17 - The Ninth Continental Tour

Summary

In the summer of 1852, when Aldridge was planning his first Continental tour, he had intended to make his debut in Paris with an experienced British company of actors and actresses he had recruited. Unfortunately, his arrangements with a theater there did not materialize, so he took his troupe to Brussels instead, and thereafter to Prussia and Germany, where he met with great success. However, in the years that followed, he retained a strong interest in performing in the French capital. Though he did occasionally receive tempting offers in the interim, it was not until November 1866 that he finally was able to fulfill his ambition of appearing before Parisian theatergoers.

But even this long-delayed satisfaction was spoiled to some extent for him, for he “searched in vain for a theater where he could show himself to the French public for the first time.” The best that could be done by the impresario handling his tour, Charles Joseph Kuschnick, who had been ridiculed in Le Figaro as a mahout (elephant- driver), was to arrange a performance for him for a single night, November 22, at the Grand Théâtre de Versailles that was preceded by a dinner for distinguished guests served in the dining room of Louis XV's mistress at the Hôtel des Réservoirs and followed by a “mouthwatering supper” in the same venue afterward. The guests included Alexandre Dumas père, the playwright Théodore Barriere, and about forty of the leading newspaper editors, theater critics, literary personalities, and caricaturists in Paris, all of whom had been conveyed to Versailles on a special train. This was a strategic ploy by Kuschnick, for it guaranteed extensive coverage on Aldridge in the press afterward. Some of these accounts were as much concerned with what happened at the banquet as with revealing what happened on the stage, but they at least gave Aldridge more exposure than he otherwise would have garnered in such a remote location.