's mind. Monsieur Baptiste, of the Deburau family, a young artist in whose talent we place the highest hopes. Meanwhile, general hubbub was rife backstage. On tenterhooks, the troupe had followed Fabian's progress.

Upon overhearing his co-manager's amazing announcement which Barked the climax of his speech, Bert rand grabbed Baptiste and hissed at him to get into Pierrot's costume at once. Stunned, Baptist e hesitated and started to stammer - "But, Mind you remember that and put it over, or else I" As in a nightmare, Gaspard Deburau somehow effected the necessary change in costume and make-up. Up rolled the curtain. Out onto the stage walked Pierrot. He turned his long, thin, white face with its eloquent eyes toward his audience.

As one person, the audience burst spontaneously into a roar of laughter. Deburau, king of Pierrots, was consecrated. With the succeeding piece, Arlequin dogue. There were at this time two families of featured acrobats at the Fu- nambules, the Deburaus and the Charigni family. This latter comprised a fa- ther, two sons and two daughters. Mademoiselle Nanette played Colombine and her sister, Mari- on, was used in various soubrette roles.

In the acrobatic numbers preceding the pantomime the two families performed their turns in combination and their human pyramids constituted a spectacular feature, Bertrand was not disturbed by the frequent and increasingly severe quarrels arising out of the rivalry between the two families. On the contrary, he regarded this spirit of compe- tition as a healthy sign, for it spurred on the members of the opposing fac- tions to increased effort and skill.

The feud began to take on alarming pro- portions, however, for in proportion as Deburau was given increased import- ance in the pantomimes as Pierrot, the roles of Arlequin and Leandre were rel egated more and more to minor importance and the professional pride of the Charigni brothers was hurt to the quick. From simple name-calling, vo- cal insults and threats, the rivals progressed to the unethical practice of trying to throw each other off during their acrobatic turns by grappling with each other or shifting balance unexpectedly at inopportune moments. As was inevitable, things finally reached a climax one evening and the two families broke into open battle.

The slapstick action of the pantomime was in itself rich in possibilities for vengeance. This evening Leandre was supposed to simulate a blow in Pierrot's face. Instead of feigning it, he let go a devastatingly genuine hay-maker which sent Pierrot reeling across the stage with blood streaming from his mouth, Whereupon, father Deburau precipitated himself upon Joigny Charigni, the attacker. Brother Lange and father Pepe Charigni flew to the aid of Joigny and then the two Deburau brothers donated 69 their talents to the fracas.

Not to be outdone by the male representatives. The hair-pulling, biting and scratching of the female battalion yielded nothing in ferocity or effectiveness to the blows wielded by the male contingent in this epic battle. Unable to separate the gladiators, Bert rand was obliged at length to resort to armed force. The curtain was rung down and the hastily-summoned police commissioner, gendarmes and soldiers succeeded in separating the combatants physically, if not in sub- duing them vocally.