In 1900, three years after penning that flamboyant masterpiece of unequalled neo-romantic panache, Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmund Rostand composed L’Aiglon.
The play was a triumph. It was a magnificent spectacle, produced by Sarah Bernhardt, with the 64-year old actress playing the teenage Duc de Reichstadt. At the first performance, in Paris, the New York Times reported that “Everybody distinguished in the worlds of literature, art, and politics was present,” and amid “repeated bursts of applause,” as the reviewer went on to observe, “Bernhardt made her great hit in the passage in which M. Rostand, in impassioned verse, pays a tribute to Napoleon’s glory.”
Amid that cheering throng, with the humiliations of 1870 freshly inflicted, the element of nostalgia would have been particularly heightened, and every nuance of political and historical significance appreciatively noted. That audience was perfectly calibrated to be attuned to this play, having been heavily saturated with the Napoleonic myth for over a hundred years.
To us today, the meaning of L’Aiglon is more obscure. Although the pervasive influence of Napoleon still resounds, albeit muffled, in the America of the 21st century, most Bonapartist references and symbolism, both ordinary and arcane, have been lost to a populist audience.
However, as good theater, L’Aiglon can be understood and enjoyed even shorn of specific Napoleonic trappings. For the action of the play is certainly familiar to us, from our numerous other encounters with what has been called the monomyth.
A young man. He is handsome, fragile, sensitive, tormented. He has been raised in luxurious captivity in a foreign court, and kept in ignorance of his heritage. He is much like another young man from another play - a similarly indecisive, introspective Prince, who mourns a dead King, and has a mother who is faithless to his father’s memory.
Our young man’s world is strewn with unrevealed symbols, which resonate mysteriously with hidden meanings - the flowers (violets) in the garden, bees (of course) and butterflies, a single star in the sky. For glory and immortality are this young man’s inheritance.
To claim these things, he must embark on a quest. He is callen - but turns away - it is too soon, he is not ready. So he prepares himself, and attempts to fulfill his destiny through legitimate ways - and that fails. So: rebellion.
There is a masked ball, and he appears masked - as himself. There is a mirror, which is smashed. There are conspiracies - there is loyalty and betrayal. There is a terrible dream sequence, during which he might finally be hearing the metallic and haughty voice of his father.
L’Aiglon was written at the start of a new century, which proved to be one cataclysmically violent. We read the play at the beginning of another century, and mysteriously a strong pacifist message seems to appear - a message perhaps lost on the initial audience. The play makes a powerful statement about the impossibility of attempting to retrieve vanished triumphs, once they are lost.
The play is also about the necessity for each generation, raised in ignorance of the vanished past, to rediscover it for themselves. For, like the Eaglet, the past is kept from us. Not intentionally - but by the deliberate hand of time. We are born in ignorance of what has come before, and we must discover it for ourselves - usually through books, and movies, plays - and by what we are told by others. What actually happened? It becomes occluded by each new medium passed through.
Similarly, our experience of Rostand’s play is distorted through translation - for L’Aiglon was written in French. In 1900, the year it was written, the play was adapted into English by Mr. Louis N. Parker. Today, the original French text is available on the internet, and one can download the play in its entirety on the Google Books website.
For purists, you can translate the original French of L’Aiglon into English yourself, on the Google Translate website. In this version, the barriers (the time barrier, and the language barrier) through which one must pass to reach the past, are all too obvious. This translation reveals, by its surrealist absurdity, the impossibility of any real understanding of the actual historical events.
In a way, this volume can be considered a sibling of Salvador Dali’s 1945 painting: Napoleon’s Nose, Transformed into a Pregnant Woman, Strolling His Shadow with Melancholia Amongst Original Ruins. Both possess a similar clutter of complicated yet familiar images, indecipherable, gestural adumbrations, at sea in a symbol-strewn and alien vista.
