"Divine Thalie": The Career of Jeanne Quinault (review)

{ 244 } BOOK REV IEWS Kim Lee convincingly conveys the multiple notions and concepts, throughout time, of what Asian-American theatre is as viewed by the protagonists themselves . —MARÍA ISABEL SEGURO University of Barcelona \ “Divine Thalie”: The Career of Jeanne Quinault. By Judith Curtis. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 8. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2007. xi + 229 pp. $101.00 cloth. In her exhaustively researched study of Comédie-Française actress Jeanne Quinault, Judith Curtis labors to establish the importance of Quinault in eighteenth-century France as actress, adviser, and mentor in the productions and dramatic literature of the Comédie-Française and, outside her work at the Comédie-Française, as a salonnière and organizer of private theatricals. Curtis meticulously charts the life of Jeanne Quinault, a figure previously known only through passing reference in “a few anecdotes in old dictionaries of actors and from a handful of highly questionable sources” (5). By accessing recently uncovered “authentic contemporary documents,” Curtis takes pains to refute the dominant picture painted of Quinault as the epitome of the eighteenth-century amoral actress in the 1818 “memoirs” of Mme d’Épinay (6). Answering anecdote with archive, Curtis gives us a detailed account of Quinault, not as iconoclastic freethinker but as a “socially acceptable and morally commendable” actress striving “to build an air of décence into the gatherings she hosted and into her style of life generally” (5). While Curtis’s work provides a record of Quinault ’s life and the world of private société theatricals, it is not until the conclusion that Curtis draws out the paradoxes of Quinault’s life, briefly contextualizing actress and woman in the social world of eighteenth-century France. Curtis chronologically charts Quinault’s life, death, and memorialization in eleven chapters. Within this chronology, Curtis pauses to highlight particular relationships, such as Quinault’s friendships with playwright Alexis Piron and aristocrat/archaeologist Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, compte de Caylus, detailed in her fourth chapter. In her first chapter Curtis studiously works through baptismal records, marriage licenses, police reports, private correspondences, and Mercure reviews { 245 } BOOK REV IEWS to untangle the often confused histories of Quinault, her four siblings, and one sister-in-law, all of whom appeared on the Comédie-Française stage. Chapter 2 takes the reader deeper into the theatrical careers and accompanying backstage intrigue of the Quinaults at the Comédie. Curtis strays from a strict reporting of archival evidence in the third and fourth chapters to explore the world of private entertainments. Daniel Gerould’s fascinating Gallant and Libertine gave a brief overview and tantalizing taste of these illicit events; Curtis provides further detail of their construction through Quinault’s organization of and participation in the société des lazzistes. The lazzistes (including, among others, Piron, Caylus, and Secretary of State Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain et de Maurepas) staged intimate entertainments as diverse as magic lantern shows, trained dog acts, and short performances—lazzi—composed by society members.Freed from the censorship of the official theatre and the opinion of the public, Quinault would cross-dress as Maurepas, satirizing all that was “legitimate” through whimsical performances of transformation and parody. Chapter 5 examines Quinault’s growing role as a mentor and adviser to playwrights in the “legitimate” theatre . As a member of the now established and powerful Quinault clan of actors at the Comédie-Française, she was able to directly influence which plays were staged at the Comédie, who acted the parts, and, through her mentorship, how those plays were written. The “divine Thalie,” as Voltaire named her, advised and mentored a number of playwrights, including Voltaire himself and Françoise de Graffigny (77). Seemingly in contradiction to her enjoyment of the raucous“uncensored”private entertainments of the lazzistes, Quinault publicly advocated the emerging comédie larmoyant genre with its heavy doses of bourgeois morality. Post-retirement, Quinault established herself as a salonnière with the Diners du Bout-du-Banc, chronicled in chapter 5. Focused more on the literary endeavors of its members than the société des lazzistes, the salon...