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A CENTENARIAN SABOTAGES
 Virtue Is Not Always Rewarded
The press, which makes any centenarian, or even a fiftieth, its bread and butter, let Rose Chéri's centenary pass almost unnoticed last year, and the town of Etampes, where the actress was born on October 27, 1824, failed to fully repair this injustice by recently holding a celebration in honor of her child. The newspapers barely mentioned it.
Rose Chéri deserved better than this indifference... but what can you expect? She hid her private life, didn't seek success through scandal, was a virtuous wife and an admirable mother... If you think these are qualities that lead far, think again! Rose Chéri's example demonstrates the opposite. The truth, the sad truth, is that this woman was unlucky, and her bourgeois honesty caused her misfortune. What a shame! To be condemned to a life of misery with such a pretty name!
She inherited it from a family of actors who performed in the provinces. She had filled the roles of children in the troupe. She was what is called a child of the dance. There were many of them in the past. Miss Mars, Miss Georges, Dorval, Léontine Fay, Jenny Colon, Jenny Vertpré, and many others, were children of the dance to varying degrees.
The complete child of the dance belonged to a nomadic family that traveled from town to town across France, all of whose members made themselves useful. An excellent school. For the apprentice actor, it was the equivalent of the family workshop for the young craftsman. The actor who had toured France performing comedy knew all the secrets of the trade, and quite often ended up finding his way to Paris on the highways. He sometimes went abroad to seek his fortune...; he returned light on money, but weighted down with experience. If it wasn't all profit, it was always that.
The actor of old was a pilgrim whose travels shaped his youth, so that middle age and even old age were bearable in the provinces, when he saw himself relegated there forever. It would be wrong to believe that this long ordeal shortened his life. He generally died full of life and hope: he never unharnessed.
Enrolled at the Gymnase at the age of eighteen, Rose Chéri immediately attracted the attention of both audiences and critics. "She doesn't really look like an actress; "She is the rarest of talents," said Théophile Gautier. He added four years later, after seeing her in Clarisse Harlowe: "This young actress, although we always appreciated her fine qualities, was, at heart, displeasing to us like a little marvel from a hothouse; we feared in her a Mars in-32. She dispelled all our prejudices."
The following year, Gautier, it is true, corrected his aim and found in Rose Chéri only a talent "not marvelous, but clean, honest, careful, a little bourgeois, very much at home at the Gymnase."
Alfred de Musset did not share this opinion: he returned thirty times in a row to see her in Clarisse Harlowe and dreamed of writing a role for her.
The director of the Gymnase at the time was Auguste Lemoine, known as Montigny. He fell in love with his resident and married her. From that moment on, her virtue remained unrewarded. The day before her wedding, her father, in a fit of insanity, threw himself out of a window. A dire omen. Later, her brother hanged himself and her sister went mad.
During the Gymnase's dark days in 1848, Rose Chéri sold her diamonds to pay the artists and went to perform in the provinces to ward off the ruin she only delayed. During the June uprising, she transformed the theater into an ambulance and multiplied her career there.
She wasn't at the end of her troubles. She was thirty-seven when the eldest of her three children contracted croup. She saved him (he was to die from a rabid dog bite), but she fell victim to her devotion, and the theater she had honored in every way mourned her. Théophile Gautier defined the actress's talent and the woman's character in four words: clean, honest, careful, bourgeois.... Today, we must find that this is not enough to go down in history... And yet, isn't it the prominence given to the actress's medallion by her modesty that today keeps the name Rose Chéri from perishing?
Lucien Descaves
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