A word about my favorite scene. The Eaglet is concerned that the world has forgotten about him in his isolation - that he has missed his chance. But a conspirator brings him gifts to prove his enduring popularity. He is shown an array of tourist items bearing his picture. His image on a pair of braces. A snuffbox with a painting of the King of Rome. A hankerchief, with himself on horseback. A pipe carved in the shape of his head. A cockade, a medal, a tumbler upon which the words “Francois, Duke of Reichstadt” are engraved. And an entire place setting, the knife, the napkin ring, the egg cup, with his portrait. A cravat in which he is woven riding in the clouds. Playing cards in which he is drawn as the Ace of Spades.
It’s a comical scene, but maybe one of the truest. For glory and power comes and goes, but these humble, curious and solid objects remain. Meant to be ephemeral, they endure. Past all utility, they are treasured, collected, enter museums, accrue value.
Only physical objects possess the power to make the past tangible - so perhaps it is by them that we can measure immortality.
adapted from the introduction to The Eaglet, published by Triage Bindery, 2010
Death Mask of the Duke de Reichstadt in the Museo Napoleonico, Rome.
Excerpt from the play, courtesy of Google Translate
From Act Three, Metternich's address to Napoleon's hat.
Metternich.
[Turning the hat in his hands.] Here it is, this famous hat! How ugly it is! It is called small, initially, is it it? [Raising his shoulders and increasingly rancorous.] No. It is large. Very large. Enormous. It is all in all that, to grow itself, which a small man carries! Because it is of a hatter that the legend leaves Napoleon truth, all in all ~ [Turning over the hat and approaching it the light for reading, at the bottom, the name of the hatter.] It is Poupart! [And very of a blow, leaving this tone of mockery.] Ah! Do not believe for you that my hatred falls asleep! I have you haï, initially, because of your form, bat of the battle fields! Hat who seemed makes with two wings of corbel! Because of the ways relentless and clear you cut out on our ciels defeats half-disc seeming on the vermilion slope the sphere with half assembled of some obscure sun! Because of your cap where embusque devil, hat of escamotor who, posed black and abrupt on a throne, an army, whole people upright, the raised, having retracted the whole! Because of your unbearable mortuary; because of your simplicity which was not that an installation, of your joy, in the middle of the gold diadems, to be insolently only one piece of beaver; because of the rageuse and voluntary hand who tore off you sometimes to launch you to ground; of all my nightmares which ten years you populated! Safeties that myself had to make you, dishes; and, when to flatter it I sought the epithet, ways in which sometimes you remained on his head! [And all these memories going up to him, he continues, in an explosion of clear-sighted hatred.] Winner, nine, acclaimed, powerful, I have you haï, and I hate you encor overcome, old and betrayed! I hate you for this proud and peremptory shade that you will always make on the wall of the history! And I hate you for your rosette rounding its large eye Jacobin very injected of blood; for all the rumours which your conch leave, large black shell that the waves pay, and in which the ear listens, and approaching noise of sea which large people make while walking! For this French pride that you returned without terminals, bicornuate which is used to them to make us the horns! [He rejected the hat on the table, and now leaned on him.] And I hate you for Béranger and Raffet, for the songs which one sings and the drawings that one makes, and for all the rays that you were bent, in the island! I hate you! I hate you! And will not be quiet that when your inelegant cloth triangle, grated its legend finally, will become again what in France it should never have ceased being a rural policeman or cocked hat! I you ~ [He stops, seized by silence, the hour, the place, and with a little disturbed smile.] But very of a blow ~ it is funny ~ present imitate the past, sometimes, while having fun ~ [Passing the hand on his face.] To see you there, like a familiar thing, that deferred me twenty years behind; because it was there, always, which it posed to you thus when twenty years ago it lived here! [He looks around him with a shiver.] This room was the anteroom; it was here that, waiting for an audience, Princes, Dukes, Magyars, piled up in a corner, fixed on this hat humiliated eyes, similar to how lions respect with rage the hat of the trainer, forgotten in their cage! [He moves away a little, in spite of himself, staring at this small hat whose black mystery becomes dramatic.] He posed to you thus! It was just like today ~ weapons ~ papers ~ one would be believe that it is he who has just thrown this hat, while passing, on the map; that Bonaparte is still here, at his place!
