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Yvette Guilbert
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Yvette Guilbert was born in Paris on January 20, 1868.
Her father, the son of a poor Norman farmer, was a wastrel who contributed less than nothing to the support of his family; until his death, in 1884, he was a constant source of worry and expense because of his passion for gambling. Fortunately for Yvette, her mother was a woman of strong character. Madame Guilbert had been brought up in comfortable, if not luxurious, surroundings, but her dowry was soon dissipated by her worthless husband, and she found herself obliged to earn a living for herself and her child by her needle. She had a flair for dressmaking, but the work was poorly paid.
There were occasional short periods of comparative prosperity during which Yvette was sent to a good school; more often mother and daughter, working together from morning to night, could earn barely enough to pay for their frugal meals. At fifteen Yvette obtained employment as a mannequin in a dress-shop; but after a few months of constant standing and walking about, twelve hours a day, her health broke down and she was obliged to stop. Her next job at the department store of Le Printemps ended in another illness; thereafter Yvette sewed at home and sold her millinery and lingerie for a pittance to small shops and a few private customers — who often forgot to pay their bills.
A chance meeting with Charles Zidler, then director of the Hippodrome (this was before the opening of the Moulin Rouge, in 1889), changed the course of Yvette Guilbert's life. Zidler proposed to train the girl to be an equestrienne in his show, but Yvette, having no desire to risk her neck, rejected the offer. Nevertheless the suggestion turned her thoughts to the stage: she had a thin but pleasant voice and hoped that she might be able to obtain small parts in operettas or at the music-halls.
A kindly dramatic critic, Edmond Stoullig, made it possible for her to take lessons in acting and singing, and after eight months of study she made her début at the Théâtre des Bouffes-du-Nord in La Reine Margot, a dramatization of the novel by Dumas.
For the next few years Yvette played minor rôles in half a dozen theatres without achieving more than a very moderate success. But she had learned a great deal, not only about the stage but about herself. She realized that her voice would never be powerful enough for opera or even operetta, but it was quite adequate for the café-concert; and she knew that if a singer at cafés-concerts once succeeded in pleasing her public, she could be certain of much more rapid advancement and a much higher salary than she could hope for in the legitimate theatre.
In 1889, trembling but determined, Yvette Guilbert wheedled a contract out of the redoubtable Madame Allemand, directress of L'Eldorado; but as several weeks were to elapse before the beginning of her engagement she tried out her repertoire, in the interval, on a provincial audience at Lyons. The tour was a dismal failure; so was her début at L'Eldorado. The patrons of that resort, unaccustomed to her novel method of half singing, half reciting her lines, without gestures or pan tomime, listened in stony silence. The only audible comment came from the lips of a rival entertainer, Mademoiselle Bloch, an enormously fat star whose reputation as a comic singer was already well established: " Why, the girl's as skinny as two Englishwomen; how can she expect to make her audience laugh? "
After the fiasco of the opening night Yvette was shifted to the least desirable place on the program. A month later Madame Allemand declared her hopeless and tore up the contract.
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