Rachel Félix

Origins and early life

Élisabeth Rachel Félix was born on 21 February 1821 in a roadside inn at Mumpf in Switzerland, the second of six children of Jacques Félix and Esther Haya, Jewish pedlars from Alsace and Bavaria who travelled the roads selling second-hand clothes; she was born a Jew, remained one all her life, refused every suggestion that she convert, and was buried according to Jewish rite in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in a funeral attended by tens of thousands.

Work and career

She sang in the streets and courtyards of Lyon and Paris as a child for coins with her sister Sarah, was heard by a teacher of declamation, and was admitted to the Conservatoire; on 12 June 1838, at seventeen, she made her debut at the Comédie-Française in Corneille's Horace. The French classical repertory was then considered dead, played to empty houses and mocked as the taste of a vanished century. Rachel, thin, small, with a voice of extraordinary carrying power and an intensity that contemporaries called terrifying, brought it back: her Phèdre, her Camille, her Roxane and her Hermione filled the theatre for twenty years and made Racine and Corneille living authors again.

Musset, Hugo, Charlotte Brontë, who put her into Villette as Vashti, and Henry James all wrote about what it was to watch her. She toured Europe, Russia, Egypt and, in 1855, the United States, and was received by the crowned heads of the continent; in 1848 she sang the Marseillaise at the Comédie-Française wrapped in a tricolour and made it an event of the revolution. This fiche notes plainly that antisemitic caricature followed her throughout her career, attacking her origins and her money as it did no Christian actress, and that she never disavowed either. She died of tuberculosis at Le Cannet on 3 January 1858, at thirty-six.