The Salt Smugglers by Gérard de Nerval Read Free Book Online Page B

with lyrics by Koerner and set to music by Weber. — I had heard these firsthand during my travels and had sung them to myself while crossing the Black Forest on foot in the company of German students and journeymen. The song entitled the Lutzow Hunt had originally been directed against France; but in my translation it lost its nationalist character and simply became the chant of a people fighting for its independence against the foreigner. The song entitled The Sword turned into something on the order of:
    O Liberty, beloved by every noble soul,
Flood us with your fire, lead us to our goal:
In the name of this living God to whom we pray,
Let us swear! Let us swear! Let us swear!
That one day we shall dare! we shall dare!
Dare die for Liberty! For Liberty! We swear!
    I had contacted August Morel to see whether he couldn’t arrange the music for these songs. He agreed to come up with a score suitable for theatrical performance, but for which we would need a chorus of sixteen.
    We thought of the singers who worked with Mainzer or those at the Orphéon. I went to visit the choirmasters in their studios and in their impoverished mansards and they generously offered to help me, asking only to be paid the price of the days’ work they would lose by coming to our rehearsals. — In the end, they lost a whole month.
    Harel, who was having difficulties finding the money to pay for extras, reduced the cast to the bare minimum; the stagehands found themselves having to fill in during the crowd scenes. Since they were playing students who did little but mill around, it was no great sweat off their brow. Still, their inexperience often threatened to spoil the effect of the scene.
    Everybody was wild about two of the popular songs, — which subsequently entered into the repertoire of various workers’ glee clubs.
    On the eve of the first performance I was quite nervous about the props which, — like chef Vatel’s famous fish course, — were nowhere in sight ...

HARLEQUIN MASKS. — HAMLET THE YELLOW DWARF. — THEATER LICENSES
    If the props were late to arrive, it is because this is always the case; — theaters tend to deal with details at the very last minute. Theater directors are often unable to pay the costume designer, the painter, or the decorator ahead of time. And the latter therefore often refuse to deliver their goods until they are assured that they will receive their cut of the take , — which is of course impossible to predict until opening night.
    It was at these moments that poor Harel, — who was a remarkable fellow after all, for he had directed the Yellow Dwarf and been honored by the Academy for a poem in praise of Voltaire, — found himself crushed by the financial burden of having to run a theater as ill-starred as the Porte-Saint-Martin.
    The theater license for the place came to fifteen thousand a year, which he had to fork over to the director of the place, — a humorous old fellow who had managed to have two theaters bestowed upon him; — one of which he owned outright and the other of which was a mere fiefdom whose paltry profits caused a smile to play across his face while slowly driving its occupant into rack and ruin.
    All this feels so very Ancien Régime . But the fact of the matter remains that if Harel had had in his coffers the 150 thousand francs that he paid out to his suzerain over a period of ten years, he would not have been as financially strapped as he was back during that summer while awaiting his elephant.

    Harel often had to spring for extremely expensive costumes. So one had to be careful when mentioning plays to him set during the Middle Ages or under the reign of Louis XV, — not to mention those set back in the luxuriant days of the Greeks, the Bible, or the Orientals.
    One day he was offered a play set during the Regency whose success was virtually guaranteed, given the spectacular outfits of the period. Harel called