One sunny but bitingly cold Paris winter morning in January 1885, a tall 20-year-old seamstress named Emma Guilbert took a walk along the Seine. Work had been hard to come by of late but her spirits were restored by the beauty of the morning. So much so that it was a few moments before she realised somebody was calling after her.
“Mademoiselle,” shouted a well-dressed older man from behind her, “mademoiselle!”
Breathing hard from the effort of keeping up with Guilbert’s rangy stride, he introduced himself as Charles Zidler, proprietor of Paris’s 3,000-seat entertainment venue the Hippodrome.
“Please believe me when I tell you that with such a fine figure as yours you could become a magnificent circus rider,” he said between gasps clouding in the morning chill.
She laughed and walked on, at which point Zidler called after her that with dedication and the training he would provide she could make as much as 20,000 francs a year.
Guilbert stopped dead. That was more money than she could possibly imagine.
While she had been born into comfortable circumstances to a shopkeeper father and a mother who ran a millinery business, times were hard for the Guilbert women. When Adeline Guilbert’s business failed, her husband left, leaving mother and daughter to fend for themselves as seamstresses. Having grimly accepted the cycle of poverty into which they were drawn, here, on the street and out of the blue, a stranger was apparently offering Guilbert a remarkable route out of penury.
As Zidler walked away, an invitation to visit him at the Hippodrome hanging in the air, Guilbert stood by the river staring at his business card while replaying their conversation in her head. She had never even ridden a horse before, let alone performed in front of an audience, yet Zidler seemed convinced she would be a success.
It sounded too good to be true, something confirmed by her mother when Guilbert returned home. Adeline had been around long enough to know the reason equestrian artistes were so well paid.
“There’s a good chance you’ll break your neck,” she said. “Or your legs. And then where would you be?”
Guilbert went to see Zidler at the Hippodrome to thank him for his offer and respectfully decline but unexpectedly found herself telling the story of her life to the impresario – its struggles, her deadbeat father, the grinding poverty in which she and her mother had found themselves.
Zidler accepted her polite rebuttal and, sympathetic to her story, handed over a pair of tickets for a production of Cleopatra starring Sarah Bernhardt.
Attending the show with a friend, at the interval Guilbert voiced her disappointment with Bernhardt’s performance, at which the man in the seat beside her pointed out that Bernhardt was indisposed and they were watching her understudy.
He introduced himself as a drama critic, suggested that Guilbert consider a career on the stage herself, handed her his card on which he wrote the address of an acting teacher of his acquaintance and advised her to call on him.
One chance encounter transforming a life is rare enough. Guilbert enjoyed two a few days apart that would turn an impoverished seamstress into one of the greatest performers of the Belle Époque.
After some acting lessons, Guilbert appeared in a few minor roles at provincial theatres but soon realised her talents lay elsewhere. She turned instead to musical theatre and the cabaret circuit, the arena where she would become one of the most celebrated performers in the world.
As the 1880s became the 1890s, Guilbert, who now went by the stage name Yvette, worked hard to establish herself, taking on an exhausting programme of singing engagements and building a formidable reputation. Sigmund Freud, in Paris for a conference in 1889, saw her perform and was impressed enough to obtain a signed photograph that hung in his office for the rest of his life. One of Marcel Proust’s first published magazine articles was one in praise of Guilbert. George Bernard Shaw was a fan.
These were not examples of the intelligentsia slumming it among common entertainments, either. Guilbert’s shows were about as far from the can-can as could be, building a repertoire comprising settings of historic songs and poems sourced mainly from the 17th century.
Fancy vocal gymnastics were not for her either. Guilbert’s style occupied a space between simple melody and spoken word over a musical accompaniment, but where she succeeded was in immersing herself completely in the material, transforming herself physically into the lonely grandmother, heartbroken ingenue or child with impossible dreams whose story she told in song.
“Each of the characters conceived by the poet appeared to be actually before the spectators,” wrote one 1894 reviewer. “When one considers this was achieved without the aid of scenery or costume, Yvette Guilbert’s claim among the highest ranks of the artist cannot be disputed.”
In 1897 Aubrey Beardsley’s The Yellow Book journal carried a long piece praising Guilbert and her craft, in particular a song called La Soularde in which Guilbert becomes a tragic, disease-ridden drunkard lurching along a street being pelted with abuse and rotten vegetables. At the song’s climax “Yvette Guilbert throws her head back and breaks the last syllable of the refrain into a cry of two notes. It would scarcely be too much to call this the greatest moment that has ever been brought off in the executory art”.
The piece goes on to describe how, despite limiting her movements to an occasional hand gesture, “you positively see the drunken woman with dishevelled hair and bloodshot eyes reeling down the street, but in the meanwhile Yvette Guilbert, in modern evening dress is standing still on the stage”.
The unique charisma Guilbert displayed changed the entire nature of the Parisian cafe concert from rowdy occasions soundtracked by audience catcalls to rapt, silent attention as the crowd hung on her every syllable, entranced by her magical ability to conjure a range of characters from the gutter to the palace ballroom.
Hers was a modern form of celebrity that included transatlantic tours, several portraits by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a screen appearance in FW Murnau’s film Faust and a string of gramophone recordings.
In her later years Guilbert published novels and an instruction manual on singing technique, while her research into medieval French folklore won praise from academics and helped earn her a Legion d’Honneur as “The Ambassadress of French Song”.
“One cannot remain the same,” she said. “Art is a mirror which should show many reflections. The artist should not always show the same face or that face becomes a mask.”
