“Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the depositaries, in
their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had begun to
interest me in themselves; I amused myself, pretending that what I saw
before me were the characters in some old humorous novel, by watching,
struck by the fresh face of the young man who had just come into the
stalls, the heroine listen distractedly to the declaration of love
which the juvenile lead in the piece was addressing to her, while he,
through the fiery torrent of his impassioned speech, still kept a
burning gaze fixed on an old lady seated in a stage box, whose
magnificent pearls had caught his eye; and thus, thanks especially to
the information that Saint-Loup gave me as to the private lives of the
players, I saw another drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the
words of the spoken drama which in itself, although of no merit,
interested me also; for I could feel in it that there were budding and
opening for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the
agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease paint
and pasteboard, on his own human soul the words of a part.
“These ephemeral vivid personalities which the characters are in a play
that is entertaining also, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one
would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by
that time are already disintegrated into a comedian who is no longer
in the position which he occupied in the play, a text which no longer
shews one the comedian’s face, a coloured powder which a handkerchief
wipes off, who have returned in short to elements that contain nothing
of them, since their dissolution, effected so soon after the end of
the show, make us–like the dissolution of a dear friend–begin to
doubt the reality of our ego and meditate on the mystery of death.”
Marcel Proust, Le C