‘Divine Thalie’: The Career of Jeanne Quinault (review)

Although she is known to have played both Phèdre and Chimène, it was in comedy that Jeanne Quinault specialized and excelled. Hence, although Voltaire’s comparison of her to the muse of comedy used as title to this study was probably more flattering than sincere, it remains a fitting tribute to her career as an actress. However, it also points even more clearly to another aspect of her activities, which did not come to an end when she retired from the stage at the relatively early age of 41, with more than half her time ahead of her. For, throughout her life, she provided help and advice to authors, which often extended to helping them revise their texts, or even, like all the best muses, providing the initial idea for the drama. The most famous example and greatest theatrical success was Mme de Graffigny’s Cénie, but she was far from being the only playwright to benefit from Quinault’s generosity, and she was generally extremely influential in the development of sentimental comedy that led to Graffigny’s work. Prominent among the sources on which Judith Curtis draws to fill out the details of her subject’s life are the Histoire et recueil des lazzis, the manuscript collection recently edited by Curtis herself and the late David Trott (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 338 (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1996)) which gives a detailed picture of the activities in 1731 and 1732 of a circle centred on the Comte de Livry and, for the period after Quinault’s retirement from the stage, the correspondence of her friend Mme de Graffigny. Although Jeanne Quinault is very much at the centre of this study, it is in many respects also the biography of a society. There is much information on the other members of the Quinault acting clan, figures who have often been confused by previous commentators, and also on the circles in which she moved: after her retirement from the stage, she, of course, established her own salon, and Curtis spends much time establishing the identities of her various habitués and discussing their attitudes and ideas. This is not merely an academic exercise: one of the major themes of this work is the difficulty for an actress of putting behind her the reputation traditionally attached to her profession to establish herself as a respectable member of society. And yet, inaccurate or even fictionalized accounts of the period (particularly the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant), which are still taken at face value by critics who should know better, trade on that stereotypical image by falsely peopling her salon with philosophes and attributing to them discussions which, as Curtis shows, would have horrified the real Jeanne Quinault; Curtis’s final chapter is devoted to putting the record straight on these matters. Perhaps at times the narrative slips into feeling like a catalogue of plays or of people, but this is nevertheless a lively and scholarly account of both the actress and the society she inhabited.