Le Blasphème de Catulle Mendès

A fine manuscript of a scathing article published in Le Journal on 7 June 1896, later collected in Gens de théâtre (1924): with his customary satirical verve, Mirbeau recounts a visit to Mounet-Sully, to whom he reports Catulle Mendès’s “blasphemy” — Mendès, in a piece entitled Le Vrai Hamlet, had reproached the actor for embodying not Shakespeare’s Hamlet but a “Romantic” vision inherited from Delacroix. The “great tragedian” listens, impassive, then delivers, in a voice “from the abyss,” the retort that became the talk of the chronicle: “Décidément, il y a quelque chose de pourri dans le Danemark de la littérature.”

All of Mirbeau is here: theater seen through the lens of temperament, the barb that unmasks posturing, and the art of the instant portrait — down to the paradoxical provocation that “what is the use of plays, since there is Mounet-Sully’s voice, gestures and teeth.”

The piece also belongs to a lived literary history: Mirbeau and Mendès, friends by 1896, had once crossed swords (a “courteous” duel on 29 December 1884), before Mirbeau made honorable amends in his Impressions littéraires (1888); and it was to Mendès, still later, that Mirbeau would entrust the first draft of Les Affaires sont les affaires.