Comment je devins auteur dramatique, the play progressed with the
audience’s “growing delirium.”
5
Even the Duke d’Orléans, whom Dumas
had invited, tipped his hat to the writer and joined in the uproarious
Ovations and Omissions
3
applause.
6
Enthusiastic young Dumas fans ran through the theater after the
performance, proclaiming the end of Jean Racine, the canonical
seventeenth-century tragedian, and attempted to defenestrate the busts of
ancient playwrights.
7
However, in February 1830, Dumas was demoted from his leading role
in French Romantic theater. Hugo’s Hernani was performed in the
Comédie-Française and has since been deemed the “public triumph of
Romantic doctrine.”
8
Gautier presided over the young, Romantic faction in
the audience while wearing a red doublet, a ribbon around his neck under
his scandalously long hair. As historian Anita Brookner explains, “he was
reported to have seen the play forty times, and no doubt loyally joined in
the roar of approval when the famous enjambment, or irregularly stressed
couplet, was heard.”
9
This metric aberration was just one example of
theatrical transgressions that scandalized the audience as Hugo breached the
three unities of classical theater: unity of setting, time, and plot.
Dumas, Balzac, Berlioz, and Nerval were also in attendance that night
and compounded the pro-Hugo clamor, impassioned debate, and polemical
paroxysm that ensued in newspapers long after the performance.
10
While
Dumas’s epochal play, Henri, preceded Hernani, Hugo’s work somehow
became inscribed in literary history as the cataclysmic event that initiated
Romantic theater. It would not be the last time literary laurels would elude
Dumas in favor of Hugo, his dear friend and contemporary.
Despite the demotion, the ardor of Dumas’s literary ambition and
audacity were undiminished. For example, during the Revolution of July
1830, Dumas joined the insurrection in the streets of Paris protesting King
Charles X. The king’s promulgation of undemocratic constraints, exacerbated
by high unemployment and high wheat prices, instigated riots in which
2,500 members of the royal troops were killed.
11
When hordes stormed the
Museum of Artillery seeking arms, Dumas saw an opportunity to
theatricalize his participation in the revolt. According to his memoirs,
Dumas donned the helmet, shield, and sword of King François I, and then
returned to the streets decked out in Renaissance armor.
12
The insurgence
resulted in the removal of King Charles X and a new constitutional
monarchy led by his nephew, Louis-Philippe, Duke d’Orléans.
In an August 1830 letter to the poet Marceline Desbordes Valmore,
Dumas admits that his fervid historical narratives seem pallid in contrast to
the revolt in which he participated, and yet he recounts it as an aesthetic
event rather than a political reality: “What I have just seen is so beautifully
poetic and dramatic, Madame, that there are moments when I believe I have
now given up writing, even one word; what is there to be done after what
has already been done? What theatrical drama can match that of the
Chapter One
4
street?”
13
Despite this momentary incertitude, Dumas emerged from the
barricades an emboldened playwright, adamant as ever to subvert the
traditional temporal constraints of the genre. He invested this vigor into his
next theatrical endeavor, Napoléon Bonaparte, ou Trente ans d’histoire de
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